Adewole Adebayo
Kings ascend into the skies. Gods descend into the Earth. Some God-Kings do both. Can any personage manage to do both and yet live? Well, that’s why I am here penning on Pius Adebola Adesanmi, a eulogistic elegy in a long story about a short life. What could I reminisce about a brief existence on this orbital corner of the cosmic debris during which the only sound exchanged between him and me was through the signature hums of the primordial noise of the creative universe? I will give it a fair shot.
Let me say what my humanitarian essence urges me to preface with here: that I write not about the event of ill-fated crash of the ill-conceived Boeing 737 Max aeroplane that dived from above the Ethiopian clouds beneath the Ethiopian soil in a flash. But it is part of my story about Pius, because he was on that flight and that was the last setting he consciously perceived with his auditory, olfactory visual, and tactile senses. To dwell on that fateful and fatally eventful flight would require me to write about every precious and worthy life that perished with that inherently death-courting bird, made aggressively aero-combative and recklessly mutinous to flight control, for I value all lives equally and alike-king, pauper, famous, unknown, cerebral, regardless of ascribed status and standing.
As a mark of respect for ongoing ‘investigative’ process, my inquest into the evilly aero-imbalanced birds named Boeing 737 Max will be for another day, when bleeding hearts of the bereaved have clotted with time-borne platelets of acceptance, consolation and hope and the conspiratorially lubricated lies of profiteering officialdom in Seattle and their suborned hirelings in Washington have been run dry by the salt of facts and truths issuing from the dying declarations writ large in the electronic will of the sunk aeroplane, hauled to the city of lights, to see the light of day.
Until his ‘untimely’ demise, I was somewhat torn whenever I had to factor Professor Pius Adesanmi into my thought frame, be it in the process of interrogating something Pius had originated or his reaction to what someone else had uttered, or done. He embodied, as a representative totem, an introversion and extroversion of my intellectual dialectics and moral hazards of our generation and, quite approximately, the generation immediately preceding ours, regarding our definition of ‘success’. What I write next about Pius is not part of the eulogy, just factual statements of what he earned as of right: Pius was easily a genius, a prodigy of mental energy, an intellectual interventionist, a peripatetic plenipotentiary with an apostolically patriotic fervor, credentialed on his stellar accomplishments on the westernized pedestal of academic interpretation of the African thought.
Pius was a western commissioned curator of the African thought. His mind was a magnetic field of triangulated mirrors formed in the parallaxes of a global cultural Olympiad. Seised of the tongues of Europeans and eyes that saw the ways and manners and lives of the Africans, Pius had the perspective duality of a door leaf in a modern house in the African summer, hot and humid outside but air-conditioned to cool inside or a dwelling in the Canadian winter, freezing cold outside yet heated inside. What would the door say to the question: “are you hot or cold?” or “what is the weather like?” Pius was foisted with the unyielding, unceasing dance of constant comparison and constant reconciliations, and had to miss his steps a few times either due to fatigue or the tempo of the music. Western flutes are often tongue-tied and the African drum is quite easily infected by the deafness of the drummer. Many of us who have the dual heritage of the African Diaspora know that oscillating feeling of celebrating your academic, economic, intellectual and/or professional successes abroad, proud that you did this by dint of grit and merit in one moment and the next you are pondering on the oxymoron of success abroad and failure at home! Sometimes you mix things up. You criticize Africa too much even for shortcomings Africa could not reasonably have overcome or you beat yourself too hard for ills of Africa beyond your immediate responsibility. And sometimes, you say heck, success is success wherever earned-Africa still takes the glory.
Pius thought he must reconcile all these contradictions everyday. He would use every tool in the toolbox, highbrow journals, mid-brow websites and low-brow social media, anything capable of being scribbled upon, any platform to speak on or forum to speak at, whatever it would take to do his intellectual sergeant-major duty of waking Africa up every morning. shaking us from deep slumber to smell the coffee of advancement. I was always receiving the intellectual gifts of Pius in the manner of western children on Christmas morning, Sometimes you don’t like what you unwrap, you frown and shrug, a few teary tantrums here and there. Yet you are reminded that you didn’t pay for it, you didn’t order it, Santa Claus was kind enough to even bother to do this and in any case, Christmas is just one day out of 365 and there is always another Christmas next year. You hope that the next unwrapping would reveal a gift more to your liking. Santa has ridden the last reindeer home and the North pole is snowing tears. His last Christmas!
The plasticity of our intellectual firmament has stretched the fabrics of borrowed time beyond the extremities of tolerance or tenancy. Pius’s quantum teleportation has convinced me that unless we make our hay in May, we the present intellectual brood of Africa can run out of space even if we don’t run out of time and vice versa. Now is time, and here is the moment for our ostriches to withdraw pretentious heads from the puffy sand of denial and face Africa, as Pius called it: “the future the world must face”. Since Pius upgraded, I have been having the nearly irresistible impulse to hug Okey Ndibe, Odia Ofeimun, Chiamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Charles Soludo to have dinner with Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Jimi Solanke and the entire pantheon, to burst into the historic palace of the Sarkin Kano and tell His Eminence Sanusi Lamido Sanusi to slow down on the ceremonies and go inside a quiet room to write more. Every philosopher, thinker or writer drawn hither thither to all manners of diversions and distractions must reconnoiter and head back to using their heads. Every grain of thoughts must be harnessed before Africa boards the Titanic.
Pius was a deservedly celebrated poster child of the custodial crisis of the African academic family, which has spawned the orphaned, the disinherited and the fostered. The orphaned are those of average intellectual abilities or late bloomers who are churned out in the millions every year with insufficient discernible acumen to progress further academically, yet with no vocations or employment to absorb them in any significant number. Pius did not belong in the first category, the orphaned.
The disinherited are the top performers, the crème de la crème of our academic harvest who, due to lack of foreign opportunities or staunch patriotism or other local commitments or priorities, stay at home to teach and advance knowledge in African universities and other research institutions. These are triply disinherited because the neoliberal African Governments have abdicated their constitutional, logical and natural duties to guarantee quality education with funding, inspiration and preservation, the corporate businesses are either ambivalent or downright anti-intellectual, whilst the public is wittingly unappreciative or unwittingly inappreciative of the role of academics and intellectuals in society. The grim result of the triple disinheritance is the abject indigence of African universities and the empty libraries, dry laboratories, sagged morale and other telltale halos of hollowness that hang around the oddly brave professors who keep up the full appearances of running tight ships in leaky boats. Pius did not belong in the second category, the disinherited.
The fostered are the exceptional achievers and the first fruits of Africa’s intellectual loins with extraordinary gifts to carry on the bloodlines of the African academia. Yet no sooner have they been spawned that we find out that we lack the requisite amenities, atmosphere and infrastructure to nurture them to their full growth potentials. Pronto, we find foster homes for them in foreign universities who eagerly adopt them as their own with varying degrees of affection. Some, like Pius, whose star can never be hidden or dimmed by any cloud however dense, cannot but be adored for their mercurial talents, boundless energy and inexhaustible creativity. They would always find love in new intellectual families abroad. Not many are like Pius whose heart never left home; who like the Pacific turtle and the Atlantic salmon had an ingrained compass innately orientated to head home to procreate the next generations. And like the Atlantic salmon honouring the ritual of procreation, Pius gave his body back to Africa, ensconced in the holy earth of Ethiopia.
It reminds me of the other deaths, unannounced, except with sardonic winks of the knowing eye, or the oscillating head on a mocking neck, or the proverbial whispers in the village square, of those who are intellectually dead albeit physiologically alive, those poisoned by the chalice of political misadventure and the inordinate lure of lucre, the silenced voices of yesterday’s consciences, interred in the cemetery of infamy, yet poking their heads out stubbornly to essay fork-tongued apologia. Wither thy redemption? It cannot be found in bloviating prevarication around the edges of non-issues or hallucinating inanities about witchcraft in the State House being responsible for obvious stupidity. Should we not be allowed to rekindle our original fires, fires of truth to power and lights to the blind and the blindsided, and our own inner light to see self in truth? Those unapologetic seers of yore who have of late stumbled and lost the confidence of the public should pick up the message of the people again and deliver fresh truths with contrite humility. Those who are in the good standing of public reckoning should take heed and not dip their tongue to taste the wine of infamy. It is far too easy to eviscerate the shortcoming of others, to be a shining light that spotlights the flaws of others. It takes subliminal levitation to be self-aware by shining lights in one’s own eyes and yet see with moral clarity.
A mother must inconsolably miss her son, a father his son, the spouse her lover and best friend, children their provider and protector, siblings their kith and kin, friends their mates and dates, colleagues, their comrade in thoughts and deeds and so on. We must mourn with them in recognition of their loss. Grieve of dear ones over the departed is soulful and solemn, even elephants mourn for years. There are many sides to Pius and hence many ways to miss him or feel his presence depending on one’s eschatological perspective. The question of whether the “dead’ are actually dead or metaphorically dead or are not even dead at all may be answered, parried or refused by anyone with self-satisfactory conviction. There are also those who specialize in death analytics consisting in dwelling on time, timing, place, mode, manner, circumstances, and mechanics of the event or process of dying. I personally do not fear or worry about death and its exaggerated importance. I value life, mine and of others. I don’t have any respect for death. I only respect the dead and sympathize with the bereaved. Death is nothing more than one of the numerous physiological events subject to anthropological interpretations.
Forgive me if I don’t lament on how Pius was “gone too soon” or “too young to die”. While it would surely be a fantastic blessing to live up to 120 years and see all great grandchildren married off before passing, I am in full and complete realization that Pius and I are much older than some of the great prophets of major religions and of the average age at which defining heroes of history and shapers of civilization had already made their marks for all time. In these respects, Pius Adesanmi remains a towering hero of “Najia No dey Carry Last”, who made his mark in a hurry as if he knew that the portion of his time allotted to teach our class was limited before he had to move on to a higher course. Yet, in the process, Pius attained eternity in our hearts, heads and in the clouds of literati and academia. Who am I to be a self appointed timekeeper of Pius’s earthly sabbatical? You know Pius. He might exclaim in his native grade French: “Putain de merde!”
Pius’s translation bears witness to the universe reminding anyone who has anything to tell the world to do so now and always without ambivalence, ambiguity, evasiveness, hesitation, guile, procrastination or reservation, as all would die, before they expect to die, when they are not expected to die, without fresh warning beyond the undated debit note issued to all upon conception in the womb. Eternity is available to everyone, if only they would claim it. Some choose to earn it by dint of gritty contributions to the fabric of existence when they still can. Others, as in most human desires, blissfully wait for eternity to be gifted to them in eternity for doing nothing other than as a miraculous redemption of a celestial promise.
We should not permit the stricture of western obsequies to prevent us Africans from sounding the ululation of the women, the pulsating feet of the youths in obedience to the drums carried by the age groups, amidst traditional gun salutes and the full throated call of the gong-beating towncrier, thus:
Oba waja!
Orisha wole!
Anjonnu Imo ti Isanlu lo!
Ko da gbere!
O di gbo se Pius Adebola, omo Adesanmi!
The King Ascends!
A god descends!
The Spirit of knowledge from Isanlu departs
Without saying his byes!
So Long Pius Adebola, scion of Adesanmi
Dr. Adewole Adebayo is a Nigerian and American lawyer, arbitrator, jurist, writer, development practitioner and media owner who maintains this daily column, “King’s Speech” as a resident writer in KAFTAN Post and kaftanpost.com.
All articles are the opinion of the columnist, not necessarily of KAFTAN Post.
