Obaro Ikime: One Year After
It is a full year now since Obaro Ikime, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Ibadan, departed these earthly spheres on the 24th of April 2023. One of Nigeria’s greatest historians of the 20th century and a stalwart of the famous Ibadan School of African History, his far-ranging significance to the Nigerian and African historical academy is one that will surely resonate for many years to come. One of his protégés, the very erudite Professor Martin Ihoeghian Uhomoibhi, himself certainly one of Nigeria’s most accomplished diplomats, attempts, in this heartfelt personal tribute, to recapture Ikime’s most remarkable personality on the occasion of the first year anniversary of his demise.
I am one of those who have no apologies whatsoever to declare that the University of Ibadan, particularly, the Department of History, made them. In many ways, Professor Obaro Ikime, the sage who transited exactly one year ago, at the age of eighty-six, will always be central in that narrative of formation. I consider myself most privileged to have had Professor Ikime as an incredibly devoted guardian and mentor for fifty long years. Our relationship lasted roughly from my very first starry-eyed days on the most benumbing UI campus in 1973, and lasted until his death on April 24th 2023, two days before which we had our final, emotionally-robust father-son conversation over the phone.
To start with, and to put it in some heartfelt subjective summary, Obaro Ikime was the archsymbol of the intellectual firmament into which I was inducted as a teenager at Ibadan. This perhaps demands some foregrounding. When I arrived as an enthusiastic, excited first-year student of History in 1973, I had no idea what possibilities lay before me, especially in terms of a life-charting, career-defining encounter. At that time, some 25 years after its establishment as Nigeria’s premier university, much of Ibadan’s prestige as the nation’s pre-eminent centre of excellence in higher education was still intact. And it did not matter that a number of other universities were already running, including the nearby Benin. It was soon to dawn on me that the Department of History and its exploits in the mobilization of the African perspective to global history contributed heavily to this high ranking. It also did not take long for my colleagues and I to discover that we had been sucked into an explosive scholarly ferment, that surrounding the rediscovery of Africa through the decolonization of its past. Obaro Ikime was at the forefront of this gargantuan project, and he was passionate about making trenchant Africanist disciples out of succeeding generations of Nigerian historians, and I proudly belonged to one of these.
Obaro Ikime was neither the initiator, nor the only key figure within the charged space of the famed Ibadan School of History, the driving agency for the academic combat waged on behalf of the African point of view. However, to my colleagues and I, he was the irrepressible crusader who embodied the entire spirit of an enduring postcolonial movement. Sooner or later, I would come to terms with such iconic characters as Kenneth Dike, JFA Ajayi, E.A. Anyandele, Tekena Tamuno, Saburi Biobaku, Adiele Afigbo, Bolanle Awe, among others, mostly through their literature. But it was Obaro Ikime that presented to me the most instructive and persuasive portraiture of their high significance as arch-proponents and defenders of the African historical space.
Obaro Ikime’s lectures were unforgettable in their distinctive mode as loud, almost ‘evangelical’ proclamations and testaments about the imperative of the rethinking of the essence and fate of the African in the long course of humanity. Those classroom transactions, and I am sure I speak for the entirety of my generation, transcended the ends of mere curricular certification; they were more accurately, capsules of Africanizing and humanizing indoctrination. For instance, I clearly recall the grand ambience of Ikime’s Course 105, ‘European, Conquest and African Resistance,’ which he ideologically codified to feature not just the European conquest, but also the spirited resistance of the African to domination and conquest. Such glowing phrases like ‘discretion is the better part of valour’ remain etched in my subconscious, particularly in the inventive manner of their application to the dispositions of the African precolonial leaders upon the colonial invasion and its temperaments of brutality.
To compress a long narrative of incomparable intellectual influence (which could actually be the subject of a full-fledged memoir), one major offshoot of those sublime classroom exchanges with Professor Ikime as a conscientized protégé was that the Africanist in me was enabled in ways which changed the trajectory of my life. After about seven years of teaching in the Department of History, and engaging with Ikime and others, I felt that the scope of my Africanist sensibility needed to be expanded. That was how, with his encouragement, I could make the switch to the Nigerian Foreign Service, with the affirmation that diplomacy offered a more expansive work-field for my conviction. I believed that, to borrow some tantalizing phraseology from my very resourceful biographers, if the formal academy could make history ‘sing’, diplomacy could, in fact, make history ‘dance.’ I considered it highly encouraging that Ikime fully subscribed to this notion.
To me, Obaro Ikime was not just a diligent, transformational teacher and leader, he was also an inspiring career coach, adviser and influencer. His guidance had been crucial to my emergence at the top of my undergraduate class, along with my dear friends, Professor Ehiedu Eweriebo, now of Hunter College, New York, and Professor Damian Ukachukwu Anyanwu, now of Imo State University. But beyond this, he very much orchestrated the commencement of my career as an academic, when he, as Head of Department of History, facilitated my employment (alongside my two aforementioned classmates) as a graduate assistant. It was the first time this form of recruitment, involving the best students in a graduating set, was happening in the department.
Then, there was Obaro Ikime’s very crucial role in seeking out and processing a viable doctoral destination for me, following the completion of a most rewarding Masters programme in History and Political Science, also at Ibadan. I ended up pursuing and completing a D.Phil in Modern History and International Politics at Oxford University in 1982, through the prestigious Commonwealth Scholarship. But he still did not stop at this. He proceeded to convince Vice Chancellor Takena Tamuno, himself originally of the Department of History, that my financial entitlements at Ibadan needed to keep running while I was away in order to assure the welfare of the dependents I was leaving in Nigeria. Professor Ikime was still on hand to receive me and oversee my reabsorption and reintegration into the Faculty upon my return from Oxford.
It is these uncommon acts of sacrifice and love, and many more the limited space of this tribute will not allow me to render in proper perspective, that situate the enormity of my indebtedness to our departed mentor and father. To state that Professor Obaro Ikime contributed immensely to laying the structures for my success as a professional/academic historian, and as a diplomat, is to convey a tightly-held truth in the most unadulterated of ways. It is therefore most natural that our lives, and by extension, those of our families, have been intertwined for decades now. All through my peregrinations in the intriguing frontiers of top level diplomacy and international politics, he remained a major fixture in my life: advising, encouraging, inspiring and blessing. Just for him and very few others in my life, I felt doubly covered in the arena of human counsel. I may have retired as a serving diplomat (and technically may appear not be needing too much of a sage’s elevated thoughts) but Obaro Ikime’s demise could not have happened at a more painful time, particularly as I set my eyes on even higher life goals, the kernel of which he approved before he passed.
One year after his death, that pain, for me is still gratefully cushioned by the consciousness and sensitivity that he is in a better place. This is because, as one who, like me, totally believed and vigorously engaged in very committed investment in the spiritual realms of the afterlife while on the earthly domains the supreme recompense of Divinity remains sure.
To God be the glory.