It is a poignant irony that, amidst global mourning for a champion of the Talakawas, and academic praise for his Harvard pedigree, a voice from his own roots should feel so abandoned
By Gbolahan Balogun
When the news broke on February 11, 2026, that Professor Biodun Jeyifo (BJ) had passed away, the global “Republic of Letters” went into a state of solemn ritual. From the ivy-covered walls of Harvard and Cornell to the vibrant corridors of the University of Ibadan, the tributes were uniform: Jeyifo was a Marxist titan, a literary deconstructivist, and the man who taught the world how to read Wole Soyinka.
But beneath the global applause, a discordant note began to ring. It started as a whisper from the hills of Ekiti and grew into a caustic roar from the plains of Edo. As the world prepares to bury this great giant in a few days, two communities stood aggrieved, claiming he was a son who had either forgotten his home or, more controversially, rewritten his very DNA.
The Ekiti Lament: “The Global Giant, The Local Ghost”
In Iyin-Ekiti, the community Jeyifo claimed as his ancestral home, the mood was one of “respectful bitterness”. The most vocal architect of this sentiment was Adewale Adeoye, a veteran journalist and son of the same soil.
Adeoye’s critique was visceral. He painted a picture of a man who spent decades fighting for the Talakawas (the oppressed masses) in his weekly columns and academic treatises, yet remained a stranger to the actual poor of Iyin-Ekiti.
“What is the utility of an intellectual shadow that covers the Atlantic but provides no shade for the primary school in his own village?” Adeoye asked. School supplies.
The grievance here is developmental. To the people of Iyin, BJ was a “star in the sky”, beautiful to look at from a distance, but providing no warmth. There are no libraries, no scholarship funds, and no physical footprints of his immense global influence in the town. For Adeoye, Jeyifo represented a generation of Nigerian intellectuals who “escaped” to the West, leaving their roots to wither while they tended to the gardens of global discourse.
The Edo Claim: “The Stolen Pedigree”
As the Ekiti “home” mourned an absentee son, another voice rose from the Edo/Esan axis, led by the formidable Odia Ofeimun. This was not a grievance of neglect, but of identity.
Ofeimun has long maintained that Biodun Jeyifo was not “originally” from Ekiti. He argues that the name “Jeyifo” is a Yorubanised derivative of the Esan name “Iyifo” or “Ijeyifo” According to this narrative, BJ’s family were migrants from Edo State who settled in Ibadan, eventually ‘acculturating’ so deeply into the Yoruba social fabric that their original heritage was erased.
For Ofeimun, this wasn’t just a family matter; it was a “civilsational theft” He saw BJ as an Edo genius who had been “captured” by the Yoruba intellectual machine.
The Caustic Voice: The Allegation of “Yorubanisation”
Perhaps the most stinging critique came from an anonymous but influential “lone voice” within the Esan intellectual circle. This critic went further than Ofeimun, labelling Jeyifo’s identity a form of “sociological fraud”
This “caustic voice” alleged that BJ consciously leaned into his “Yoruba-ness” to gain leverage within the powerful Ibadan-Lagos intellectual axis. The allegation is sharp: by “Yorubanising” his name and focusing his life’s work on Yoruba icons like Soyinka, Jeyifo essentially “turned his back on the dust of Esan land.”
The critic’s most biting line resonated across social media: “He was a Marxist who forgot that the first ‘class struggle’ is the survival of one’s own village. He changed his name to fit a narrative, but in the end, he belonged everywhere and nowhere”
The Human Angle: The Burden of the Exile
To be fair to the memory of BJ, his defenders argue that these critiques are “parochial”. They point out that his class was humanity; that as a Marxist, Jeyifo’s “community” was the global working class, not a specific ethnic enclave.
They also did not fail to see him paying the price of activism. Dr Remi Medupin, who is in the same boat as Jeyifo, observes that his long years in the US were a forced intellectual exile due to his radical stance against Nigerian military juntas, arguing that he, however, made this up with his intellectual remittance. “His weekly interventions in The Nation and Guardian were his way of ‘building’ the nation, one mind at a time. No sensible individual would fail to see that”
The Verdict
The controversy surrounding Biodun Jeyifo’s passing reveals a deep-seated tension in the Nigerian psyche: What does a great man owe his village? Is a man a “failure” if he wins a Nobel-level reputation but fails to sink a borehole in his hometown? Or is the “village” of a genius simply the entire world?
As Jeyifo is laid to rest, the debate over his name – whether it began in the hills of Ekiti or the plains of Esan – remains a haunting reminder that in Nigeria, you are never just an “individual”, you are always a son of the soil, and that soil never stops calling you to account.
However, considering what we know about BJ, the controversies surrounding his life and death reflect his proclaimed commitment to humanity. Regardless of a man’s achievements in life, he ultimately returns to the soil and faces his maker as the Skull and Crossbones. This belief has been a part of BJ’s understanding since 1967, as I was informed. It is also a sentiment that resonates deeply with his fellow travelers and companions on this journey.
Culled from Midland Post