On the night of 8 February, 2024, we lost Emeritus Professor Emevwo Anselm Biakolo. He passed on peacefully in his sleep in his home in Lagos, Nigeria. He was 67. Earlier that day he was at work in his office at the Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos where he was the Founding Dean of the University’s School of Media and Communication. He taught at the SMC for many years and raised generations of students who now survive him and are carrying on his legacy as leaders and managers and impacting the world in different spheres of life.
Emeritus Prof. Biakolo was educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria where he studied English and the Classics earning a doctorate in folklore. The egret does not wander too far away from the cow where it dutifully harvests flies and this was true of Prof. Biakolo in his chosen academic vocation. He never left the ivory tower and later became an influential member of faculty in the Department of English in Ibadan where he taught poetry, oral literature and folklore studies.
My earliest encounter and initial intimation of Prof. Biakolo was in 1991 as a fresh undergraduate in Ibadan. Indeed, he literally held me by the hand into Ibadan through the instrumentality of my cousin, Prof. Saawua Nyityo who was then a graduate student in Archaeology and Anthropology. He had implicit confidence in my future prospects and would always remark that it was possible to discern the productivity of the yam from its tendril. He earned a solid reputation in the university as a conscientious writer, dedicated teacher, cerebral academic, consummate scholar, thoroughbred researcher, restless seeker of knowledge and tireless trafficker in ideas. He, therefore, followed his late elder sibling, Dr. Anthony Biakolo (later a professor, Delta State University) who lectured in the Department of Modern European Languages in Ibadan.
At the Pan-Atlantic University where he was dean for many years, he proved himself to be an avuncular mentor, committed teacher, painstaking and industrious scholar, visionary administrator, astute manager of human capital, prudent controller of financial resources, and a rare gem of a scholar in communication media and ethics. He established valuable partnerships with cognate organizations and media industry players and nurtured the SMC from infancy to the Everest of growth. Under him, all programmes of the SMC were accredited by the National Universities Commission, and as HOD and Director of Academic Planning for the University, I worked closely with him. His 2010 inaugural lecture symbolically titled “Communication, Communion, Community” was richly layered and ground-breaking and confirmed Biakolo as a high priest whose horn was filled with the anointing oil of knowledge, wisdom and ideas.
Fondly known as Oga Biaks by his colleagues, friends and admirers, Prof. Biakolo possessed a personality contagion which attracted many people to him just like bees are attracted to the ambrosial fragrance of nectar. He was a personable, humane, selfless, forthright, incisive and humorous man. He was affirmatively “an intense man” (to appropriate his late spouse, Margaret’s felicitous phraseology), with a somewhat imposing, even intimidating and aristocratic bearing. However, beneath that intense, Spartan veneer was an affable, friendly, accommodating, progressive, generous and compassionate soul who had no capacity for arrogance, hate or malice.
He was a man of peace but his pacific disposition did not prevent him from shaking tables and fighting battles as a prerequisite peace. One day while in a heated altercation with a colleague whose insubordination and treachery deeply hurt him, I went to him after the volcanic e(dis)ruption of emotions to seek clarity and closure over the matter. He was quick to ask for reconciliation with the colleague even when he was the innocent party and told the offending colleague that he had forgiven and forgotten about the incident because he did not have the heart to keep malice. Thereafter, he conveniently interred the matter in the rubble of collegiality and never resurrected it.
In matters of faith, Prof. Biakolo was a devout Catholic who gave full and unalloyed expression to his Christian life and identity with piety, heroic virtue and exemplary conduct. Like St Anselm, his patron saint, he was a man of outstanding philosophical depth, constant prayer and deep contemplation. He was imbued with the spirit of solidarity and fraternal charity towards all irrespective of their social stations or estates in life. His love of God and neighbor formed the very core or centre of his life and was courageously convinced that the duty of humanity consisted not so much in doing extraordinary things but doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways and responding actively to the universal call to holiness.
Prof. Biakolo was a successful family man. His love for his immediate family, traditional family life and the institution of marriage was exceptional and unparalleled. This salutary commitment propelled him into a life of engagement in marriage counseling and family therapy and he generously invested his time and resources to acquire the requisite training and expertise in this area as a coach and therapist. Together with his late wife, Dr. Margaret Biakolo, he co-founded Natural Family and Educational Network, NAFACEN, a non-for-profit outfit to advance the cause for education and family life. His books, The Meaning of Marriage (2010) and Withness Conversations: Love and Commitment in Couple Communication (2022) are compelling commentaries which bear eloquent testimony to this singular cause which rehabilitated many spousal unions, rescued marriages and strengthened family bonds.
As a writer, Prof. Biakolo was an accomplished poet with great intensity of thought, compelling style, profound imagery and lyrical grace. His volumes of poetry, Ravages and Solaces (1994) and Strides of the Night (1995) amply validate this unassailable critical acclaim. And as an astral essayist and columnist, his prodigious output resonated with powerful accents, vatic insights and prophetic vision. He was a leading member (with late Prof. Harry Garuba) of the Ibadan Poetry Collective which regularly met nocturnally in the famous Room 71, Faculty of Arts, for engaging poetic sessions. It was in that cultic room that sacrifices of poetic initiations were held and ritual libations were poured with disarming piety to the poetic daemon or muse. Young poets, among them Onookome Okome, Nduka Otiono, Chiedu Ezeana, Remi Raji, late Pius Adesanmi, Afam Akeh, etc. were forged here and offered to the university and the world through this initiative.
Prof. Biakolo had an exceptionally fertile mind and was given to protean artistic interests. He ventured into media practice and soon established himself as a much read and much sought after columnist with The Guardian Newspapers where he was a member of the star-studded editorial board in the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. The board’s weekly meetings at Rutam House in Isolo, Lagos became veritable conclaves of fiery parliamentary debates about the soul of Nigeria and the place of Africa in global reckoning. It was while writing for The Guardian that Biakolo’s activist credentials and character as a social gadfly and public intellectual became firmly etched on the public imagination.
It is only iron that sharpens iron and only the deep can call to the deep. At this flagship of Nigerian journalism, Prof. Biakolo met the cream of Nigerian intellectuals and media connoisseurs, including Stanley Macebuh, Edwin Madunagu, Emeka Izeze, Godini Darah, Reuben Abati, Adebayo Williams, Odia Ofeimun, among many others. In that galaxy of intellectuals, Biakolo’s voice was oracular and resonant as he always engaged Nigeria and its plural contradictions as a nation-state in a perpetual state of becoming.
I recall with nostalgia one acerbic, satiric piece he wrote in 1993 in his column which was titled, “The Palm and the Ash” to commemorate Ash Wednesday. The piece had a scurrilous temperament which called on Nigerian politicians and the military to repent of their malfeasances in ashes and sack cloths. The piece resonated strongly among the reading public and became the talking point and soon Biakolo was placed under surveillance by the state security services. His pen was like a barbed, poisonous arrow in the rib cages of the military dictatorship and political establishment.
On one of his weekly trips to Lagos for the editorial board meetings at The Guardian, my cousin, Prof. Gabriel Nyityo and I had the fortune of accompanying him in his rugged and dependable Peugeot 505 Evolution car. Along the way, not long after we started off, he saw through the rear mirror that I was dozing my life off while the car tore its way on the expressway to Lagos. He called me brusquely and teasingly asked me what I did the previous night that I was sleeping and snoring like a well-fed python in hibernation.
Of course I was not snoring and did not do anything untoward overnight but I had no rehearsed answer and he had a good laugh at my expense. As a trick to wean me from the clutches of somnolence, he immediately invited us to pray the rosary, a devotion he was piously committed to. Many years when we later worked as colleagues at the SMC, the two of us, always at his behest, occasionally went on pilgrimages to shrines of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary in Lagos armed with our chaplets counting the rosary beads in meditative prayer.
At the height of military interregnum in Nigeria during the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, the dark-goggled one, many intellectuals became an endangered species and the existential threat of silent elimination hovered spectrally in the air. Some of these iconoclasts went underground and operated in the dark trenches. Some took the one-way traffic abroad to save their necks from the guillotine. Prof. Biakolo did not push his luck too far. In 1994, he migrated to the southern African nation of Botswana.
I recall that after the prolonged industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU in 1994 we resumed after a year-long hiatus in academic activities only to discover that Biakolo had evaporated into thin air. His destination, we were told, was Botswana. He taught there for about a decade before he returned to Nigeria. Even while in Botswana, his virile, patriotic voice occasionally ricocheted in the national imagination with searing commentaries about Nigeria’s unending catalogue of pathologies and the urgent need for therapy.
At this juncture, I am left with a bouquet of reminiscences of Prof. Biakolo which I want to share here. Our communication, let me admit, suffered a severe drought when Biakolo was in Gaborone, especially after the initial years. Then a rare opportunity presented itself in 2005. There was an international conference at the Delta State University, Abraka on Prof. Tanure Ojaide. It was organized by Prof. Onookome Okome and Prof. Biakolo was one of the keynote speakers. It was the first time we met after about a decade. We were extremely delighted to see each other and got locked in what appeared to be an eternal ecstatic hug as if that was the last opportunity we had. We did a lot of catching up on the sidelines of that conference.
A few months later, he wrote to seek my advice regarding the possibility to return home and assist the newly established Pan-African (later Pan-Atlantic) University to found the School of Media and Communication. I was humbled to be so consulted and I encouraged him to come back. He did. As soon as he started the School, I was inevitably on his radar in his recruitment drive. He persuaded me to leave Ibadan where I was teaching in the Department of English. I could not resist the persuasive logic and charm of his persevering appeal. A conspiracy of powerful push and pull factors prevailed and I ended up with Biakolo in Lagos. Our two tributary lives found a confluence at the SMC and mentor and mentee were finally restored to each other.
If our guardian angels wear human habiliments, then Prof. Biakolo was my own guardian angel. A few months after I joined the SMC, fortune smiled on me. I won a prestigious visiting research fellowship at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Prof. Biakolo readily released me from teaching and administrative responsibilities for the fellowship even when I had not stayed on ground long enough. According to him, the prestige of the fellowship was not only mine but the University’s also. The dean had spoken in unequivocal accents and this scuttled and settled any and every smouldering opposition to my release for the fellowship. Such was his acute infectious humanity, deep sense of collegiality and willingness to help in the career advancement and professional fulfillment of his colleagues and staff.
While in Cambridge, the Centre of African Studies and my fellow fellows gave my university the honour of hosting the Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Conference. Prof. Biakolo promptly agreed to co-host the conference and when I got back from the UK he assisted me to put everything in place for its success with the venerable late Prof. Abiola Irele, then of Harvard University, as the keynote speaker, Prof. Stephanie Newell (University of Sussex) and Chris Warnes (University of Cambridge) as lead presenters. The two had known each other in Ibadan. During banters at the conference warming, Biakolo wondered that with Prof. Irele’s lust for the best of wines, it was impossible to imagine if the Harvard don would survive without wine for a day. Homeric laughter rent the air as the atmosphere of conviviality was infectious. Thanks to Prof. Biakolo that conference was sustained and had other subsequent keynoters including Profs. Molara Ogundipe, Karin Baber, Jide Osuntokun, and Remy Oriaku.
But occasions which were tense also brought out his humanity. There was an incident in 2013 which brought me into serious collision course with Prof. I received a grant to travel to South Africa to attend a conference at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. Again Prof. Biakolo graciously released me to travel for the conference. On the morning of my departure, I left very early for Ibadan to visit Very Rev Fr. Prof. Louis Munoz, my former chaplain and spiritual director during my student days in Ibadan who was ailing. I had not seen him for a long time and after a stream of emissaries he had sent, I decided to check on him and a few friends. My flight was in the evening and so I had to rush back to catch the flight.
When I returned from South Africa and resumed, I entered Prof’s office with palpable excitement to express my gratitude for the kind dispensation to attend the conference. Quite unexpectedly, I met a visibly enraged Biakolo who accused me of crass betrayal. The atmosphere became charged and oppressive and it was as if I had committed treasonable felony. According to him, I chose to travel to hide in Ibadan only to return and claim that I went to Grahamstown. I could not travel long with my spirited protestations of innocence as I sounded like a hapless chick asking to be spared the imminence of a ritual sacrifice. The only evidence he was willing to accept was my passport.
When I left his office that morning, I knew instinctively that someone in Ibadan must have innocently informed him that I was in the university city of seven hills. I suspected a few friends and colleagues as the possible culprits but could not ascertain exactly who was responsible. The person did not mean any harm but practically threw me into a boiling cauldron, even the nether regions of purgatory without knowing it. Throughout that day I was ashen and moody like a lamb waiting for the knife to journey through its neck at the slaughter slab. The next morning, I came to the office armed with my travelling document.
The moment I entered his office, I met Prof wearing a rueful mien. He stood up and offered me his hand. He proceeded to tell me not to bother presenting my passport. He got in touch with the South African chancery and fetched the truth. He was deeply apologetic for having accused me without sufficient evidence. To further douse the simmering tension, he told me that my lunch that day was on him. Such was his legendary humility to accept readily his culpability when he was at fault. The courage to admit that you are wrong is rare and in short supply. Indeed, it is a hallmark of greatness and humility. Prof was so humble that it was customary for him to receive even students in his office without sitting down and insisted on opening the door to others to enter before him.
Prof. Biakolo had a unique weakness. He was direct and brutally frank especially when he was convinced that the truth was a casualty and was being sacrificed. This was not a weakness but a marker of personal courage and conviction. However, in our world where truth-telling makes one vulnerable, it was still a weakness. Prof. Biakolo possessed a tremendous sense of humour which he liberally distributed when he was in good company. It was not unusual to hear him waxing philosophical teasing colleagues and friends: “The devil is in the details”, “When push comes to shove” and “I’m still hanging in here”, the last statement whenever I asked him about his health.
When in 1993 he discovered that I could not drive, he was so disappointed and teased me. He wondered if I was a dinosaur, an antiquated creature not in tandem with modernity as it was strange for an undergraduate student. He offered to teach me how to drive, according to him, for selfish reasons, so that I could run errands for him. Unfortunately for me, the protracted 1994 ASUU industrial face-off happened and when we resumed, he had disappeared from Nigeria.
Prof. Biakolo played a key role in my domestic affairs. He once accompanied me on the hazardous Lagos waterways to the island of Abule Elepa, a community neighbours with the Atlantic Ocean, to visit my father-in-law. He was willing to risk his life for me and my family, a risk he shared with Prof. Remy Oriaku, another of my teachers in Ibadan who has always stood for me and my family. On that visit, we went to the Atlantic beach for sight-seeing. In the distant, hazy horizon, we strained to see and count the ships on their way to berth at the Apapa Port and Prof aptly remarked that they were like a caravanserai of camels trudging their way through a desert, this time a desert full of a multitudinous waters. My father-in-law was full of admiration and gave him loads of coconut fruits in appreciation for the visit.
He also graciously stood as a baptism sponsor for my last child, Hilary Terzungwe and became his god father. The remarkable thing that happened was that Prof. Biakolo got to the church in Ojo before me that day from his far-flung Lekki base. He then drove to the house when he did not see me at the church. Again he teased me for being the typical African man who had no concept of and respect for time. When I protested that there was still time he could not hear of it. Teasing me was a pastime for Prof. Biakolo and it gave him tremendous satisfaction. One day I was late to the office in Victoria Island because of the legendary Lagos traffic. He teasingly told me that with my fat pay, I still chose to stay in Ojo because of cheap accommodation and that I should move closer to the highbrow Lekki area and have value for my money. We both laughed heartily.
It is notoriously prohibitive to talk about Prof. Biakolo in the past tense because of the immortality of his personable presence and the elasticity of his enduring impact. For those of us left to mourn his untimely and sudden passing into eternal glory, he is everything good to everyone everywhere and is supremely ever-present as his influence will never wilt away in our memories. To his immediate family, he is a beloved son, brother, husband, father and uncle. To his circle of friends, he is a most affable and loyal ally and to his professional colleagues he is a dependable and trustworthy comrade who would sacrifice everything and anything to enhance the quality of our diminished and impoverished humanity.
Prof. Biakolo has put off the garb of mortality and now wears the vestments of imperishability. His transition is our loss on this terrestrial plane but the gain of the celestial court. Even in this tragic moment when our grief reaches Himalayan heights, we can only be grateful to Providence for the valuable gift of our amiable, illustrious Prof. Biakolo.
It remains for me to etch a lapidary inscription as epitaph in honour of this iconic personage: “Here lies the man who changed the world around him by first changing himself”; or “Here’s the oasis that resided in a vast desert”; or “Here reposes the man who planted roses in place of thorns”.
Rest in eternal glory with the angels and saints, dear Professor Emeritus Emevwo Anselm Biakolo!
***James Tar Tsaaior, Department of English, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa
ENDS***