Renowned Scholar, Biodun Jeyifo Dies At 80

Professor Biodun Jeyifo, a renowned scholar, literary critic, public intellectual, Marxist, and committed trade unionist, is dead.

The world-class intellectual, popularly known as BJ, died on Wednesday of renal failure, one month and five days after he celebrated his 80th birthday in Lagos.

Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, Jeyifo earned a first-class bachelor’s in English from the University of Ibadan in 1970, followed by a master’s from the same institution in 1973, and a doctorate from New York University in 1975.

He also holds a DLitt (honoris causa) from Obafemi Awolowo University—formerly the University of Ife—where he taught for several years. Reflecting on that period, Jeyifo noted that it was at Ife he became “the kind of teacher and person I had always tried to become.”

His distinguished career further includes senior professorships at Cornell University and Harvard University, where he currently serves as Professor Emeritus of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature.

The range of his scholarly and professional interests demonstrates his purposeful pursuit of knowledge that can bring about social change: African and Caribbean ‘Anglophone’ literatures; theatrical theory and dramatic literature, Western and non-Western; comparative African and Afro-American critical thought; Marxist literary and cultural theory; colonial and postcolonial studies; and twentieth-century revolutionary social philosophy and literature.

Jeyifo is generally regarded as the world’s pre-eminent scholarly authority on the works and career of Wole Soyinka. His award-winning book on the 1986 Nobel laureate, “Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism” (Cambridge University Press, 2004), is regarded as the most comprehensive study of the author’s work, and the most sophisticated single-author study of any writer in African postcolonial studies.