Sola Olorunyomi’s professorship offers us an opportunity to break the monopolisation of the ‘people’s’ label by comrades and activists in the legal profession. At the same time, it offers a perfect occasion to begin to imagine the continent of the Author of the book; Fela and the Imagined Continent. For if we strive to do so, we might discover that this newly minted Professor’s continent is perhaps bigger than we possibly ever imagined. Or is it that his own continent has been unimagined?
If I’m allowed to start the debate, which I’m qualified to do having been associates since the mid-1980s, I would say that diversity defines Sola Olorunyomi’s intellectual continent. A diversity that makes him a unionist on and outside the campus; a one-time trainee revolutionary soldier in Nicaragua’s Sandinista Liberation army; a leftist philosopher and fighter; an intellectual powerhouse of ASUU; a guitarist and lover of the Arts; a culture explorer and language enthusiast; a humanist and a writer.
If persucution was all that was needed to quench intellectual thirst, Sola Olorunyomi would have given up long time ago especially following his expulsion from the University of Ilorin for the ‘crime’ of making the campus a fortress of the resistance to the attempted commercialisation of education by the Buhari-Idiagbon regime in 1984. As a consequence, many in our generation graduated while he was still suffering out there. But by the 2010s, he had become a PhD holder and the one chasing other comrades to acquire more academic qualifications. That was how he was the one who supervised my Masters’ thesis in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Ibadan. His unrelenting commitment to motivating others is therefore another of his unimagined or unspoken continent.
Yet, whenever he is confronted with all his laudable contributions to knowledge and struggle, Sola Olorunyomi would dodge the accolades and summarise his contribution as little drops in the ocean. Such modesty and humility cannot but be endearing. In itself, it manifests the characteristics of a professorial personality. One of the things we also have to imagine in his vast continent.
Congratulations to you, Miki, the Baami. Your professorship is well earned and deserved.
