An Interview with Biodun Jeyifo

Eyal Peretz

So, perhaps you could start by narrating your trajectory a bit. Our concept is the concept of the world, so it might be interesting to narrate how you got here.

Biodun Jeyifo

Yes... I take the view that the biographical is very important for scholars of Comparative Literature, or Literary and Cultural Studies, whose life experiences go back to the late colonial period, who have been lucky to have lived so long. I was born in 1946 and the first fourteen years of my life were lived in late colonial Nigeria, so I grew up in the period when there was an intensification of the nationalist movement. And I was born in Ibadan, which at that time was the biggest city in black Africa. There were around one and a half to two million people living there at that time, and it was also the cultural and intellectual capital of the country. So I grew up... I mean this is all in hindsight now, you know... but at the time I was growing up, at least for the first ten years of my life, I wasn't that aware of the nationalist movement. I would say that it was ten years of my life, up to the upper levels of primary school. I think I had this—I don't think this was clear to me, I think it was to my generation—this kind of romance of empire, you know, because of all of the rituals of the British Empire and its colonies. We had Empire Day every year, we had visits from members of the royal family to Nigeria, to West Africa. With Ibadan being such a big center, it was also the administrative center of the western region of Nigeria, so my schoolboy sense of all of that I remember vividly; I remember all of these visits of the British royal family, and there would be a huge parade at which all the schools would be present and there would be feasting, and we had songs about the British Empire, songs from the Second World War celebrating the victory of the British over the Germans. All of that.

So that's what I mean by saying that I grew up in the romance of empire, even though at that time, right from the late- or mid- 1940s, until the final independence in 1960, there was an intense nationalist movement. But I didn't become aware of it as much until around age fourteen, which is the point at which I entered secondary school. And then I became very aware, intensely aware, because I would attend rallies and debates and lectures. There were two large public lecture halls in Ibadan. One was totally anti-British, which would feature most of these well-known nationalist figures, and I would attend, and I would actually say that that's the beginning of perhaps my political and ideological radicalization, attending the meetings and protest marches of these nationalist figures. But before that, of course I think perhaps the single most important factor, culturally speaking, was that from very early on I developed a passion for reading. And initially it was reading in the Yoruba language, but very quickly that was overtaken by reading in English, and I just read everything I could lay my hands on. And so a very special relationship with the English language developed. And again, it is only in retrospect that I can now put a colonial framework to it. When it started it was just love of reading, and it didn't register in my mind as if I was a split subject, you know, I read books both in Yoruba and in English with equal pleasure, although the bookshelves at the public libraries and my school libraries had many more English books of course. So that's how English became the dominant language for both reading and writing.

And at the same time, I also discovered that I wasn't a terribly industrious and conscientious student, you know, until the very late top forms of secondary school. Throughout primary school...