In the House of Many Mansions

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A brief encounter, rich in sensations of the ineffable characteristic of a West African evening in the dry season. A professor with an instantly recognizable face stood along the corridor of the Faculty of Arts annex, at the University of Ibadan, sometime in early 1987. In the eyes of the beholder, a student walking past, the encounter could not be a meeting. The face was recognizable because it matched a name seen in a number of newspaper articles, but this encounter was full of forebodings. It was late in the evening. The sun was gone. To the student, a "Freshman," nearly everything on campus appeared wondrous. That twilight signaled a different but related transition, the thronging of some of the great names of Nigerian arts and letters toward new mornings elsewhere, in search of food and fulfillment. The professor was one of the emigrants but the student did not know this. Only later, with the great fortune of readings, anecdotes, and further sightings would the missed opportunity of direct tutelage come, improbably, to stand for a legacy.

In the decades between that sighting at Ibadan in 1987 and his death on July 2, 2017, the literary scholar Abiola Irele acquired the status of a mentor. Such was the fate of the modern Nigerian intellectual tradition that some of its best products, those in a position to keep it steady, pass it on, were literally on their way out—of the country. Yet in Irele's case, mentoring was a lifelong undertaking, and three generations of students passed through him, from the playwright Femi Osofisan through the scholars Moradewun Adejunmobi and Laura Murphy. He left Ibadan, and Nigeria, in 1987, but he never really left, and not just because he returned in 2009 to become the provost of Kwara State University, Malete. Apart from his lifelong commitments as publisher, editor, and administrator, Irele's intellectual standing convinced his former colleagues at the Department of Modern Languages (Ibadan) to present him with a festschrift in 1996, the year he turned sixty. A second festschrift, edited by Biodun Jeyifo, appeared in 2011, based on a conference held in his honor at Harvard University in 2007 to mark his seventieth birthday.

Irele's legacy is assured. Beside many still-uncollected essays, his single-authored books—The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981), The African Imagination (2001), and The Négritude Moment (2011)—provide an indispensable compass for the movements of global-black intellectual history. It may sound like a tricky extrapolation now, a result of poetic association rather than fact, but the student who felt shortchanged by the evanescence of that 1987 encounter took solace in the scholar's classic essay, "In Praise of Alienation" (1982) as an inestimable gift of insight for an evolving creature of sensibilities.

Many more meetings followed; longer, more direct, and on increasingly firmer grounds of experience. Such as, back in Ibadan, with Osofisan who had in his office a picture of himself with figures like Amiri Baraka; a historic picture, as Irele observed, whereupon he was told of a student's honors thesis on Baraka's drama, and he agreed to bring a copy to the dramatist. And at the lobby of the Novotel in Accra where, waiting for a shuttle to the airport, he spoke, in a Cecil Taylor playful-sort-of way, about the "comparability" of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat (1967). And aboard a ferry to Gorée, as he marveled at the range of Ayodele Ogundipe's doctoral thesis on Esu, which he would publish as a book under the new imprint he oversaw in Nigeria. Inside the Marriot Hotel in Indianapolis, treating his auditor to a self-deprecating laughter about his unforgivable error of remembering Susan Suleri Goodyear as Susan Suleri Firestone. And, finally, in December 2016, in yet another American hotel lobby, promising to send copies of The Savannah Review…

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Such are the movements of history. A man of many worlds, Irele was, in a sense, to literature what C. L...