Garlands for Ropo Sekoni (RS) at 70

I am talking about the late Professor Sam, A. Adewoye (God save your neck if you did not emphasize the Sam, A and you said Samuel or the Adegboyega completion of his name!) Professor Adewoye was indeed the first Lecturer-in-Charge of the Department. Being just a Lecturer 11 in 1976, he did not, by University […]

I am talking about the late Professor Sam, A. Adewoye (God save your neck if you did not emphasize the Sam, A and you said Samuel or the Adegboyega completion of his name!) Professor Adewoye was indeed the first Lecturer-in-Charge of the Department. Being just a Lecturer 11 in 1976, he did not, by University Regulation, qualify to be an Acting Head of Department, not to talk of a Head of Department. But he was the most senior of the four of us that were appointed into the academic division of the Department of English.  The other two were the late Professor Emmanuel Efurosibina Adegbija and Auntie Victoria Ofuya. The last three of us were in that pioneer year, 1976 of the life of the University and Department of English, Graduate Assistants, while the late Adewoye was a Lecturer 11 and our boss, therefore. The soul of that Victorian fictive scholar and later writer must rest in enduring peace.
Dr. Ropo Sekoni came into the Department later in 1977 as a Lecturer 11 while I was away in Sheffield my Masters (in Sheffield) and later starting my PhD, in the School of English, Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds. I came back home, in middle of 1978, on a research trip, to find Ropo Sekoni, and our more senior colleague, the late Sam Adewoye, as the pillars holding our Department together. And, guess. We just clicked and became inseparable twins—metaphorically speaking, with all its hazardous consequences—more matter for a May morning, as Shakespeare would propose for very difficult and hard times in social relationships endangered by external factors.
In saying happy entry into the Septuagenarian age to my friend and Egbon (and I am sure he will chuckle that, finally, Olu whom he relished referring to as a trainee, in those young years and who violently resisted the ‘relegation’). I also wish to continue to wish the late Sam, A. Adewoye, eternal repose and immortal renewal as a teacher, writer and friend. For, in spite of the turbulent times and misunderstandings of our very harmless relationship as a trio, visited by external, and even familial suspicions, we remained as colleagues and friends bound together by very serious academic and intellectual pursuits, garnished by  happy hours of social interactions which oiled our intellectual ferment.
And, Oluropo Sekoni was the great blender of our profound scholarly and intellectual engagements and the hedonistic embellishment of our life in those testy days of crippling brain-drain, SAP, Austerity and so on, imposed by military oligarchies willing to make the search for the so-called ‘greener pastures’ the most enticing enterprise of young academics and, even fledgling radical scholars and intellectuals in the middle eighties. The three of us, Egbons Sam and Ropo and I, since 1981, when I came back with the doctorate, kept our search for academic excellence aglow, by trudging, itinerantly, from one Conference to another, especially under the aegis of the Nigerian English Studies Association, the long defunct Nigerian Literary Association and the Ibadan Annual Literature Conference—to Jos, Ibadan, Benin, Calabar and so on, and to the justifiable bewilderment of our young families. But as the domestic pressures mounted, it was more convenient for the two of us, the younger arm of the ‘three academic musketeers (Ropo Sekoni and I) to fly more easily together.
Dr. Ropo Sekoni, as he was then, was a great inspiration for me. Coming with boundless energy from Leeds and anxious to build a theatre family under the auspices of my theatre troupe,  Ajon Players, ignited by the radical ideological precept from the Leeds Social Science and Humanist Circle, Ropo Sekoni was the anchor of my radical thought and practice, outside of the friendship that I had built with Femi Osofisan, and to a limited extent Bode Sowande  in Ibadan and Kole Omotoso and my ASUU comrades in  Benin and Ife (it is not time yet to raise thought on that leg of my life in later years). Ropo Sekoni just gave me the right blend of fulfilment—sound scholarship, radical praxis and accommodable hedonism. We enjoyed our worked and seized accessible space for relaxation. Ropo Sekoni to help hone the semiotic perspective of my theatrical and dramatic scholarship. He helped us in Ajon to bring adequate and apt indigenous oral songs and narrative to our radical dramaturgy. He kept late nights with us on the stage and its aftermath of social relaxation. He worked with me on the search for the conceptualization of oral performance theory and the social context of dramatic and literary semiology.  Above all, he taught me how to blend radicalism with humane-ness—some of the attributes I was enabled to imbue on some of my own protégées, not exactly for lack of trying, I hope—which threw painful sour- grapes into my life at some critical point of growing.
Even with this intellectual and social intimacy—even bond—with our new septuagenarian, Ropo Sekoni, it was not all smiles, not all paean without pain. But what subtended in our relationship was the possibility of the triumph of truth over social and domestic trivia. The social environment at the growing city of Ilorin—for people coming from Wisconsin and from Leeds, anxious to join the band-wagon of change and social transformation, even within the academic labour force in ASUU—brought burdensome trauma hat required fortitude, courage and resilience to carry. It was not all rose and no thorns for people of radical bent within a fledgling and nascent tradition of academic trade unionism, which the new academic trade union in Nigeria under Biodun Jeyifo and shortly after under the late cerebral but un-obtrusive Mahmud Tukru typified..
It is quite humbling for me to now come to grips with the fact that Ropo Sekoni was actually six clear years older than I was when we were just Olu and Ropo—and still are—with inimitable intimacy, unbridled and unstoppable affection in the most trying of times of those years from 1977 to the later part of the eighties when he literally took flight from the country, back to America.
Ropo, if I were today asked to name the scholars and friends who bore enduring imprint on my life as a growing academic, scholar and social being, I will give gratitude to my teacher the late Kolawole Ogungbesan and you before many. And so, to a friend, an inspirer, a professional colleague in the semiotic and oral performative disciplines; to an initiator into the radical social ferment, Oluropo Sekoni, it is a Happy Birthday. May your Winter years yield Springly, sprightly, Summer fruits. May a thousand years of your productive life be very like the sprouting of Spring and the harvest seasons of Summer. May your life never yield products of dry seasons.  So, Egin, Happy Septuagenarian seasons from a soul-mate.