When The Iroko Answers The Ancestors: A Dirge For BJ

By Lanre Ogundipe

The drum has spoken in a minor key.

The talking drum bends low; its leather voice trembles.

An iroko has answered the call of the forest.

Professor Biodun Jeyifo has gone the way of the ancestors — not in defeat, but in fulfillment. Eight decades he walked this red earth, measuring it with the stride of inquiry, planting questions like kola nuts in the courtyards of power.

O BJ, ọmọ ilẹ̀ Ìbàdàn, child of the dust that births stubborn thinkers,

you did not come among us to decorate silence.

You came with fire wrapped in grammar,

with thunder disguised as scholarship.

Who now will trouble the complacent page?

Who will lean into the wind of argument

and call it home?

In the old Yoruba way, when a great tree falls, the forest does not clap — it inhales. It remembers the shade it gave, the birds it housed, the medicines hidden in its bark. So we remember you: teacher of teachers, critic of critics, custodian of the word’s moral burden.

Your classrooms were not bounded by walls. From Nigeria to distant shores, from seminar halls to conference podiums, you stretched the map of African thought. You spoke of drama as destiny, of literature as a people wrestling with history. In your readings of Wole Soyinka, you did not genuflect; you engaged. You wrestled brilliance with brilliance, sharpened steel against steel, and called it love — the love of truth.

You taught us that criticism is not quarrel; it is care.

That to interrogate is to honor.

That to disagree with rigor is to build a house strong enough to weather time.

Ah, BJ, alákọ̀ọ́bẹrẹ̀ of restless minds,

you wore intellect like agbádá — ample, flowing, but never cumbersome.

Your laughter, quick and knowing, could soften the edge of your fiercest argument.

Your pen, however, spared no laziness.

You insisted that ideas must earn their keep.

That theory without conscience is a masquerade without a dancer.

In the marketplace of nations, where Africa is too often misread, you stood like a town crier refusing distortion. You declared that our stories are not footnotes. That our theatre is not imitation. That our modernity is not borrowed cloth but woven aso-òkè, thick with memory.

When storms gathered around the public square, you did not retreat to ivory towers. You walked into the square. You argued that scholarship must descend from its balcony and sit among the people. That the academy is not a shrine but a workshop. That knowledge must carry the weight of justice.

Today, the curtain falls on your visible presence. The stage dims. The script closes. Yet what is a life such as yours if not a rehearsal for immortality?

The elders say when a sage departs, he does not vanish; he becomes wind. He becomes proverb. He becomes that inner voice that refuses cowardice. Already, in libraries and lecture halls, your sentences stir like harmattan dust — persistent, impossible to ignore.

Nigeria mourns, yes. Africa bows its head. The global academy lowers its flag of inquiry. But beyond grief there is gratitude ; deep, resonant, like the bass of the bàtá drum at twilight.

Thank you for eighty years of intellectual integrity.

Thank you for the stubbornness of your clarity.

Thank you for impacting us – that to think is an ethical act.

Sleep, BJ, where the ancestors debate in eternal symposium. Sit among the great disputants of our history. Let Orun welcome you with the dignity you gave to words.

And we, your friends and admirers, named and unnamed – will keep the argument alive. We will trouble falsehood. We will defend nuance. We will refuse easy applause.

For the iroko has fallen, yes.

But its seeds are everywhere.

Go well, Professor.

The drum will speak your name at dusk.

The forest will remember.

Lanre Ogundipe President, IBILE Club and former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists writes from Abuja.

February 13, 2026.