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Professor Wale Adebanwi At 50 -By Festus Adedayo

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Professor Wale Adebanwi

Tomorrow, my friend, brother and benefactor, Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, Fellow of St Antony’s College and Director of the African Studies Centre of the University of Cambridge, will be 50 years old. Adebanwi is one of the unsung Nigerian scholars who do Nigeria proud and conversely place selves against Nigerians who tar-brush Nigeria on a daily basis outside the country. Unfortunately, seldom does Nigeria bother about the two of them – those who destroy her name outside the country and those who cause gold and fascinating ornaments to be strung round her neck.  

I met Adebanwi sometime in 1988 at the University of Lagos where we were both admitted as students that year; he for Mass Communication and me, Philosophy. We met weekly at Professor Alaba Ogunsanwo’s class whose courses we took as our ‘Elective.’ Though he never knew me throughout the duration of our study in Lagos, I mischievously told him years later of how he used to strut into the lecture room, always late. I was later to learn that he combined working as freelance for the Tribune and some other soft-sell magazines and those schedules, affixed to schooling, always drew him off class on time. We later met at the University of Ibadan in 1994 while undergoing our Masters programme in the Department of Political Science of the university.

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Professor Wale Adebanwi

Adebanwi was sworn to life of an academic right from this period. Oscillating from working as a reporter with the Punch and later, the Tribune to studying for his Masters, he exhibited an abiding fellowship with the academia that never stopped amazing his friends. In our class, not only did he lead everyone with a 70+ average score, he completed his PhD a few years later and started working as a lecturer in the department. The story of how the system frustrated Adebanwi out of the University of Ibadan is a story for another day. He thereafter went to the University of Cambridge where he was a Bill and Milinda Gates scholar. He thereafter taught as Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, USA until 2017 when he moved over to Cambridge. I remember visiting him in Davis in 1995 and dumbfounded that it was that long a journey he always made to Nigeria to intervene in issues Nigeriana, at the snap of a finger. “Wale, it is not a curse but you will never see me in this ilu orun (a town as far as heaven) again o!” I told him as he saw me off to the Sacramento airport, enroute Maryland.

Adebanwi is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa and has, since 2016, been a co-editor of AFRICA: Journal of the International African Instituteand was co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies until 2017. 
 
The academy part of Adebanwi is a tiny miniscule of his person. He is an embodiment of the Omoluabi which the Yoruba say is the zenith of character. Wale has sown seeds in the lives of hundreds of people which have germinated to become baobab trees. I remember in our POS 800-and-something Marxism class in 1995, taught by then Dr., now Professor Adigun Agbaje. I had presented a paper to the class, moderated by Agbaje himself and I performed woefully. “The candidate apparently does not have an understanding of the subject and he should represent,” Agbaje had pronounced matter-of-factly. Downcast, I walked home with Adebanwi that evening, feeling miserable and spent. Adebanwi prodded me up emotionally, brought me books the second day that lifted up my morale. He was one of those who reversed the departure of my self-essence and esteem. A few months later, he was to recommend me to his friends in the Tribune where my journalism career began.

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These are the people that Nigeria should consistently court but unfortunately, the politicians, the looters of her patrimony and their allies have more worth than these global ambassadors of this pummeled country in the hue of Adebanwi. Here is wishing my aburo and friend a happy golden anniversary.

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