Saluting Bene Madunagu at 70 – Part 2

It was in Lagos, on Christmas Day, 1975 that a number of young Nigerians, including Bene and myself, resolved and committed themselves to the revolutionary transformation of Nigeria on the platform of workers’ power, popular democracy and socialism. Through monumental sacrifices and exemplary acts of courage and commitment – the results of which are nearly always credited to other people and entities, on account of the covert nature of most of our activities – Bene has remained faithful to the 41-year Lagos landmark resolution and its 40-year landmark re-endorsement in Calabar.

When Bene turned 60 on March 21, 2007, Comrade Professor Biodun Jeyifo (BJ) wrote a tribute, For Bene Madunagu at 60, which was published in The Guardian of April 11, 2007. In the second paragraph of the long tribute, BJ said: “If it is undeniable that part of the identity of Bene Madunagu derives from the fact that she is the wife of Eddie Madunagu, it is equally true that Bene stands so completely in her own shoes and in so many diverse areas of life that one can equally say that Eddie Madunagu derives part of his identity from being the husband of Bene. I shall come back to this point but first, a few significant details of the life of this most selfless, most dedicated and life-affirming of the activists of my generation ….”

This profound insight can be extended, elaborated and substantiated in several directions. But this cannot be done in full here and now. I shall therefore limit myself to the following statement: In any of at least seven subperiods of the 30-year period (1975-2005), Bene and I would have been physically destroyed or politically liquidated – with the Nigerian Left suffering serious setbacks – if Bene had not possessed the attributes highlighted by BJ, if she had not been standing “completely in her own shoes”, or if she had just been sharing my shoes as wife.

The subperiods are: January-May 1975 when I was detained in the dying months of General Gowon’s regime; June 1976-May 1977 during the “extraordinary” revolutionary engagement at Ode-Omu in present Osun State; April – June 1978 during the national Ali-Must-Go students’ protests; April 1981 when Comrade Ingrid Essien-Obot, our German-born comrade and Secretary of ASUU-UCB, was murdered in her residence at the University of Calabar Staff Quarters; 1988-1990 during Bene’s third-term tenure as Chair of the University of Calabar Chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) when the union was confronting the dictatorship of General Ibrahim Babangida; 1997-1998 when, for unknown reasons, General Abacha’s security apparatuses turned their attention on our adolescents’ conscientisation and empowerment programmes in Calabar; and about mid–2006, during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, when the silent state harassment of 1997/98 returned.

In a number of the crises that characterised each of these seven subperiods Bene confronted and corrected my tactical errors, bore the sacrifices dictated by them and took brilliant, courageous and heroic steps that ultimately led to the realisation of our original strategic objectives.

One final point here: I need to state very clearly – for history – that the “crises” to which I refer in the preceding paragraph were quite serious, very serious. The only hint I can permit myself to provide here and now about the seriousness is that at a certain period of our history, in the second half of the 1970s, our movement was “highly mobilised.” Correcting tactical errors in a “highly mobilised” revolutionary movement, as Bene did – not once, not twice – was, to put it mildly, heroic. At certain points of our engagements our organisations came close to being liquidated or at least beheaded. The closest we came to this tragedy was during the national Ali-Must-Go students’ protests of April-August 1978. Bene saved the day – although I was in command!

Organisations and institutions to which Bene belongs or belonged and on whose platforms she has been, or was active-up to leadership levels – may be classified broadly into five: academic, professional, popular-democratic, sociopolitical and revolutionary. The first four are in the public domain and may therefore be skipped. Formations in the fifth category, the revolutionary, may be listed, in part: Nigerian Youth Action Committee (NYAC) (1973); Society for Progress (SOPRO) (1974); Anti-Poverty Movement of Nigeria (APMON) (1974); Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Nigeria (REMLON) (1976); Calabar Group of Socialists (CGS) (1977); Democratic Action Committee (DACOM) (1980); Movement for Peoples Democracy (MPD) (1977); Directorate for Literacy (DL) (1986); Socialist Revolutionary Vanguard (1989); Congress of Popular Democracy (CPD) (1998).

On attaining the age of 65 in 2012, Bene Madunagu – this bundle of humour, warmth and kindness – retired formally from the University of Calabar. That same year she delivered her Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Botany on Plant-Human Relationships. The following year, in 2013, she also retired formally from all executive positions – including that of Chair of Executive Board – in Girls’ Power Initiative (GPI) Nigeria, a women’s empowerment organisation she co-founded in 1993.

Let me end this tribute by isolating and underlining three integral attributes of the relationship between Bene and myself: compatibility, complementarity and love. The first two attributes are necessary – and, indeed, irreducible – for a cell in a revolutionary movement. But a revolutionary cell which, in addition, is endowed with internal love has an added advantage of high degree. Bene and I have constituted such a cell in the Nigerian Left since 1975.

The contents of this revolutionary union of Bene and myself have included the following: All major decisions in our organisational, political, professional, occupational, financial and family lives – including relationships with our respective larger families – since 1975 have been taken together and executed together – sometimes with one person above ground and the other underground. Sometimes we creatively follow the revolutionary dictum: “March separately, but strike together – agreeing on where to strike and when to strike”.

Beyond this, everything that can be called property (which, excluding literary acquisition, is very limited) is collectively owned in a revolutionary sense (that is, with individual authority to use or deploy) – but with the formal and legal ownership residing with Bene. Division of labour, where this is inevitable, also follows the revolutionary principles that are continually moderated by our 1978 decision to have one joint foot in the existing bourgeois society, and the other outside of it – a duality that, under our subsisting historical circumstances, is inevitable in the life of a genuine revolutionary, individual or cell.
Concluded
Madunagu wrote from Calabar.