It was a long astonishing day – a most astonishing day that galloped to a long astonishing week and beyond astonishing timeless time. His assembled friends and guests were assembled friends and guests of holy joy of holy Sunday and of astonishingly holy every day that it all lasted. And he was amazingly dazed with pleasure as his heart danced with pleasure and as his mind was full of sweet wine. Without mincing words, he was intoxicated with marvels that were marvels.
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Across the globe, yes, across the globe, the celebrant who was keen on leaving his vicinity of forty-three plus years silently, quietly, silently and silently and quietly and quietly, without a bang got diversely diverse lines upon lines of humankind, ripe for timelessness. He couldn’t leave with a whimper that was less than a whimper as he earnestly wished. His group of old-folk didn’t let him however hard he tried. The mystery of genuine friendship that was deliberately not expressed until it was time to express it with every expression of sincerity was so powerful that it had mastery over him.

The picture he drew of those instances and sights that persuaded him with full appreciation of everyone’s repertory of positively surreptitious words and lines exorcising the misshapen anywhere it lay glittered in him and nourished his profoundest sensibility and comprehension. And how the breeze of delight and arms of nectar got round his full, hefty frame made up the force and vehemence of a day and time of the splendour of eternity!

In the banquet hall of great words, splendidly splendid phrases and all those ripe figures of speech which thrilled all and which were eaten and consumed as the meat and fish and drink and drink that they intermingled with catalogues of warm, multicoloured airs of conviviality, he remembered and remembered – his constituents whom he was leaving behind in a time and a season of their long tenure in adversity he was now swimming out of, although with regret for those left behind. He remembered those fleeing this land and who fled this land – their country your country my country our country in adversity.

He remembered the poor who are poorer than the poor in this land, this dear land of their fathers and of their mothers. But the land is really dear no more to those whose purses are now purse-less, to those whose purses give them no livelihood any longer on account of their country’s Satanic adversity. In his intoxicated intoxication he remembered the poorest poor and the hopeless masses whose sorrow is the classic dignity in a country, their country, your country, my country, our country of serpents everywhere as kings and queens of virtue-less virtue.
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He felt emotions that caused him tears that welled inside him. He controlled the world of his mind. He conjured up for himself and all present a heavy cloud that hid what he wanted hidden. He wanted to sound to the hearing of his brought ups Leonardo da Vinci’s immortal line: “Poor is the pupil who cannot surpass his master.” But he could not. Everything happened fleetingly in the fleetingness of his poetic time that pictured to him a peculiar reality depicting timeless weariness that is no longer a myth in the Nigerian university system. How will our universities fare now? Where are the ships for them to sail in, the ships for them to swim in splendour, un-foreign to academic and scholastic fragrance? Will our new President and commander-in-chief, or members of our tenth Assembly redeem our universities? Should this be their burden now? And why should this not be their burden now and again and again? Let the endless paradox of our universities endlessly changing in directions of unchanging harmful harmonies keep on experiencing what they are experiencing. Their apparent abandonment will with patient patience bring progressive variation in feeling that will astound and amaze their tormentors. This is a fact. As Jean-Paul Sartre informed us long ago: “Facts repeat themselves.” This country attests to this day by day.

He descended from his height of reverie. He could hear every word, every line, Professors Olu Obafemi, Ibrahim Bello Kano, Ademola Da Sylva, J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, Akachi Ezigbo, Mabel Evwierhoma, Razinatu Mohammed, Owojecho Omoha and the others streamed to him from their distant abodes. They intoxicated him and helped to adjust his mental preparation for the moment which hadn’t much and many seconds to prepare him as his phone beeped and beeped. From Professor Ibrahim Bello Kano in his “Amicus Brief or Salt-giving for Tony Afejuku on his Retirement from the Citadel”:

“I wish you a fruitful retirement from formal academic employment. Good you didn’t shed that tear because you don’t shed a tear for something you knew would happen. Retirement isn’t a loss in all and every sense(s) of that word. It’s a time for striking out into the unknown, for good. I have been reading a book lately on disengagement from the many routines of life, of which retirement is one. Yet you are not retiring from the simple pleasures of life, from friendships, or from savouring a nice meal or an evanescent drink. Books for retiring academics recommend travel, more writing, more reading, and more fun, especially in the sanctified domestic sphere. Retirement gives you time for chatty encounters, uplifting gossip, window shopping, and gazing at world cultural and geographical maps. Indeed you are not “tired yet” but more curious, more speculative and more playful. Yeah, now is the time for more play and greater attention to playfulness as an end in itself. The great German Romantic, Shiller wrote, in a celebrated phrase, that men and women are human only when they play.
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To play is to laugh off petty injury, petty malice, and petty innuendo. As Lao Tsu says, as soon as you think a thought, laugh at it. That precisely is what retirement gives, yields, and bestows: the freedom from formal routines, salary brutalization, the quiet equanimity of “owing yourself” after a brutalizing half century of timeless deadlines and enforced duties. So Professor TA, our and my great interlocutor, our semantic philosopher of figural figurating figuration-pragma, I wish you a great retirement from the Viper’s Nest, from brutish dogmatism of insect-level proportions. May the great Fateful Moloch of Nice offerings deal you a kind, soothing, evanescent

“Hand.” Now your Column will be sweeter, more deliberate, and more philosophical as you cast away and off the incubus of the Eight-Month Malice now in the backwater space of none. So, Professor TA, you will be missed by your students but embraced by your Friday-day Nostalgic, Insomniac Readers. You have been in words and deeds, an exemplification of this great “FIAT MIHI SECUNDUM VERBUM TUUM” (You know what I mean and symbolise by that…). Now, Professor, you must start living with the Impossible, with Derridean-Lacanian real Real. Cheers, Fabulous One who is more fabulous and greater than any fabulous one who is lesser than fabulous and really can’t be fabulous.”

Who says that the columnist should not be intoxicated? This excellent Nietzschean and outstanding scholar of Nietzsche and the deconstructionists has added further colour to the columnist’s airs and enthusiasms since the announcement that seizes everyone’s attention drives us to the moon of intoxication. The theoretical-theorist-and-practical-critic-and-practicalist has offered us theoretical and practical words of joyful joy and of reality that is not impossible, and “impossicant”, to borrow Da Sylva’s term. The deconstructionist defies deconstruction in our hearts today. His labour is the heavy labour of love that is love that can turn anything negatively heavy into something dialectically light and splendid and splendid and splendid and splendidly splendid. He and the listed gems of professors, who shall have their momentous moments in a Friday that is not distant or in Fridays not far off, are gifts from the gods to their country your country my country our country.
Afejuku can be reached via +2348055213059.
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