Professor Emeritus Olu Obafemi, FANA, FNAL, NNOM is a man and personage after my heart. He has always been since we knew ourselves centuries ago. In fact, I know him far better than many persons today who know him in different proportions. In both my quiet and un-quiet moments, I call him Olu Obafemi the Magnificent. He knows this quietly and un-quietly. Clearly, his trajectories have been trajectories that lead him to a magnificent world, his mango world of magnificence – of mango intelligence and mango vision – which his scholarship and arts wing to us who know that he is committed to producing something worthy of ceaseless fame.

What I am doing now, what I am penning now, should have been given attention to well above one month ago when the University of Ilorin – where our large-hearted humanist worked as a teacher, scholar, and writer and academic as well as a literary administrator for 44 years – decorated him as Professor Emeritus. As an expression of my solidarity with him on one of the excellent occasions of his well-earned crowns, I was prepared to establish in this column my truth about him. But I decided not to bring forth this being of writing until this auspicious festival time and season of open celebrations. My celebration, my open celebration, with him now is not a social one – and should not be seen or understood as a social one – for his conferment of the well-merited Professor Emeritus title on solid academic grounds and artistic perspectives is open to verifiable truth that explicates what we already know – and which we consistently must drag to light every now and then.

The truth I am talking about is the truth of our subject’s mango life which is a proof of his artistic vision and curiosity – curiosity on the part of his literary subject and on the part of the family or the bond of scholars and critics as well as on the part of writers and readers and admirers who read and study and dissect and admire him very admirably.

Of course, several scholars and critics and readers there are who admire his imagined vision. I am one of them. And I have openly now called his imagined vision mango vision which is derived from his special mango world of art. Another label I can give it – and which I am giving it – is the “Art of Drama and Poetry” or “Olu Obafemi’s Art of Drama and Poetry.” A reading of his Pestle on Mortar, a play he wrote in 1974 and his Melodies of Inclement Climes, a poetry collection he published in 2023, are, for instance, two works of art which are delightful spectacles of his mango art of humanity in which he addresses troubling issues and subjects in his country your country my country our country where so many things are twisted and are out of joint. The cited works are more than good in their tabled subjects and in the manner they are presented to reveal their edifying nature. They are morally and virtuously satisfying to our sensibilities and are appealing to the credulity of our generation.

In this wise, Mabel Evwierhoma’s insightful essay on Obafemi’s “national and humanistic concerns” illustrates perfectly the moral and virtuous well-being in a welcoming superabundant sort of way. I say this with scholarly and literary temerity. Evwierhoma, a scholar-artist herself, diligently focuses on Obafemi’s Pestle on Mortar to indicate and render the “biological source” and “female essence of fecundities” that are parts of the choices that naturally fructify his mango vision and world. The pleasantness of the serious subject he treats is a naturally natural toast to Obafemi in this trying season, I must admit, where many of our countrymen and countrywomen, our fellow compatriots, will have no mango to suck and bite!

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.