One of the most celebrated journalists and columnists of our age, Sad Sam (whose naturally and officially recorded birth-name is Samson Oruru Amuka-Pemu) celebrated his 90th birthday on June 13 this year – that is, two weeks, two Fridays ago.

Actually, he didn’t celebrate his 90th day; it was celebrated for him by his more than very numerous mentees, friends and colleagues across different generations, professions, walks of life, and ethnic nationalities. Perhaps I am wrong and not wrong at the same. Of course, I stand, sit and wait with alacrity – to be corrected – if the verdict is given by a jury that I am wrong. But does it matter?

What matters to me as a Safarian, like Uncle Sam, Uncle Sad Sam, who immersed himself in the orbit of Sapele of the famed Collegians no true Safarian can and will ever forget, is that I applauded what I will hereby call the brilliant event of Uncle Sam’s classic ninetieth birthday.

I was not where what happened, happened. But I felt (and still feel) with a thrill of pride that the happiness Uncle Sam enjoyed and radiated on June 13 was happiness that was happiness. All voices that he heard at his glorious event honoured him without flattery, exaggeration and emphasis – they all contained perceptions of remarkable truth.

As a Sapele Boma Boy, not of Uncle Sam’s generation, as an Itsekiri urchin who knew and heard of tales about him as our Big Brother of worth and mark, my Sapele generation of different ethnic nationalities and of Itsekiris particularly aspired to follow his footsteps (and those of other personages who appeared in our youngish imaginations as role models) in our growing up years.

Our generation of Sapele urchins – or better, of Sapele Boma Boys, Itsekiris and non-Itsekiris, will always allow his posterity to appear and remain in our collective thought. Our generation which I represent in this column today by writing this piece will always applaud and salute him as a Sapele classic. His 90th birthday has underscored this in our lofty thought that has a lofty place for him. 

Now let’s go straight to my question which is the subject, the modest title and subject of this essay. Uncle Sam, as a human being, is weather-less. He is a human being whose glowing, transparent, humility induces him to have friends from everywhere – which helps to define him as a personage of all seasons and of everyone of different classes who truly encounters him and who, to boot, he truly encounters – the tributes set down in his honour make this greatly plain.

He is a classic of humanity which his writings illustrated and which made him famous as a columnist (and editor). (Of course, he is still famous as a publisher – which Vanguard, his newspaper, and the other one, The Punch, which he co-founded, as two of our newspapers of the highest class, generously show). However, it is in his columns in ‘his’ newspapers of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies that he exhibited his genius, wit, talent, taste, and class – as a classic.

I read his numerous old writings especially in the Daily Times and Sunday Times in my under-graduate years at the Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru, Zaria. The serial section of the Kashim Ibrahim Library (KIL) ceaselessly  welcomed me any time I went there as a guest to kill myself without dying because I dared not to die if I must continue to read Sad Sam (and Peter Pan and the others…..). 

Then Sad Sam’s virtue, his morality and his style especially enchanted my attention. As the gleaner is doing this essay his thought still dwells on Uncle Sad Sam’s style. He is ruminating upon Sad Sam’s style and insisting on “Discourse on Sad Sam’s Style.” The acute gleaner is purposely insisting on Sad Sam’s oneness of plan, arrangement and execution which he considers as the great stamp of really classic work which the majestic columnist’s masterpieces induced long ago in the radical gleaner’s critical imagination.

But where are Sad Sam’s masterpieces now?  Where are his classics now? Where can the circumspect gleaner luckily and urgently find them now?

But what is a classic? Or who is a classic? This is an exquisite question, a delicate one which diverse scholars, philosophers, researchers and artists will try to answer by attempting to proffer different remedies suitable for their inclinations, passions and bents.

I won’t go the whole hog here. I will simply try to enliven my readers with these two perspectives drawn from a European (French) literary critic, Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve (1804-1869): “A classic, according to the usual definition, is an author of past times, already hallowed by general admiration, who is an authority in his own style.”

Furthermore, “A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, who has really augmented its treasure, who has made it take one more step forward, who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or has once more seized hold of some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known  and explored; who has rendered his thought, his observation,  or his discovery under no matter what form, but broad and large, refined, sensible, sane, and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in style which is new without neologisms, new and ancient, easily contemporaneous with every age.” 

There are other definitions to be cited but the gleaner considers these cited ones adequate enough for the purpose he is allotting to Sad Sam whose writings, whose masterpieces, ran for years in his columns, but which this generation and future ones will not be lucky to glean and study – unless they are collected, compiled and reproduced in volumes.  

Rightly or wrongly, I consider that their publications perhaps shall mark the pinnacle of his achievements. The Editorial Department of Vanguard Newspapers, Nigerian Guild of Editors and other groups, including his friends, should give consideration to this request. Students of our tertiary institutions in particular – up to graduate levels – need to read, study and do researches on the works of this very accomplished columnist and other ones of his generation and time who will fall into my classification of “Supreme and Great Tradition of Nigerian Creative Journalism and Immaculate Column Writing.”

Our modern time reflects our civilisation of semi-barbarousness which our study of Sad Sam’s works may richly contradict in their essentialism in the highest degree – if read side by side those of our current ones without inhibitions.

Our new generation of readers and students as well as their teachers, lecturers and professors need to gaze at Sad Sam’s and his contemporaries’ engravings. As old masters there will be much to learn from them.

We will still find the masterpieces richly rewarding and perpetually entertaining. Our Departments of English, Literary Studies, Linguistics, Journalism, Communication and Media Studies, History, Political Science, Philosophy and Multi-Disciplinary Studies, and other pertinent ones need to give thought to the idea of designing and re-designing their curriculums accordingly to accommodate our columnists of the supreme, great tradition.

There is still much to say but let me with keen pleasure and delightful delight anchor here. I must, however, finally, state that Sad Sam’s necessitarianism, which I found alluring in his classics, needs to be more than thoroughly investigated by philosophical scholars. Where are the classics?

Happy 90th classic birthday, Uncle Sam – on behalf of all us Sapele denizens especially of my generation. Your honour and recognitions are ours as well.  

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.