What we are doing today is a momentous event in the history of the Nigerian Left. Although it is the launching, not of a richly endowed foundation, not the opening of a magnificent physical edifice of the Left but a (mere) online website, it is still an occasion of great historical significance. This is because this online website will be a window on what will be the only Socialist Library and Archives on the African continent. As an online window, the website will open out to both an online library and archive that is accessible to the whole world and a physical library and archival documents and other materials on the ground in Calabar. The epochal nature of this project can be gauged by the fact that while we know of socialist booksellers, socialist book distributors, socialist publishers and even socialist institutions for the production and training of cadres, a socialist library and archive is a very uncommon thing.

As a matter of fact, only in post-revolutionary societies do we find socialist libraries that double as depositories for archives. How did this come into being, what will it add to resources available to the Nigerian Left and what new relationships between the past, the present and the future will it entail – these are the issues that I hope to address in this talk. But first, a word or two on the ground on which I stand as I give the talk.

I speak today as the Chair of the Board of Advisers and of the Board of Trustees of SOLAR, not as “Professor Emeritus” as I was introduced. I speak also as a former President of ASUU, indeed the foundation president of ASUU. I speak also as a former member of the Central Working Committee (CWC) of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) representing ASUU in that body. And I speak as a former member of the Socialist Forum Collective (SFC) of Ife that, for more than two decades, met unfailingly every week to dispassionately review what we had done right or wrong and where we were going. I also speak as one of a small band of revolutionaries that formed a commune at Ode-Omu whose purpose was ultimately to foment a mass uprising of peasants and workers in many parts of the country. Finally, I speak as a leftist newspaper columnist who wrote continuously for major mainstream Nigerian newspapers – Sketch, Guardian, The Nation – for more than half a century. I mention these facts and points of reference because it was within the contexts they provided that I met the outstanding leftist revolutionaries, activists and thinkers of my generation and the generation that came after mine. As will become evident in the course of my talk, this is the main backdrop of the talk. It is also the central experience of my life. I do not of course under-value the scholarly and professional work indicated in my emeritus professorship; indeed, I wish to place on the record here that I am immensely proud of all the younger scholars that I joined others to produce at Ibadan, Ife, Cornell and Harvard, nearly all of them very prominent academics and intellectuals in their own right. But as all of them know, the life I have had in the Nigerian Left has been at the center of my existence in the last half-century. And it is from this fount of invaluable experience that I draw the substance of this talk.

SOLAR’s online and on-the-ground library and archives both have their antecedents in two projects of Edwin and Bene Madunagu that are almost without duplication or comparison in the Nigerian Left: a socialist free public library that opened in 1995 and closed partially in 2018; and a passionate and dedicated archiving of the lives, struggles (and quarrels) of individuals and generations of Nigerian revolutionaries and activists from the colonial period to more or less the present period. Edwin Madunagu was//is of course not the only one in the Nigerian Left who kept an archive, but he was the most dedicated and what he colllected is numerically vastly superior to what anyone else collected. He was/is not like a collector of stamps or heritage coins; as the greatest historian and archivist of our generation, he collected documents and memorabilia on the lives and times and struggles of generations of the Nigerian Left assiduously.

When it became widely known that he was “collecting”, many sought him out to donate to his ever-expanding trove. In one case – that of Pa Curtis Joseph – the tranche of papers and memorabilia that he gave to Eddie was more than a thousand pages! The free public library also has all the marks of an uncommon revolutionary project about it because, at precisely the time when government-funded public libraries were folding up in Nigeria, Eddie and Bene were running a free library in Calabar where working people and young people could come in, read newspapers, check out books, and for a small, token fee have photocopies of newspapers and documents made for them. Is there a connection between the free socialist public library and the vast archival collection of the Madunagus? Yes, there is and it is this: of all the comrades that I encountered in the Nigerian Left, none appreciated the significance of documentation and information as intellectual and cultural aspects of our struggles as did Comrade Eddie, especially with regard to relations between past and present generations of the Nigerian Left.

I recall here the countless number of conversations between Eddie and myself that were sparked by some particular items in the archives, just as the free public library dedicated specifically to socialism made Calabar one of my favorite cities in Nigeria, quite apart from its own great political and historical significance in the making of Nigeria. It is these two currents, the free public library and Eddie’s vast archival collection, that are coming together in the creation of SOLAR.

Digitalization of the archives has started in earnest, thanks to assistance from one of our collaborators, IFRA. Meanwhile, thanks to another collaborator, GPI, the books, documents and other items of the archives have been moved into a building complex that is more commodious than the physical space they had occupied in the last three decades. Indeed, we have been given a parcel of land by a senior comrade and a member of the BoT. In the fullness of time, we shall erect the permanent home of SOLAR on this piece of land. Our hope is that it will be a testament to SOLAR’s vitality to the posterity of the Nigerian Left.

It is all very promising and exciting, the movement of part of the library to the GPI building complex and the digitalization of the lives and works of generations of the Nigerian Left. Some comrades whose lives and works are being digitalized have an abundance of written works by themselves or about them. Others do not have such rich written documentation. I think here of Comrade Tony Engurube, of cherished and imperishable memory. Fortunately, he is not forgotten and there is a surfeit of oral and written accounts and testimonies produced by other comrades about his life, his exceptional revolutionary passion and activism. Like all archival collections, in this one the dominance of written sources will be alleviated by recourse to oral materials. 

The digitalized archives of SOLAR will be, first and foremost, about individuals. But ultimately, it is in generational cohorts or groupings that the archives will achieve their greatest impact. This is because as crucial as class, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, locality and individuality are as vectors of social identity and struggles for justice and equality, generations are the wheels around which revolutionary outbreaks and social transformation turn. As Fanon famously said, “out of relative obscurity, every generation must discover its mission and either fulfill or betray it”. Generation is not destiny, but it is the greatest bearer of possibility when it comes to the need and the will for revolutionary change.
To be continued tomorrow
Jeyifo is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.