Friday, 29th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

Solid Da Sylva leaves UI with a bang

By Tony Afejuku
04 November 2022   |   2:34 am
At last Professor Ademola Omobewaji Da Sylva (or Dasylva) leaves UI. At last Professor Dasylva, the “cheer up” Professor of solid thoughts in literature and activism leaves UI, our great premier university where he lectured

University of Ibadan

At last Professor Ademola Omobewaji Da Sylva (or Dasylva) leaves UI. At last Professor Dasylva, the “cheer up” Professor of solid thoughts in literature and activism leaves UI, our great premier university where he lectured for many years as a solid authority in African Literature, Oral Poetics and Performance whose critical and theoretical enquiry in this and other related fields marked and underlined him as a top grade authority of ample African thought.

At last, he leaves the University of Ibadan on attaining the mandatory retirement age of seventy years. He leaves UI in high spirits. He leaves the Department of English where he distinguished himself as a thorough-bred teacher, supervisor, researcher and administrator, gentleman of gentlemen, model ASUU activist, philanthropist and dazzling humanist of humanists.

All the listed perspectives and more which reflect his solid personality came to the fore last Thursday, October 27, 2022, when his well above twenty PhD candidates who successfully passed through his crucible celebrated him.

What a memorable event that was a memorable event which was more than a memorable event! I was not a physical gracer of the event that the grateful students of yesteryears, many of whom are now professors, organized for their very accomplished titanic teacher of literary and humanistic splendour.

Due to the vagaries of our current circumstances in your country my country our country, I was not in the glittering gathering of eminent personages. But I was a Zoom participant from the beginning to the end, that is, from 11:00 AM to about 3:00 PM. The words of power that poured forth from the hearts of those who uttered them echoed in letters of fire.

I won’t claim that I know Da Sylva the Solid so well. But after hearing the words I heard from speaker after speaker, including the University of Ibadan ASUU Chairman and the reviewer of the scintillating book about him that the magnificent former students published in his genuine honour, I can claim that I now know Professor Da Sylva so well. Everybody and everything animated me.

Of course Da Sylva the Solid (and his queen of hearts in their splendid green attire) sparkled throughout the twinkling day. He carried himself very well as a philosopher who knows how to apprehend un-joyfulness, one who a painter of distinction will like to paint thoughtfully and majestically as a solid philosopher – which Da Sylva actually is as well. If only this was the lasting impression inscribed in me, and which I will always remember, it is enough for me.

Da Sylva and I first met and knew each other physically in 2010. Our meeting was decently awesome and awesomely decent. The National University Commission (NUC) brought us together in Abuja. Our assignment was at the Nigerian Turkish Nile University. We did it with unquestionable decorum, high integrity and patriotic feats. It was a time we always remember and have always remembered.

We learnt so much about one another. But this is about the solid scholar, singer, dancer and fabulous weaver of words and first-rate activist who toyed with the idealism of wanting to be a Romantic Catholic Priest in his much younger days.

The once animated lad who was baptized as Anthony-Michael in the endeavour to entrust himself permanently to the Vatican in Rome has since found another master in political thought and moral and political activism. Perhaps his finest hour in patriotic activism came many years ago when the rebel against the Romantic Church and faith publicly rejected the political commissionership in his then Ondo State during the military era. That singular act won him the admiration of the late super-iconic lawyer, Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, whose legal heights of fame and glory were legendary.

Da Sylva the Solid is a solidly principled person who always transforms his rigid patriotically active flaws into precious virtues and strengths. He is always contentedly contented, truthfully truthful, straight-forwardly straight-forward and bluntly blunt. Nothing can entice him from the narrow path of political and religious rectitude.

No blackmail, no hunger, no promise, and no temptation can make him value or long for political office of any kind outside his academic terrain. Gani Fawenhimi, on these counts, was glad to persuade him to be the national secretary of his National Conscience Party (NCP) in the then years of radical radicalism in your country my country our country.

When we met, he displayed some of these qualities of bounteous integrity. I was very moved by his loyalty to friendship and truthfulness – qualities that he has displayed time after time ever since. The man, the new septuagenarian, knows no guile. His constructive commentaries on my column several times in the not-distant past attest to what I am saying about this solid being of triumphant and victorious dreams.

He is unlike a number of campus politicians who bad-mouth, backbite and mouth-kill their colleagues noisily and un-noisily to climb to nowhere. Da Sylva never is a wearer of masks. His face is his face. His heart is his heart. Let me shock you to admire him further: His in-law not long ago was the executive governor of his State of Ekiti. Da Sylva never made one demand or request from him for favours of any kind. What a man! What a human being! What an uncommon Nigerian! What a jewel of jewels!

Professor Ademola Omobewaji Da Sylva leaves the University of Ibadan with a bang and as a man and as a Professor of destiny who – as I am writing this – has got a new prolonged appointment in a very thriving private university where he is going to get high finance that is high finance – unlike the peanuts that spurt forth torture to professors in public universities where quite mad men, fellows of thoughts of stone as minister-less ministers run the show. Let your magic of uniqueness and gestures and thoughts imbue you further with the spirit of aesthetic and moral sensibility to nurture new sets of students with a passionate desire from a new patriotic realm.

I believe that with time they will also author another book about you, another festschrift, along with Conversations with Professor Ademola Omobewaji Dasylva: Biography, Spirituality, Activism, Scholarship, which your former high-grade students released last Thursday. Oh Da Sylva! Oh one leader of human kindness and firmness and forthrightness in our clime! You left the University of Ibadan with a bang that is a bang!

Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Ebon horn!

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.

0 Comments