Literally, memoirs perform retrospection surgery on the memory. They do this by removing shards that encumber and make remembrance difficult.

Intellectual memoirs do even more. As academic works spiced with human existential narratives, they offer one for the price of two. While the reader walks through the lane of history with the author to recreate the past, the reader is also afforded the benefit of a profound discourse which, together, forms a corpus of memorable intellectual narrativization.

Tunji Olaopa’s The Unending Quest For Reform: An Intellectual Memoir ranks hugely in this category. A 249-page work, it is a journey, not only into the very didactic world of the author’s intellectual life, it also provides invaluable insight into what he calls the systemic structures and operational dynamics of the Nigerian civil service.

For anyone in search of titivating titles that surreptitiously lure the reader into the body of a work, The Unending Quest is at first uninspiring and uninviting. The title heralds a prospective travel into the world of staid academy and philosophy. However, a curious fascination lies ahead upon a cursory reading of the book. Then, the reader immediately transposes into another world as they encounter a very insightful, well written narrative of the life of a man whose existential itinerary is woven, like a tapestry, round the quest for knowledge and scholarship.

Foregrounded by impressionable words from two renowned scholars, one in cassock and the other in the shawls of the academy – Matthew Hassan Kukah and Eghosa Osaghae – the kick-off of The Unending Quest begins on a fluid plane. Like all Forewords, both scholars’ interventions dissect the book by way of summaries, whetting the appetite of the reader about an eventful historical progression. They did not shy away from alerting the reader that the totality of the memoir is woven round issues Nigeriana but such that remarkably enfold themselves into and supervene in the life trajectory of the author.

Aside the Forewords, the book is broken into eighteen chapters which narrate the life journey of the author and his very luxurious thoughts about Nigeria and her development. The first thing the reader will find out about the book is that it is very lean on the author’s personal life but very robust on the existential dilemma of Nigeria. Before embarking on this journey, the author offered an explanatory note on why Olaopa embarked on writing a memoir at this point of his life. As he narrated, two schools of thoughts explain the maturation of a memoir.

The first, heeding the call of the philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, frowns at the vanity of self-portraiture that underscores writing of a biography. The other, whose justification was given by the author himself, unfolds itself into the quest to write a memoir. This, he said, is the realization of the sociality of man as “being in a community.” The explainer for this is that, man whose life project is concerned with “how the life projects of others within the political community can become the platform for making sense and meaning out of existence” has great motivation in explaining how he got to where he is. Memoir is one of those routes.

As the book blows own whistle for the commencement of a journey with Olaopa, the author unapologetically flaunts his Aawe, Oyo State ancestry and the life-long impact that the rusty and sleepy town of Okeho, also in the same state, played in his life journey and foundation. The reader will meet this flaunt almost at every intersection of the book, almost to a repetitive level, with the result of an underscore of a life structure moulded on core traditional African values.

The book romanticises the flora and fauna of Aawe, its “ancestral founding and apocryphal imaginaries” as well as the picaresque beauty of Okeho’s landscape, which all find a maturation and encore in Ali Mazrui’s famous triple heritage of Africa thesis. For Olaopa, Aawe was a study in the dynamics of shared values, especially its capacity to “mediate and manage differences.” The author’s most profound takeaway from Aawe, it will seem, is its “stable crises of plural configurations” and “mosaic of multi-colour differences.” The icing on the cake that that this sleepy town provided for him lies in its dynamics of shared values and eventually, its ability to lend self as a community of loved ones.

The above theme was further adumbrated in Origins 11: Family Life where the book doubles down on the communal nature of the author’s upbringing, how “the moral eyes of everyone (were) on everyone.” However, in spite of how the author painted the marital amity and harmony witnessed in his father’s polygamous home, Olaopa still has a negative perception of polygamy which he feels was “not fair to the mental development of a child and the intergenerational handholding that a child requires to get a solid grasp of life and existence.” This negative reading of polygamy, for Olaopa, is due to its socio-cultural internal dynamics “that often go wrong and drag the child’s mental and psychological balance with it.” This, to him, is the most robust justification for Christian theological abidance with monogamy.

With another chapter entitled Christianity and the spiritual, Olaopa seems to have completed his narration of his personal memoir section of the autobiography, preparatory to discussing his intellectual journeys. In this chapter, like most philosophers who arrive at intersections of knowledge where they begin to query the existence of God, Olaopa was also drawn to that troublous juncture where three footpaths meet, apologies to Professor Ola Rotimi’s The gods are not to blame. Brought for reflection at this point was the dialogical relationship between the Yoruba spirituality and Christianity, the relationship between Christianity, mysticism and occultism, the author’s invariably tending seriously towards agnosticism and eventual return to the faith of his father. His son’s decision to walk the path of his father by staying at home on a Sunday woke Olaopa up from his solipsism. The reality rudely perched on his mind that rather than his personal experience being an exclusive feeling, it verged on the experience of others. With this reality slide in a subterranean manner into his thought, Olaopa there and then kindled afresh the dying fire of Christianity in him and set aglow the quickening of his return to the faith of his father.

To be continued tomorrow.