Nigeria, Jan. 14 -- It is both an honour and a source of genuine intellectual pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker at this special convocation marking the 80th birthday of Biodun Jeyifo - a scholar whose life and work have shaped critical thought in Nigeria, Africa, and the wider world. In celebrating Professor Jeyifo, we celebrate not only an individual, but a tradition: the Ife-Ibadan school of critical humanism, rigorous Marxian analysis, and fearless engagement with literature as a site of political struggle.

Those of us formed within that tradition know what it means to speak of BJ - as teacher, mentor, comrade, and exemplar. From Ife to Ibadan, and later across the Atlantic, his classrooms were never merely pedagogical spaces;...