Nigeria, Jan. 8 -- Happy 80th Birthday to Emeritus Professor Biodun Jeyifo (BJ).

Professor BJ is a leading light in the study and world of literature in English. The theme of his birthday symposium, as well as the quality of the speakers addressing the subject, was a clear testimony to his enduring intellectual influence and scholarly legacy.

Colonialism and colonisation are, by their very nature, inherently violent - the former as a process and the latter as its consequence. Brutal conquest was often followed by what was described as "pacification."

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the Berlin Conference of 1884, African responses to colonialism can broadly be categorised into three forms: active resistan...