This October, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin, will host a major academic conference to celebrate the life and times of one of the most renowned and remarkable scholars of the Yoruba, Nigeria, and African history, the late Professor Joseph Adebowale Atanda aka J. A. Atanda. The conference is appropriately titled, “The Yoruba Nation and Politics Since the Nineteenth Century: A Conference in Honor of Professor J.A. Atanda”. This conference includes wide-ranging activities that examine the life and contributions of this great scholar to our academic and historical landscape, academic presentations that build on his scholarship, and fora where scholars will examine contemporary Yoruba history and culture in present-day Nigeria to make informed remarks on the evolution of our social and cultural history.
At the conference at Ago Iwoye, scholars from various parts of the world will present more than 200 papers. I am most proud of my involvement in these efforts because the late Professor Atanda, both while alive and after his transition, has remained one of the brightest beacons of intellectualism in Nigerian history till today. He was an erudite scholar, an historian, an academic, a public servant, a teacher, an administrator, a writer, a Christian, a proud Yoruba and an African. Professor Atanda embodies a perfect example of a life fully lived in contribution to the society.
Professor Atanda, a son of Eruwa, Oyo State, was born in 1932. He received his first degree in History from the University of London in 1964 and his Ph.D. in the same discipline in 1967. He taught at the University of Ibadan from 1967, building up a profile as a painstaking researcher of Yoruba/African history of note. While Professor Atanda developed a huge body of work on Yoruba history, he also studied the history of the Buganda people in East Africa and the Transatlantic history of Africans. He researched the history of enslaved Africans who survived the middle passage to end up in the West Indies and the Americas. Taken together, his research is a profound contribution to Black/African and Africana histories.
At the conference, we would be presenting a collection of Professor Atanda’s works to the public. This book, titled The Collected Works of J. A. Atanda, represents over three decades of scholarship and intensive research into African history. Never has there been such a similar effort to synchronise his voluminous works under one umbrella like this and we are quite optimistic that this book will ensure that Professor Atanda’s works will not be lost due to a lack of coordinated archival efforts. The Collected Works of J. A. Atanda covers the broad spectrum of his research on the Yoruba, the Old and New Oyo Empire, colonial Nigeria and Buganda, and reflective essays on a newly independent Nigeria. The book is divided into five parts, and each section, definitively representing the contributions of Professor Atanda to Nigeria and African scholarship in general, fortifies our memory of the meaning of that scholarship. An extensive introduction in excess of 60 pages puts the book in context.
The works in the collection include original and compelling research into the origins of the Yoruba people; the Old and New Oyo Empire; and Indirect Rule and Change in Western Nigeria in the 19th and 20th century; the collapse of the Yoruba Empire; an analysis of the earliest anthropological exploration among the Yoruba; tensions and resistance in the colonial empire and the effects of indirect rule; Yoruba royalty and their changing status under colonial rule and in postcolonial governance; Western Nigerian politics; and the ideological underpinnings that structured the direction of Yoruba contributions to Nigerian political history from independence to the present. Professor Atanda also wrote on Yoruba religious history and arguments for, against, and about secularism in Nigeria; Yoruba mythology in governance and administrative systems; Yoruba intellectualism; and the perennial challenges of postcolonial governance and administration in Nigeria and Africa. Also included are his works on Buganda, including his critical analysis of the people’s colonial history; resistance and challenge to colonial rule; and the future of African people after colonialism.
Professor J. A. Atanda was a most remarkable teacher who inaugurated himself into the hearts of scores of students he taught and mentored throughout his career in Nigeria, Uganda, and the USA. He joined the Nigerian academia at the time when the nation had only recently become independent with the high expectation of raising a future generation of scholars who would study both the history and the place of Africa in the world. At the University of Ibadan, Professor Atanda taught African History, Yorùbá History and Culture, the History of West Africa, and the History of West African Peoples in the Diaspora, among other subjects. His students remember him with utmost fondness, and some of whom will be gathered in Ago Iwoye to celebrate the life and times of their great teacher. Professor Atanda’s students, the ones he taught directly and even indirectly, have testified to his immense contributions to their own scholarly and intellectual trajectories.
Indeed, his contributions to academia transcended his research and teaching, as he also served in various local and international organisations in the interest of advancing the frontiers of African history. Those organisations included the Historical Society of Nigeria, Historical Committee of the Baptist World Alliance, Heritage Commission of the Baptist World Alliance, Presidential Panel on Nigerian History Since Independence, Belize Historical Society, American Historical Association, and African Studies Association. He was a member of the committees which included representing the Faculty of Arts on the Board of Studies and Faculty Board of Education; he was also a Congregation Member of the University Senate; a member of the Senate Committee for The Institute of African Studies; Assistant Warden of Azikwe Hall and Ag. Head, Department of History; amongst other acts of service.
Professor Atanda intertwined the gown with the town, bringing his scholarly culture to bear in public administration. He was a commissioner in the old Western Region and, later, Oyo State, holding several portfolios. He held principal positions in social, religious, and political capacities.
In his lifetime, Professor Atanda received a number of awards of merit and excellence. This included the Federal Government of Nigeria Postgraduate Scholarship for his doctoral degree; Irving and Bonnar Graduate Prize in History, in the University of Ibadan for his academic distinction; the Rockefeller Foundation Travel Grant as Visiting Lecturer at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; and another Rockefeller Foundation Grant to serve on an exchange programme at the University of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. in the 1969/70 academic year. He held the Honorary Life membership of Frank London Brown Historical Association, Chicago U.S.A. He delivered a number of lectures in various venues and universities all over the world. As a devout Christian, Professor J. A. Atanda dedicated himself to work in the Lord’s vineyard and in 1990, he was made an honorary deacon at the Oke-Ado Baptist Church, Ibadan.
It is impossible to fully capture the depth of the immense labour of love and dedication that drove Professor Atanda’s research, writings, teaching, community service, and intellectualism. Up till his death in 1996, Professor Atanda continued to write extensively on modern Nigeria, making recommendations on public and political affairs, de-colonisation, self-reliance, nation building, and the prospect of building a united Nigeria where everyone would be a citizen. He was committed to the cause of African history and its future, and he spared no effort to ensure that his career in and out of the university was mobilised towards ensuring this passion.
“Òrò pò ń’nú ìwée kóbò” (So much to see, read and learn in a penny-worth of documents), as the Yoruba often say. We will gather at Olabisi Onabanjo University from October 9 to 11, 2017 to celebrate this scholar whose life, though fully lived in service to humanity, cannot be fully told because words alone are insufficient to entirely demonstrate his great contributions to the Yoruba people, Nigeria, and the descendants of Africa everywhere they are all over the world.
If awards and accolades were the hallmarks of success in life, then, Professor Joseph Adebowale Atanda has already secured a place of honuor in the pantheon of our ancestors. “He sure earned his pay,” as the secular would enunciate. Yet, this was a complete gentleman to the core, a father and grandfather to successful offsprings, a committed husband, a friend to many. “A good teacher makes learning a thing of joy,” as the wise king has taught us in Proverbs 15:2; it is no wonder, then, that Professor Atanda lives forever in the hearts of students and mentees, in his works, and everywhere his intellectual footsteps have touched in different parts of the world. If we could just borrow a final word from the final line dedicated to the Biblical “Virtuous Woman,” we would not be remiss to say, “Give him of the fruit of his hands; and let his own works praise him at the gate.” And so, as we stand at this sacred gate of history, may Atanda’s spirit open the door, and grant his children entrance into his saintly heart so that through this conference, we may know and share with the world a little fragment of the seed of knowledge Baba Atanda had planted at home, and which has germinated across the pan-African world, the impact of which will become another “Ìtàn,” the loaded Yoruba word, implying “a spreading of knowledge, the impact of which there is no end.”
Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor, The University of Texas at Austin.
Credit: Toyin Falola