The  Departure  of  AbdulRasheed  Yesufu  

Professor AbdulRasheed Yesufu   Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

 

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At the core of Rowland Abiodun’s monumental unfolding in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, of his perspective on the relationship between the human capacity for understanding and the various forms in which this capacity is expressed is the Yoruba expression Òwe l’esin Òrò Ti Òrò ba sonù Òwe la fií wáa which may be translated as Imaginative expression is the steed of discourse Where cognition and its projections are lost Imaginative forms become our means of search Having read a number of times the section of the book where this maxim is introduced and struggled to reach an adequate understanding of it, it has taken the departure, in late July 2016, of AbdulRasheed Yesufu, my former teacher at the University of Benin, whose academic career has taken him across continents to culminate in his professorship at the National Open University of Nigeria, for me to move to a better grasp of the saying. “Òwe” refers to non-linear forms of communication, requiring imaginative sensitivity to appreciate. Why claim that, in order to better comprehend a subject, you invoke styles of articulation which are anything but plain? I could readily identify with the idea of amplifying perception from an already established base to a more sophisticated, more subtle and more complex apprehension using such forms to facilitate appreciation of the various aspects of a phenomenon, but to claim that even fundamental discernment is established through the use of such strategies remained puzzling for me, till I at last realized

 

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why my mind had responded the way it did to the news of the departure of AbdulRasheed Yesufu. I had not been able to arrive at any comment to make in response to the news, except to remark on its deep untimeliness. Instead, I have found lines from David’s great lament in the Bible for his great friend Jonathan and his father King Saul, to whom David had also been dear, going through my mind “...how are the mighty fallen! /Tell it not in Gath, speak not of it in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised exult/Ye mountains of Gilboa/Let there be no dew or rain upon you”, the Philistines being the enemies of David’s Hebrew ethnic group, distinguished from the Hebrews by not sharing the ethnic identification represented by circumcision, and who had killed Jonathan at the battle of Mount Gilboa, inflicting a defeat so devastating that Saul committed suicide, David’s lament being made more poignant by the fact that David had recently been reconciled with Saul who had earlier tried to take his life. I at last understood why David’s lament had been passing through my mind, an understanding framed by the Yoruba adage. I had previously not been able to uncover any adequate way to organise in my mind why I consider Yesufu’s untimely departure a tragedy. The spontaneous mental

intoning

of

David’s

lines,

however,

demonstrates

my

consciousness probing in the direction of awareness and expression. What is at stake cannot be summed up for me purely through conventional depictions of sadness. Hence it needs to be suggested in terms of the epic tones of the David lament. Even that, however, is inadequate. A movement towards adequacy comes closer with reference to a summation a senior colleague of mine at the University of Benin, Leo Otoide, made some years ago about AbdulRasheed Yesufu, in observing that Yesufu was “a human being”.

 

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Why should what seems an obvious statement of fact actualize a greater movement towards adequacy of response for me than the sublime threnody of David, a poetic monument demonstrating why the Bible is one of the world’s greatest books, evoking, in its tension between passion, chaos, paradox and the ineffable, the grandeur of human existence? The answer to that question is mediated by another Yoruba expression addressed by Abiodun in his book, “Ìjà ló dé l’orín d’òwe”, which may be translated as “The emergence of a fight makes an otherwise innocent song a piercing imaginative force”, a context in which the medley of sonic and verbal rhythm sums up with poignant power the significance of the conflict, the antagonism between brethren in the human species represented by the fight, context transforming expression into a richer map of meaning than intended. Along similar lines, without the need for either of us to analyse what he had done, Otoide and I concurred on his summation because we both appreciated the fact that the simple statement he had made constituted an assessment based on a survey of human history to the point where we were standing and beyond, into its consummation at whatever point in or out of time. He had just made a distillation of the essence of what it is to be human, not in the foundational biological sense of the bipedal entity with one head and two hands joined in a particular manner to a trunk, along with the metabolic processes that structure involves or even the cognitive processes that mark homo sapiens, but the quintessence represented by the finest qualities that shape the full sphericality of that sapience, in the balance between intelligence and emotional depth, between compassion and discipline, between self respect and respect for others, and identified this nexus of qualities which humanity constantly strives for as an ideal arrived at only in spurts in many people, in terms of one human being, AbdulRasheed Yesufu. Hence, what in the basic semantic possibilities of English was a simple statement of biological or even psychological fact, had been transformed by the context dramatized by our conversation, by the  

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reference to Yesufu in that situation, into a philosophical statement, in which history, philosophy, religion, biology, psychology, sociology, the various methods though which human beings try to understand themselves and what they represent, had converged in a summation about one person, one example of humanity. Something similar to what Otoide had achieved in that expression had also been pursued by Shakespeare, in the more elaborate declamation of Mark Anthony’s at the death of Brutus in Julius Caesar “...the elements [were]/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world 'This was a man!' ” In the dedication to his magnum opus, Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe presents something which a friend of mine, fluent in German, stated he was struck by efforts to translate from their original German to English because he did not think that passage could be translated, perhaps on account of its subtle ideational convolutions and emotional density. The lines are the reflections of a person looking out over the landscape of his life and taking stock in terms of milestones represented by the relationship between his own strivings and those who were with him on the journey but are now no more except through their invisible presence.

Like the drops of water from the leaves to the earth in the Benin forest zone where the Ogba river breaks ground for the first time in its underground journey, transforming the space into a recreation of the dawn of creation, what do I remember of Yesufu that will forever make his memory for me a testimony of what is valuable about life? His inspiring comments as my supervisor on my BA dissertation, comments unforgettable, illuminating possibilities on an unfolding career progression? Learning from him a technique of association eventually central to my self training in the study of the visual arts after the academic education in literature I had undergone with him and other

 

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inspiring teachers? My countering, on my Facebook wall, his position on the last Nigerian elections by invoking ideas I had learnt from him in our classes on English Romantic poetry? Even when he might not have agreed with my views, his admiration of my approach in that debate becoming clearer in the disgust he expressed at the provocative erotic image I later posted on Facebook in my efforts to build an erotic magazine in the frame of the combination of the titillating and the cerebral exemplified by Playboy in its prime, “I thought you were developing a promising career in politics”, to which I must have responded in the spirit of a person taking delight in his creative freedom, only for me to realize many months later that the positive attention of a person like Yesufu was something to be courted, not alienated for any reason, seeking him on Facebook to no avail, thinking of how to make up with him only to learn that he had passed on, on learning of which, through an alternate Facebook account of mine, I discovered he had blocked my activity on Facebook showing up on his account, meaning I could not observe his presence on the platform, explaining why I had not been able to find him again, so I can’t even post this response to him on his wall because only his Facebook friends can post there, thereby underlining another regret about a situation one has matured beyond but too late to address some of its consequences? His exemplification of the best in Islam in a world in which those Muslims who insist on dehumanising themselves and others in the name of a divine existent far removed in essence from the mud and blood of the struggle that is human life are shaping worldwide the most graphic images of Islam? His low toned sartorial elegance? The sense of inward and outward refinement? Moving responses from his former students and colleagues can be seen on his Facebook wall.  

A story goes that a group of Jews once put God on trial on account of the horrors their race was going through during the Holocaust, but after the trial, returned to their life of religious devotion even within the

 

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devastation their lives had become. In Watership Down, Richard Adams tells a story of a group of rabbits kept in his farm by a man who, at random, would kill one of the rabbits for food. Observing this recurrent tragedy afflicting their ranks, a group rose among the rabbits who were distinguished by their reflections on this tragic configuration of their existence about which they did not understand themselves as being able to do anything, their philosophising being a way for the rabbit community to come to terms with this bloody circumscription of their lives. The human race has long struggled with what may be understood as the injustice of being brought into and out of existence, as existence can be readily perceived by human beings on earth, without any evidence of a participation in the occurrence and timing of the process. Religion, philosophy, art, have all been organised in relation to this challenge. Medicine and healthy living are used to prolong the time on earth, staving off the entry into the unknown for as long as possible. Peter Thiel, co-founder of the global online payment system Paypal, is funding research into preventing death by ageing, in the hope of increasing satisfaction in the beauty of living, enabling human choice about whether or not to leave the earth through death and when to depart from it, if a person so chooses. Some shamans are even said to be able to travel to the world of the departed and retrieve some who have been thrust there. Jesus is depicted as being able to raise the dead and to have declared “What I have done you can do and more”, but his historically identified followers are not known for such nature defying feats. Aghor Pir, a practitioner of the Hindu Aghori school, describes himself in the listserve Evocational Magics as successfully negotiating with a particular deity to allow the extension of a person’s life, something some people in the Bible are portrayed as being able to do with God. Some Buddhist schools, as represented by the Bodhisattva ideal, claim they can train one, through meditation, to choose when to incarnate on earth and when to leave the earth. We remain hopeful.  

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