He was not born with greatnes!. But he attained greatness through dint of hardwork. persevarance, prayer and dogedness, climaxing his academic height with his appointment as professor at 31.
Even when his mates were still struggling for university admissions; not sure of what future holds in stock for them, he has taken the bull by the horn and pursued a career that later brought him fame and honour even among his professionals.
His appointment at age 41 as Professor of History from the prestigious University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos, climaxed his academic pursuits among other laurels that he has achieved early in life.
The story of Anthony Ijiola Asiwaju, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Lagos is that of a village boy destined to make it in life despite his parents' s
peasant background.
Today in Nigeria, you hardly talk of boundary issue without mentioning his name, having been taking part in so many national and international assignments.
The Balogun of Imeko and Asiwaju of Yewaland speaks further:
TGP: Where and when were you born, and where and when did you start school.
A. I was born on April 27, 1939, in Ekunkan Village, now extinct, less than ten kilometres northeast of Imeko, headquarters of present-day Imeko/Afon Local Govt Area of Ogun State in Southwestern Nigeria, one of such several hamlets located down-under the extensive and scenic rift valley east of the lofty plateau on which the famous Yoruba border town itself had been located early in the 18th century. I started school in 1949 at St. Joseph's Catholic School, Ado-Odo in present-day Ado-Odo/Ota Local Govt Area of Ogun State. This followed my father's relocation of the family in 1947 to Oyede Village, near Alapoti, one of the many such Ketu-settler rural communities in and around the ancient ancestral Awori-Yoruba city of Ado Odo.
TGP: Who were your parents?
A. My father, the late Pa Peter Alamu Egbedele Asiwaju, hailed from Ketu, capital of the renowned ancient Yoruba kingdom, now on the Benin side of present-day Nigeria- Benin border, in the Republic of Benin, formerly French Dahomey; mum, on the other hand, was an indigene of the aforementioned Nigerian border town of Imeko, also formerly part of the ancient Yoruba kingdom of Ketu prior to the historic Anglo-French partition of the kingdom as a result of the European colonial boundary making in the wider area of Africa in the last quarter of the 19th century.
TGP: What's your position in the family?
A. I am the second surviving of three brothers of the same mother: I have a senior brother, five years older, born, February 20, 1934; and a junior, nearly 18 years younger, born September 8, 1956. We have a half sister, about 31 years younger, born in 1960.
TGP: There were such big gaps in years between you and your two brothers, especially between you and your junior: was this as a deliberate spacing in family planning!
A. Family planning? That's now, not then. My parents suffered from the extraordinary infantile mortality rate, very rife in the time and place of our birth. Mother, for example, narrated that she carried pregnancy to term thirteen times including a set of twins, twelve in Imeko and the last two in Ado Odo, making a total fourteen babies! It was largely this high incidents of reproduction waste that determined the family relocation from Imeko to Ado Odo.
TGP: Where and when did you have your secondary education?
A. In St. Leo's Teacher Training College, Ibara, Abeokuta, from 1956 to 1959, thus privileging into the proud life-long profession as a teacher with varied experience at all levels of our educational system, primary, second and tertiary, including the apex appointments as Professor of History in University of Lagos in 1978 and Professor Emeritus of the university since January 2011.
TGP: What informed your choice of History as course, and not medicine, law and engineering as is now the craze?
A. This is clearly a very important question, as it raises the all-time critical issue of choice of career, which intertwines with the essential matter of life. As with life itself, our choice has been a matter of God's Grace, which alone explains a compelling natural flare for the subject and discipline, that began manifestation from our primary school days and maturing unabated through secondary and tertiary years of our long gestation as an academic. Following strictly the line of our disciplinary disposition and being undistracted by parental and other counseling interference, I stayed with the historical science and its inexhaustible exploration as teacher and researcher. Add the consideration of natural disposition to the prestige which identification as a historian and a history teacher carried over all the then known professions and academic specialisations in our own days, and it should begin to dawn why we chose history, and not any of the other available courses.
TGP:. What are you doing, then, to ensure that history as a course does not go into extinction, as state policy would appear to have pushed and is still pushing it?
A. Let me start by drawing attention to the wider context of the policy abuse that has pushed history to the back burner of Nigerian educational system since curricular reforms of mid 1970s, that privileged sciences and technology in the name of advancing accelerated social and economic development. This new thinking about education for development, with reduced concern for the human beings as raison d'etre of development, is encountered throughout Africa and wider area of the so-called Third World or 'developing economies' with similar regrettable consequences. I have been in the vanguard for the resuscitation of history in our schools, fighting for this long in active collaboration with colleagues within frameworks, not only of the Historical Society of Nigeria and the Nigerian Academy of Letters, but also the Association of African Historians in Bamako, Mali, and the more global contexts of the International Committee of Historical Science, CISH (Comite international des Sciences Historians), to say nothing of the recently initiated Helsinki-based global network of Association of Historians Without Borders. The highly sustained and unrelenting advocacy for necessary policy reversal for returning history to our schools, especially, by the Historical Society of Nigeria, Nigeria's oldest learned society, has finally borne some very good fruits with a new policy articulation by the present and ongoing administration of President Muhammadu Buhari for history to return to Nigerian primary and secondary schools.
TGP: Are you sure, sir, that this latest policy pronouncement would not go the way of most government policies, more in their being announced than in their being implemented?
A. Yes, I can see the point of your cynicism. After all, President Obasanjo was compelled to make even a more forceful pronouncement in his first term as democratically elected president, 1999-2003, when he was convinced in briefing session in Ibadan by a contribution if the late Professor Ade Ajayi that the main explanation why there was a worrisomely widespread armed revolt in the opening years of new millennium was that the mostly youth perpetrators of the troubles everywhere were of the generation who, if and when they went to school at all, did so without learning history, without a sense of history. However, unlike in the Obasanjo regime, the present pronouncement has been backed with necessary action and support. I am, for example, reliably informed by Prof.Chris Ogbogbo, current President of the Historical Society of Nigeria, recently elected as Vice President of the Association of African Historians at its Fifth Congress in Yamoussoukro, Cote d'Ivoire, November 6-9, 2018, that the Historical Society of Nigeria has been actively engaged with the NERDC (Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council) in Abuja to produce suitable textbooks for use in the primary and secondary schools, come October this year, 2019.
TGP: What Christian denomination do you belong to?
A. I am Catholic, a Christian Without Borders! I was born, raised, married and fathered my children in the Roman Catholic Church. However, circumstances led us into the membership and even ordination as an honorary pastor of Mount of Salvation (Oke Igbala) Church, with its headquarters in Imeko. Today, my neighbourhood church in Abeokuta is the All Souls Church of the Egba Diocese of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion). As Asiwaju Onigbagbo of Imeko, an honour bestowed on us in 2004 by the local branch of CAN(Christian Association of Nigeria) and boosted by the privilege to be a Jerusalem Pilgrim in 2009, I worship in other Christian denominations, either by invitation or impromptu visit as Asiwaju of the entire Christian community, in addition to the more regular attendance at the Roman Catholic and, also,Mount of Salvation(Oke Igbala) Church from time to time. Other Christian congregations in Imeko, with whom we have occasionally worshiped include the historic Methodist Church, Ojakekere, now the Cathedral of the newly established Diocese of Ketu of Methodist Church Nigeria and the relatively recently established St. Andrew's Anglican Church of the Yewa Diocese of Anglican Communion, essentially to boost the morale of the rather small congregation. I believe that it is a mark of Christian maturity to be able to think and act out of box, to transcend the essentially secondary issues of separatist history and attendant divisive indoctrination, and honestly engage with other Christians across unnecessary hard borders of doctrinal politics. In my humble opinion, this is about the only valid way of contributing to the realisation of the prayer of Our Lord Himself in John 17.11 that the Church 'may be one', even as He and the Father 'are one' also in Unity with the Holy Spirit. Our ecumenism is even inclusive of respect for other faiths, notably Islam, where there are so many cherished relations and friends as adherents.
Q. When you were growing up, did you ever think you would live this long?
TGP: Not by any stretch of imagination! In fact, I habitually look at the future, any future, with trepidation. I still do. I don't write post-dated, including cheques; and if and when, I put the sign of the cross. This sensitivity explains the habit of remaining constantly in prayers for self and in intercession for loved ones and globally in respect of all manners of known and unknown movement in time and space.
Q. Has there been anytime in your life when you thought you were going to die, and what happened?
TGP: I live everyday,as if it may be the last, which explains why I try, as much as possible, not to postpone important matters for action. I try in my writings, for example, to rid my drafts of avoidable inadequacies of format, style and typographical, but I would rather publish with errors for later correction rather than attempt perfection and fail to timely pass the message across. In May 2001, though, precisely the night of the 28th/29th, l had a dream or a premonition to the effect that I did not have much time left, and I disclosed it confidentially to one of my daughters but asked her not to discuss it with anyone. I then made a note of it in the copy of the Holy Bible in my use at the time, including some details of what I would like to be inscribed on my grave. However, the information got leaked to my wife; and, before I knew it, the household was mobilized in prayers and fasting, to avert it. When less than two years later, on 14 January 2003, my wife passed on in a totally unexpected circumstance, intra-surgery in LUTH, my thoughts went back to the premonition of May 2001 and I thought and strongly believed she died a Christ-like death, in place of her husband, the friend that she so much loved and who also so much loves her. May her soul continue to rest in the Peace of the Lord and may we both meet, when my own time comes, in the Lord's Bosom, wrapped together in His Infinite Mercy and Love.
TGP: Were there any particular occasions when you recall having a close shave with death.
A. Yes, many times, including a near plane crash on an Egypt Air flight, Cairo-Dakar, in the early 1980s, while researching my famous book, 'Partitioned Africans' published in 1984; and more dramatically, in August 1980, leading to a deepened personal relationship with Alagba (Elder) Frederick Akanbi Adeoye, Prophet-Founder of Mount of Salvation(Oke Igbala) Church and, by extension, intensified affiliation with the church to the extent, first, of being ordained as an honorary pastor by him and ultimately being the first of the only two executors & trustees named in his Last Will & Testament, the other person being the lately highly lamented Professor Segun Adesina, close colleague and friend of mine at the University of Lagos, whom I had introduced to the Prophet.
TGP: Can you, sir, elaborate a bit on what happened in 1980, in view of the more enduring impact of the experience on your life as a Christian?
A. It was a major experience in spiritual healing of a near fatal gastrointestinal crisis which doctors later diagnosed as duodenum ulcer. It happened overnight July 31/August 1, 1980, in the then newly opened Ogun State's Gateway Hotel, now Park-In Hotel, Abeokuta, to finalize a report in preparation for the concluding meeting of an investigation panel set up by Chief Olabisi Onabanjo, the first democratically elected Governor of State, to look into allegations of gross maladministration of the then College of Education, Ijebu Ode, the first tertiary educational institution in the state. Since I was Chairman, I came in a few days ahead of the scheduled meeting to fully prepare to be able to guide in view of the weights of the recommendations, ranging from suspension to outright dismissal of senior academic staff, including the provost, and expulsion of students. My falling critically just hours before the meeting of the panel thus raised some spectre of speculation and suspicion about the possibility of some mystic interference with the work of the panel which I chaired. This was especially so as there were reports of alleged jubilation in the college in Ijebu Ode when news reached the institution about my illness. I was brought back from Abeokuta to Lagos almost gasping for breath. By the morning of the second day, August 2, the decision of the doctors at the University of Lagos Medical Centre was for me to undergo surgery. But Prophet Adeoye intervened; and some way was found to go to him in Oshodi rather than the Teaching Hospital where I was to be taken for the surgery. The long and short of the story was that, after a week of admission into the Mount of Salvation Church faith-healing clinic under close watch and prayers of the Prophet- Founder, I got fully recovered; and, up till today, almost forty years after, I have never had a relapse. It was at the discharge from the faith-healing clinic on Sunday, 10 August 1980, that I was ordained as an honorary pastor of the church and I have since remained attached to it, though without being detached from existing membership of the mother Church, the Roman Catholic.
TGP: What's your favourite food?
A. I have no taboo about food, and I used to eat a lot, especially amala. However, since diagnosis for late-onset diabetes (type two) at age 60 in 1999, I have reduced volume and on advice of my late wife, a state- registered midwife and dietician in her own right, I have since changed from regular amala, yam or cassava flour, to the form made of flour from unriped plantain. Reduction of volume, change of main food stuff, regular excise, prescribed medication and supplements, all working in the Grace of God, have kept us going.
TGP: As a growing up child, what lessons did you learn from your father?
A. Habits of prayerfulness, hard work, self-discipline, moderation, perseverance, resourcefulness, engagement and humility. My father was an ardent Roman Catholic and a Marian: he prayed his Rosary everywhere and whenever, at home, under the hut at the farm, in the morning and at night time. He also worked extremely hard, in Ado Odo combining farm- work with trading in farm produce, first palm oil and later cocoa. He walked the popular Yoruba talk, Ise kii pa ni, work does not kill! He was moderate in everything and was sufficiently resourceful to provide for his family. We ate well and clothed modestly. Both in Imeko and Ado Odo, he has a house of his own, where the family lived. He was humble, though his talent of the intellect and wisdom caused many to seek his counsels.
TGP: As a renowned historian and world-class border scholar, how have you applied your invaluable intellectual assets to tackle and resolve Nigeria's myriad border problems and challenges?
A. Again, a very good question. I was never a scholar withdrawn to himself. As a matter of fact, the distinct hallmark of my many decades of academic career has been in its uniquely impactful policy advocacy and opportuned appointments and assignments that have enabled us to apply at all levels - local, national, regional, continental and international- what we researched and taught in comparative border and borderlands studies over the years. Beginning with appointment and widely acclaimed achievements as pioneer Commissioner ( International Boundaries) of Nigeria's National Boundary Commission from 1988 to 1994, we have had the singular honour of serving in cognate capacity as consultant for the enunciation of Mali's innovative border policy of 'pays frontieres', border country or Cross-Border Areas, in 2002 and its elevation as Cross- Border Initiatives Programme of ECOWAS( Economic Community of West African States) in 2005 and the African Union Border Programme (AUBP) in 2007; and from 1997, after the tenure at the National Boundary Commission, we were appointed as a foundation member of Ogun State Boundary Committee, becoming the State Boundary Commissioner from 2003 to 2011. Through Nigerian Government's embrace of transborder cooperation policy drive vis-a-vis each of our limitrophe neighbours in West and Central Africa, and of a special development focus on structurally neglected border regions, the hitherto rising tides of border tension with all our neighbours were dramatically reduced. This has been so even on our most 'troublesome border', that with Cameroon, in spite of episodes of border skirmishes between our armed forces, leading to the aggressive and terribly expensive marathon eight-year litigation at the International Court of Justice at The Hague from March 1994 to October 2002.
TGP: Has the issue of Nigeria- Cameroon squabble been resolved?
A. I would say yes, based on the 2002 judgement by the ICJ, which both state parties have been persuaded to accept and implement. Although the judgment and its implementation modality has remained a bitter pill in the mouth of affected Nigerian local communities and politians, the ongoing implementation process has at least halted and quietened the hitherto frayed nerves between us and Cameroon. Though I was maliciously edged out of being part of our legal defence team during the eight years of the litigation. I was, however, very pleased to be significantly involved at the implementation stage, when I was appointed as Leader of the Nigerian Delegation on the Sub- Commission on Affected Populations of the main Nigeria-Benin Cameroon Mixte Commission. The sub- commission literally walked the over 1600-kilometre border from Darak in the Lake Chad to Limbe on the Atlantic coast of Cameroon, criss-crossing the borderlands, for one year, from May 2003 to April 2004. It has been a matter of self-fulfilment for me that it was the Report submitted by the Sub-Commission on Affected Populations to the main Mixte Commission that was used to draft and finalize the text of the historic Green -Tree (New York). Agreement signed by both Nigeria and Cameroon on 12 June 2006 to determine the phased withdrawal of Nigeria from the Bakassi Peninsula, which was achieved in the Presidency of Umaru Yar'Adua in 2008. We also played some role in the highly influential presentation by SIRA, Society for International Relations Awareness.to the House of Representatives Public Hearing, when in 2012, there was a politically futile efforts to push for an appeal in the ICJ to review the Court's own 2002 judgement.
TGP: How do we reverse the alleged marginalisation and neglect of our border regions?
A. Did you say 'alleged'? It is not an allegation. It is stark reality that the nation's border regions are politically marginalised and infrastructurally deprived, to the extent of posing a terrible security danger to the nation itself, as has been demonstrated first in the Niger Delta and now, currently, in the Northeast. As was agreed by the historic 1989 National Planning Conference for Development of the Border Regions and documented in the published proceedings by the National Boundary Commission, which we had the honour to edit, the way out is a special development focus. While the National Boundary Commission made some feeble start, the Border Communities Development Agency, established in 2009 precisely to bring about this special development focus, has achieved little on the ground outside the characteristically large bureaucracy in Abuja, which gulps its admittedly huge budgetary allocations.The truth seems to be that government at all levels - Local, State and Federal- is yet to take border region development seriously, and the nation may expect to see the worsening of the danger posed to national security. The potentials in the southwestern border region have been highlighted in our latest book, 'Border Regions in Africa, History of Political Marginalisation and Infrastructural Deprivation in Ogun State of Southwestern Nigeria '(Ibadan: University Press, 2018) where you can check it out.
* This piece was first published in 2019 to mark the milestone of Prof. Asiwaju at 80.