I cannot believe that it is already ten years since I wrote a tribute in celebration of the attainment of the age of 60 by my friend, sister and comrade, Professor Bene Madunagu. But since I myself have almost “forgotten” now that I am already over the age of 70, it is not hard for me to accept the fact that on March 21 this week, comrade Bene did in fact join the club, the rare order of Septuagenarians of the Left (SOL).But how could I not remember and then celebrate this fact when there are so very few of us in the SOL! Yes, there are few of us in SOL primarily because most Nigerians don’t live past the age of 60. But there is also the fact that many members of SOL are keeping the criteria of membership very strict! For instance,next month, on April 13 to be precise, my bosom friend, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi, will turn 70. But I can tell readers of this piece that when that happens,there will be a spirited debate whether or not he should be admitted to the SOL. Yemi will of course have my vote, but as I am anticipating strong resistance to his nomination to membership of the order, I am thinking that perhaps we should create a wing of the SOL into which I am sure there will be a strong vote in favour of Yemi’s membership. That wing of the SOL will have the the acronym, SODL, which stands for “Septuagenarians of the Democratic Left”!

I have chosen to start this tribute on these half playful, half serious musings on exclusivityof membership within a special unregistered and indeed unconstituted group or community of elderly Nigerians in order to underscore an aspect of comrade Bene’s life, career and achievements that I left out when I wrote a long tribute in celebration of her 60thanniversary ten years ago. What is this aspect? It is something that could be calledrarity raised to the power of two: women are not visible, not prominent in the Nigerian socialist movement; exceptionally strong women who can and do match men on virtually all indices of capability and achievement are rare in the Nigerian Left. Why are the sources and portents of this problem – this is the issue that I seek to briefly address in this tribute. But before I delve into it as the focus of all that I wish to say in this tribute that uses the exploration of a general idea to celebrate the life and work of one person, let me first write in demonstration of my claim that comrade Bene is indeed exceptional – among men and women in general; and in particular, among Nigerian Leftists,the country’s human rights activists and humanistsandprofessional academics and scientists.

I should perhaps state here that comrade Bene is only the fourth person about whom I have written more than one tribute in celebration of their birthday anniversaries in my newspaper columns, the other three being Professors Wole Soyinka, Abiola Irele and Femi Osofisan. I do not need to draw the attention of the reader to the fact that Bene is the only woman in this group. But what does one make of the fact that she has stood out among many other categories of very accomplished and highly respected people among the ranks of the national intelligentsia?

In the six years between 1980 and 1986 when I was, first, National President of ASUU and, then, Immediate Past President (IPP), Bene was quite easily the most conscientious and highly respected chairperson among all the chairpersons of the local branches of the Union. As we did not organize any competition among thesechairpersons of ASUUlocal branches to honour the best, or the most dependable among them, the reader will have to take my word on this claim. Fortunately for us, there are tens of colleagues from that period of the early, formative stages of ASUU’s evolution that are still alive, still around to lend their testimonies to my claim here that Bene was the chairperson that all other chairpersons in ASUU without exception looked up to. But then, why did it never occur to us that she should have gone to be ASUU National President? Why, in fact, has there never been a female ASUU National President? [Parenthetically, I do not wish in any way to imply that not having been ASUU National President in any way diminishes comrade the totality of Bene’s achievements, an observation that would be utterly ridiculous. Needless to say, I raise the question only as a general commentary on women in the Nigerian Left]

Here, I cannot avoid recourse to the hidden but not exactly unknown secret lives of Nigerian Leftists. Socialists, activists and radicals of the Left everywhere in the world all belong to a very rare breed of humanity in the sheer number of hours they expend in meetings going meticulously over obscure or even arcane matters of ideology, strategy, tactics or principle. Nigerian socialists often took this to extremes of time, energy and resources expended in these marathon sessions that sometimes lasted all day and all night and my friend, Femi Osofisan, used to tease and berate me about this phenomenon. I mean, where other Nigerians hold all-night vigils either for fortifications against Satan and his hosts or to endure emotional abuse from ritualists promising them great wealth, Nigerian socialists and activists have their “vigils” on how Lenin and his comrades would have, in the Nigerian context, responded to that classic query: What is to be done? I testify here that we in the Nigerian Left have spent a large part of our lives, our waking hours on this classic Leninist question: What is to be done?Sadly, only rarely have we ever come up with answers that rise to the challenge implied in the question.

I raise this particular matter because there was/is a subtle gender inflection in it, at least in the Nigerian experience and culture of the Left. This is the fact that men were/are far more obsessed than women bythese obscure points of ideology, strategy or principle. In American movies of the genre of Westerns, the closing issue at the end of every film is – who is the last man standing? Who is the last man standing? Well, in many instances of our day-long or night-long sessions on tactics, strategy or principle, comrade Bene was not the last man standing; she was the last person standing, even though she was/is not particularly fond of the excessive, self-absorbed quarrels of the men over ideology and principle.

In concrete terms, what I am intimating here is the fact that comrade Bene has always sought to move us from ideology to action, from theory to praxis, from the abstract programme to actual effects in the world, especially on the lives of the deprived and excluded majority of our peoples. One of the most memorable and moving of my experiences in the Nigerian Left is having conversations with young, teenage girls that had gone through the education and training provided in Girls’ Power Initiative (GPI), the NGO that Bene cofounded and ran for a long time in Calabar. In my travels around many parts of the world, I had never met – and still have not met – any young women from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds with more knowledge and insight about their place in the world than the products of GPI. To think that comrade Bene achieved this remarkable feat while at the same time rising to eminence among Nigerian botanists and scientists and in the meantime working indefatigably as a human rights activist, this is humbling for all of us in the Nigerian Left. This observation leads me directly to the central idea of this tribute: the dominant visibility of men in the Nigerian socialist movement in juxtaposition with the rarity of exceptional women in leadership positions and roles in the movement.

About three years ago, something deeply portentous happened at a big ASSU national event that throws some light on the focus that I am placing in this discussion on the place of women in the Nigerian socialist movement.This was a so-called National Educational Summit (NES) organized and sponsored by all the unions in our tertiary educational institutions. I had the honour of being the Chairman at this summit. Well, dear reader and compatriot, consider the implications of the following fact: the session on the place of women and the special problems that they face in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education was reserved to the very last session of the last day of the summit when people were visibly exhausted after more than three full, all-day meetings. Consider this also, compatriot: with very few exceptions, most of the men present at this special session on women laughed at and about every issue raised concerning the problems and challenges that women face as women in our tertiary educational institutions. I was so taken aback and deeply offended by this open display of extreme backwardness about women’s issues at an ASUU-sponsored event that I drew pointed attention to it in my commentary on that summit in this column.

I do not wish to oversimplify the ramifications of this happening but still, I cannot but ask: would the majority of the male delegates at that NES have been laughing if a woman was ASUU’s National President? Would it have made any difference if ASUU had had several women National Presidents in the last three decades? There were many female delegates at the summit and quite a good number of them were senior professors and academic administrators: why did their presence not make the sexist yahoos among the male delegates self-aware about their sexism? Do we need exceptional women like comrade Bene to turn things around? Isn’t the very notion of exceptionalism problematicin being subtly and insidiously sexist?

I leave these questions unanswered here, though I must confess that I certainly hope that the careful reader would have an intimation of what my answer to everyone of these questions would be. Sexism, especially in the form of the type of open, anti-feministreduction of issues pertaining to the place of women in our society to matters fit only for laughter and levity, is rampant in the Nigerian Left. It is necessary to celebrate the lives and achievements of exceptional women in the movement like comrade Bene, but not on the basis of the reification of exceptionalism. In the final analysis, exceptionalism is gender-neutral. But it is everywhere surrounded and pervaded by deep but casual sexism. As we honour and celebrate the life and achievements of Bene, let us not for one moment forget this pervasive but often ignored aspect of the Nigerian socialist movement.

Biodun Jeyifo

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