We are delighted and honoured to celebrate Biodun Jeyifo’s 80th birthday with a symposium themed ‘Who is Afraid of Decolonisation?’

Date: Monday, 5 January 2026

Time: 9:00am (WAT)

Venue: MUSON Centre, Onikan, Lagos/Zoom: bit.ly/BJ80

Biodun Jeyifo is a Professor Emeritus of English at Cornell University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He served as the first National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in Nigeria and has been a notable voice in public discourse through his journalism and critical essays.

Join us as we honour the legacy of a brilliant and remarkable scholar.

At 80, Professor Biodun Jeyifo stands as one of Africa’s most influential and uncompromising public intellectuals, a scholar whose work has persistently interrogated literature, power, culture, and the unfinished project of decolonisation. Across decades of teaching, writing, and public engagement, his ideas have shaped critical thought within Africa and the wider world.

Professor Jeyifo is the author of several landmark books that have become essential reading in African and postcolonial studies. These include The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama; Perspectives on Wole Soyinka (editor); Contemporary Nigerian Literature (co-editor); Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria; Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism; Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process; and Africa in the Age of Globalisation (co-editor). His essays and criticism are widely regarded for their intellectual rigour, political clarity, and fearless engagement with questions of power and representation.

Beyond the academy, Jeyifo’s leadership as the founding National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) placed him at the heart of Nigeria’s struggle for academic freedom, university autonomy, and social justice. His journalism and critical essays have continued to intervene in national and global debates with rare moral consistency.

The symposium theme, “Who is Afraid of Decolonisation?”, resonates deeply with the concerns that have animated Jeyifo’s life’s work, asking who resists decolonial thought, why such resistance endures, and what is at stake for knowledge production in Africa and the Global South. This symposium is both a celebration of a remarkable life and a collective reflection on ideas that remain urgently relevant.

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