In a talk to mark Professor Udenta O. Udenta’s 60th birthday, Nigerian writer and Professor E. E. Sule notes that Udenta’s “incredible contribution is unsung, often overlooked, or, as strange as it sounds, ostracised by the Nigerian academia mostly peopled by discourse-famished scholars unable to engage in rigorous academic exercise.”
I don’t think there is any truer expression, because I didn’t hear about Professor Udenta until I met him in 2020. And when I met him, I wondered why his name was not everywhere in Nigerian intellectual and academic discourse. But one will ask if there is a Nigerian academic space—a space where we think of theory, not as a rehashed Euro-American 60s to 90s model of thought and cultural discourse propounded by dead white male critics and thinkers.
While I am tempted to talk about Udenta, I doubt I can make that introduction. Some people know the man as a politician, a freedom fighter against the military junta who was jailed over six times, and the founding national secretary of the Alliance for Democracy (AD). Others know him through his first critical book Revolutionary Aesthetics and the African Literary Process which was published by Fourth Dimension, the same publisher of Chinweizu etal’s Towards the Decolonization of African Literature.
What I know of Udenta is that he is the scholar of scholars, not because of the engagement I have had with him, and how vast he is. Not solely because of his genius which manifests from his boyhood works—works he wrote at the age of thirteen to fifteen. These works include The Wrath of the Gods, a magical realist novel which shows the depth of his thinking at that age, Book of Knowledge and Great Understanding, Before They Came, The Rediscovery of Arlistoga, Poetic Reminiscence, Book of Dislocation, Lyrics and Other Longer Poems, and Youthhood Ribblings. But, for me, this is not the only space where Udenta’s genius manifests itself rather it’s the scholar he is.
Udenta is a scholar of scholars who always finds a path to bring fresh perspectives into his theoretical position. Rooted in the Marxist background and theory, he is a scholar who shifted into a theoretical plain that shuns discursiveness into praxis rooted in the African worldview. His idea of negation and unending “dialectical movement in which primary and, hence, ontological negations are negated…” (from Crisis of Theory) creates a base for theory and thought to follow a dialectical turn, which is crucial to a particular society.
In a conversation with Prof. Udenta at his house, after he offered me fresh palm wine, he reiterated the point raised by most scholars of decoloniality that colonialism, through its continuous domination of power and knowledge production, aimed at denying the humanity of Africans keeps subduing the impact of our revolutionary aura. He links this to the polis and its denial of critical and revolutionary scholarship. Udenta reaffirms the authenticity of African epistemology in his Crisis of Theory in Contemporary Nigerian Literature and the Possibilities of New Materialist Direction: Critical Fragments by introducing “the shape of contemporary Nigerian aesthetic domain; that is, the organic interplay of the literary and non-literary cultural and aesthetic forces that cumulatively determines its ontology” (149). In essence, to not allow our humanity to be denied by the violence of colonial history, we must “reinvent” our modern reality through a concrete universality that is a materialist negation of the Marxist construct of concrete universality. He holds that:
The key strategy in constructing a postcolonial Nigerian cultural and aesthetic theory infused with ‘concrete universal’ ethos is to discover and overcome the contradiction between revolutionary aesthetics and material transcendence; that is, first, to locate the negation between materialism and metaphysics and, second, to negate that very negation. The negation of negation as a central Hegelian and Marxist philosophical thesis constitutes itself as a cognitive-epistemological force as well as an ontological movement. (177)
It is this system of thought in Crisis of Theory that stands Udenta out as one of the thinkers of today’s Africa. While most Nigerian Professors and scholars are caught in the recycling of “postcolonialism according to Edward Said; postcolonialism according to Homi Bhabha; or Can the Subaltern Speaks?”, Udenta voyages into an aspect that has until now been caught in the ambience of fiction.
The reason Udenta’s material transcendence is crucial for me is that I can narrate how I was reincarnated by an old woman and not feel like I am trapped in mysticism. The language of Crisis of Theory also shaped me as an emerging scholar. But what is more interesting about Udenta is his investment in building a community of young scholars. The way he finds time to converse with anyone who knows theory or is intelligent. Today is his birthday, and I am here perusing through Crisis of Theory and excited about the gift of Professor Udenta O. Udenta to Africa.
