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"

At the core of Rowland Abioduns 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
we lesin r
Ti r ba son
we la fi wa
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. we 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

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 Davids 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 Davids 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, Davids 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 Davids 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 Yesufus untimely departure a tragedy. The spontaneous
mental

intoning

of

Davids

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.

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 worlds 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, j l d lorn dwe,
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

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 Anthonys 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

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 cant 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

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 persons 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.