By Olu Obafemi
I celebrate my bosom friend and brother David Ker, frontline literary scholar, university and public administrator, profound intellectual and fine gentleman, as he turns Seventy today. We may not eat food (the Tiv’s king of cultural cuisines) dressed with bushmeat (Nyam toho) today, but I shall drink a little wine to your safe arrival at the portals of the Septuagenarian Season.
I do not find it difficult at all to write about my bosom friend and soulmate, David Iyornongu Ker, at any moment or time and from any perspective of our lives together, which is a year short of five decades today. What may be difficult for me to do is knowing what to leave out, as too private and what is for our ears only in our banter-full, laughter/humour, anecdote-surfeited fraternal lives together. This Tribute will therefore, in delivery strategy, oscillate between formal and direct manner of telling. This is because, it is one relationship that has transcended the confines of friendship and has smashed the borders of kinship, and everyone marginally close to us know that we are simply inseparable. Turning Seventy now, a year and two months after me, the only thing I may have had to lose is the privilege of taunting you with this thing about being a senior citizen, which you have now, handsomely become, with all his charms, relish and burdens. I am very delighted to welcome you, David, into colder clime of life; the Season of the Septuagenarians!
Believe me when I say that your friendship has meant so much to me, as it has revealed to me, the boundlessness and infiniteness of the possibilities inhered in a genuine relationship, a relationship that does not count costs, nullifying distances and spaces, domes and heights, in all their manifestations. The personal sacrifices you have made for this friendship to subtend are too weighty to debrief. Everyone knows that no Obafemi event—social, celebrative, creative and professional- is complete without your physical, moral and mental involvement. The effortless ease which your shorten the road between Makurdi, via Abuja to Ilorin, just to be there with me; the incredible way you meet 48 hours’ unfair deadlines to write Forewords, prefaces and blurbs to my books! The joy you show in take examination assignments in Ilorin (and I know elsewhere) even as Vice-Chancellor and Commissioner, for the love of our shared calling! How many shall I count in the plethora of Adepele’s teeth, dear David! Now, do I dare look forward to the future with trepidation, given the uncertainties and dangers in our insecure, violent theatre which our nation has now become, where every moment lived beyond every night, is a bounty, a bonus, even as are turning the final curve in the journey of life? There is so much to reveal, in appreciation of the friendship you offered me, dear Noriega, but the paradox of life also is that, there are always things to say, where time is in deficit, but yet, unlike now, where there is time in abundance, and words fail. Luckily, I have heard occasions—at your Golden and Diamond Jubilees, at your Valedictory from BSU and the lectures to which I have been invited to give speeches by your acolytes and disciples who read your mind and will, that hardly are there many others whom you would have preferred on such occasions to make speeches.
I borrow all those talks and lectures to express my feelings and joy on this occasion of your entry into the Winter Season. Yet it would be quite apposite and relieving to share a just a few of those features and attributes of your life, as I have lived them with you, not for your sake, but for what instruction it may bequeath to society, out there. I am not talking of those achievements of yours that Professor Google has eloquently provided—your fine scholarship, commitment to the academia and education generally, your erudition, capacity for eloquence, poetic brevity of profound thoughts; your perspicacious public intellectualism which carry the burdens of the underprivileged masses of society, your inimitable mentoring genius delivered in palpable humility and baritoneand elocution in the middle of laughter great humour, and so on. Need I engage in the obvious achievements which you have gathered in your strides without airs—as Head of English, Dean of Arts and of Students in ABU, during which one of your students, Professor Tanimu Abubakar, located you in in the frontier of literary scholarship /discourse thus: ‘Professor Ker should be credited with the singular prestige of consolidating a political pedagogy for the study of literature in ABU. He broadened and entrenched the pioneering works of late Professor Ogungbesan (our late teacher and mentor I add) by fusing literary studies with studies of History, Sociology and Drama. In his very important contribution, Professor Ker centred the grand-narratives of African discourse-History, politics and Ideology in the study of Literature’.
I have quoted this pithy and apt perception of your contribution to literary knowledge and academia only to foreground the origins of your unique apprehension of the sociology of power politics, power ploy and its strengths and limitations in our society, which as I have said two decades ago, you, among our generation, were the first to embrace, or is it confront. You came to grips very early in your career with power in its many trappings and demonstrated, in practice, how it can be used to nourish humanity. Your achievement as an academic, scholar, university administrator (as Deputy Vice- Chancellor and twice as Vice-Chancellor and in public service as a former Commissioner in the Benue State Government-veritable platforms/laboratories for locating your incredible deployment of positions of power for the advancement of the humanist enterprise. The goal has always been, for you, the improvement of the lot who come across you in the classroom, in university committees, in bureaucracies, in the dog-eat-dog field of politics and in the joyous social venues among friends. I had observed that your life aspirations and motivations, as those occasions of selfless service have proved, has always been informed by the vocation of the imagination, which compelled, you, to tell astory from which humanity feeds and drinks; to nourish the soul and help grow society achieve its possibilities, from whichever corner of it you are privileged to operate.
As you turn seventy, beginning to bend the curve of life downwards, inevitably, it is satisfying to see you return to your original and first love—from which I am proud to say as a witness that you never departed from—pedagogy, training the minds that owns the future, critical thinking, and mentoring of the generation that is succeeding ours. You dared, in advance of many of us too timid to do so, to venture into partisan politics, believing, as Tai Solarin once admonished, that ‘he who knows does, he who does not teaches. Your life in academia was devoted to teaching what you know and do, best. You plunged into the ajar-redjaws of a famished lion; into the murky waters of politics, out there, willing to dirty your hands so as to help clean up the filth in the society of your birth, and by extension, the nation. In the end, that society, whose grass-root wanted and believed in you, and whose political elite, cautiously embraced theinevitability of your capacious merit to help lift society, but only from a safe distance– was not ready for you.
And you must continue to embrace your profession, teaching, mentoring, lighting the way to society’s future. I join all the elders in our ‘tribe’ to welcome you to the Season of the Septuagenarians. And to you, Professor Mrs. Beatrice Ker, the cherub, who bears and tolerates your restless search for essence, these many decades, I can only say, keep on your enduring virtue of your fulfilment as this celebration is also for you.