Renowned literary critic, public intellectual and second President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Prof. Biodun Jeyifo, has died at the age of 80.
Although details surrounding his death were still sketchy at press time, the President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, Prof. Andrew Haruna, and one of his former students at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Prof. Wunmi Raji, confirmed that he passed away in Ibadan on February 11.
Haruna described Jeyifo—fondly known as “BJ”—as a distinguished scholar who had a remarkable academic career at the then University of Ife before later holding dual appointments at Cornell and Harvard Universities.
An international event had been held in his honour at the MUSON Centre on January 5, 2026, to mark his 80th birthday, celebrating his immense contributions to literary criticism and African intellectual thought.
Raji recalled Jeyifo’s leadership in ASUU, noting that he took the union to “revolutionary heights” and vigorously championed the cause of university workers during his tenure.
Efforts to obtain a reaction from the current ASUU President, Prof. Chris Piwuna, were unsuccessful as of the time of filing this report.
Born on January 5, 1946, Jeyifo was a Nigerian academic, critic, cultural theorist and specialist in world Anglophone literature and culture. He gained prominence in African and global academic circles for his incisive analyses of capitalist modernity and its social and cultural crises.
His published works include The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (1985); Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (2004); Things Fall Apart, Things Fall Together (2010); Against the Predators’ Republic: Political and Cultural Journalism, 2007–2013 (2016); and Apostrophes: To Friendship, Socialism and Democracy (2021).
Jeyifo’s intellectual depth and influence earned him comparisons with global postcolonial theorists. It has been said of him that “no other scholar, apart from Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, is more attentive to the radically dispersed accents or strands of thinking the post-colonial the way BJ has done.”
His death marks the end of an era in Nigerian and African literary scholarship.
By Friday Olokor
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