The recent death of Alagba Adebayo Faleti, father, husband, writer, poet and journalist, may not qualify as a national event. Yet we have just lost a cultural hero whose lifestyle and literary activities cut right to the heart of living for oneself and living for others. Baba Faleti could pass for an ordinary farmer at Oke-Ogun as well as a professor of literature at any Ivy League university across the world. Thus, one immediate point of association with his memory is his easy going and quiet force of character that, I suspect, was molded in the cauldron of a life lived within the character-forming context of the Yoruba communal values and ethos. No wonder Alagba Faleti eventually became a sturdy man of culture whose understanding projected a firm conviction about what culture can enable us to do.
Alagba Faleti however lived at a time when our world is facing a huge transformation in terms of our connectedness with others around the globe. With increasing globalization, the world has enlarged beyond the confines of our cultural boundaries. Today, we say that the world is fast becoming a global village, but it is not a village in the sense we know a village to be. Due to the emergence of new technologies, events in several faraway places now have impacts on us and on what we think, in the same manner that things happening with our neighbours in a nearby village calls our attention instantly. If a particular type of president is elected in the United States, it automatically has several political implications for people in Africa. But the globe is also a village in a way that spells trouble for the nature of our world today. In a village, almost everyone is united by the same language and the same ethos. Thus, calling our world today a global village raises several issues that complicate the several cultural manifestations that define us. In a world where the Western/American culture has become the cultural norms, then globalization raises critical questions. And these are questions that we really need a man of culture like Adebayo Faleti to enable us answer.
Nigeria is a multicultural country that is in a cultural mess, a defining dimension of our collective predicament that has often been neglected for far too long. One side of this is that the various mother tongues now have a marginal role in our educational curricula and even in national life. I doubt whether Nigeria is alive to the cultural imperative of the national project that requires fashioning a common purpose by which we are to live together as one unified people, and by which we can forge ahead in terms of development and progress. This is where the person and the unfortunate death of Alagba Adebayo Faleti become crucial, at the juncture of globalization and the cultural imperatives of national development in Nigeria. Alagba Faleti grew to a ripe old age before passing on to join the ancestors. But that is not the news, even though his death would not elicit lamentation within the ontological and social requirements of the Yoruba people of Southwest Nigeria. I am however certain that Faleti’s sojourn here, as journalist, writer, poet, actor and translator, points far beyond his immediate Yoruba sociocultural milieu to the larger Nigerian cultural predicament.
Alagba Faleti’s name and achievements conjure similar names of cultural trailblazers—Akinwunmi Isola, Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo, Babs Fafunwa, Wande Abimbola, and many others who saw into the cultural malaise Nigeria is confronted with, but also used the culture as a viable instrument with which to pass the message about the increasing emasculation of culture in Nigeria’s national scheme of things. Take two examples. Ogunde’s travelling theatre not only carried a Yoruba cultural mandate but attempted to deploy the theatre as an instrument for conscientization on a national scale. Fafunwa’s solid effort to outline a link between mother tongue education and national development remains a critical testament to the relationship between culture, education and progress. But who remembers these icons again, except in theoretical scholarship? What has happened, for instance, to Professor Fafunwa’s cultural and educational experiment? Alagba Adebayo Faleti belongs in this illustrious and iconic group of those whose adherence to the imperatives cultural performances and the sustenance of cultural institutions should have formed a core of our national heritage as a state.
Yet, when we ought to celebrate Faleti’s death, we lament as we have lamented other heroes and heroines that Nigeria have died through our neglect and national inattention. We can sum up Faleti’s life’s works in two words—culture matters! If culture is the collective template that molds a people’s perception of who they are and what they are capable of doing, then Faleti’s existence was a continual reminder of what we ought to have made a primary occupation in our collective attempt at forging a national direction for ourselves. In his poetry, writing and acting, for example, Alagba Faleti was always attempting to jolt our cultural memory about the ongoing denial of our cultural being in the face of modernity. His translational energies were actively functional. Translating the Nigerian national anthem from English to Yorùbá could be seen as an attempt to facilitate the devolution of national memory into cultural acceptance. But more than this is his dedication to the unraveling of cultural memory, especially amongst the Yoruba. This reconnects us back to the emerging cultural hegemony of globalization and the danger it poses to cultural memories across the globe.
Take his one and only novel, Omo Olokun Esin (translated into the English as “The Freedom Fighter”) as a deep example of how culture matters to a nation. The novel, though set in the traditional Yoruba society of the 19th century, is an attempt to come to term with the dynamics of colonization and independence. Basorun Gaa, published in 2004, brings to life the dictatorial powers of a onetime chief in the Old Oyo Empire and how he was eliminated. In Magun (“Thunderbolt”), we saw the attempt to highlight the efficacy of a cultural antidote to adultery in the face of modernity.