Former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) Prof Abubakar Adamu Rasheed has reechoed the great literary works of Chinua Achebe at the 41st and Diamond Jubilee of the English Scholars Association of Nigeria (ESAN) held at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
Prof Rasheed, also former Vice-Chancellor, Bayero University, Kano, gave a keynote address at the event.
Chinua Achebe is universally recognised as the “father of modern African literature” given his groundbreaking works in redefining how Africa is portrayed in world literature.
According to Prof Rasheed, Chinua Achebe’s achievements went beyond writing novels.
He explained that Achebe helped alter the terms upon which African experience entered world literature.
One of the great achievements of modern African literature, Prof Rasheed further said, was to recover the authority of Africans to represent African experience.
“To narrate oneself can become an act of intellectual recovery”, Rasheed emphasised.
He stated that literature also teaches intellectuals to resist what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie famously described as the danger of a single story.
“No individual is exhausted by one description, and no community can be adequately represented by one narrative”, he stressed.
He submitted that if language gives identity expression, literature gives it memory and imaginative form.
“Human beings have always lived by stories. We tell stories about where we came from, what we have suffered, what we value and what we hope to become”, he said.
Prof Rasheed said the ESAN’s 41st annual conference theme, ‘Rethinking Identity in Language, Literary and Communication Studies in the Digital Age’, raised questions that went far beyond technology.
Rasheed’s central argument of his keynote address was that the digital transformation of society should not be regarded merely as a technological development to which the humanities must somehow adjust.
He said the digital transformation of society is itself a profoundly humanistic problem because it is changing the ways in which human beings communicate, construct identify, produce knowledge, tell stories and understand themselves.
Prof Rasheed said the ESAN diamond jubilee provides an opportunity to celebrate sixty years of organised English scholarship in Nigeria, dating back to the Nigeria English Studies Association’s founding in 1966.
He recalled that the pioneers of English Studies in Nigeria confronted the intellectual challenges of their historical moment – colonial inheritance, African literary identity, linguistic plurality, curriculum, nation-building and others.
Over the decades, he also said, Nigerian scholars have contributed significantly to African literature, Nigerian English, stylistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language education and related fields.
But Prof Rasheed was however quick to point out that a diamond jubilee should not become an exercise in nostalgia.
According to him, the proper way to honour an intellectual inheritance is not to preserve it unchanged, but to extend it intelligently.
He said their predecessors confronted the questions of their age.
He stressed that the present generation must confront artificial intelligence, digital authorship, algorithmic communication, misinformation, changing reading cultures and the technological future of African languages.
“They confronted their historical moment. We must confront ours”, Prof Rasheed said.