By Godini Gabriel Darah
Historian Professor Segun Osoba was to Ife University Campus what Comrade Ola Oni was to the University of Ibadan, and Professor Eskor Toyo to the Universities of Maiduguri and Calabar. Under their radical and humane mentoring several generations of young comrades discovered their revolutionary mission and fulfilled it. I was part of that holistic environment in Ife from 1978-1990.
Segun Osoba was trained in the foundational discipline of History in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Besides his professional career of University Lecturer and Scholar, Osoba was engaged in all the struggles and uprisings that defined the 30-year-long resistance against military dictatorship in Nigeria (1966-1999).
He is popularly remembered for the 1976 Minority Constitutional Report he co-authored with Yusuf Bala Usman of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. As a pragmatic dialectician, Osoba always contributed to progressive national development efforts. For example, Osoba, Omafume Onoge, and Bala Usman were the three Marxist scholars that the Nigerian Government sent to China in 1976 to understudy the Chinese system of education, probably with the intention to guide the Gen Obasanjo-Yar’ Adua military junta regime.
This is not the time to mourn but to mobilise.
Segun Osoba lived a long and fulfilled life; he qualifies for automatic admission into the Elysium of African Ancestral Heroes/Heroines.
May his exemplary life motivate, stir, sting, challenge, and provoke more Africans to accomplish the anti-imperialist revolution that awaits us all.
*G. G. Darah, a Professor of Literature in English, writes from Udje Heritage Centre, Ovwian Town, Delta State
