Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem (1961–2009): A celebration of a life in full

Over the last 40 days, I have read many eulogies and tributes to our brother, comrade and friend Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem since his rather untimely departure on 25 May 2009. Several times I have put pen to paper to share my own thoughts on Taju with his legion of friends and well-wishers, but on each occasion words have certainly failed me. I suppose since that morning when Bisi and I received the call from Nairobi, I have been in deliberate denial. Even after joining friends and family to receive the body in Lagos, travelling to Abuja, and subsequently Funtua, I still refused to confront the reality of this painful loss. My mind kept going back to our last conversation when he was with our mutual friend and brother, Napoleon Abdulai in Monrovia, just a week before the loss. And I kept asking myself, did he have a premonition that this was about to happen? Was he sending a message when he kept imploring me to watch my security more tightly because the goons who had taken over the political landscape in Nigeria were capable of resorting to any means of retaining what had been stolen? Why, I kept ruminating, do bad things happen to good people? Why must we always lose our brightest and best to the pervasive evil machinations stalking Africa? Why, why, why?

But as the eulogies poured in on the specially created Pambazuka News webpage and several other online outlets, the palpable sense of despair and sadness turned into a celebration of a life in full culminating in today’s 40th-day commemoration across the continent. The tributes have come from far and near, remarking Taju’s pan-African internationalism, his obsession with the unity of the African peoples, his quest for institution-building, his insistence on speaking truth to power and his refusal to be a cloistered academic and suffer fools gladly. Many of the tributes, from presidents to plebeians, made this abundantly clear.

Taju deserved no less. An accomplished scholar, exceptional teacher, Pan-Africanist ideologue, democracy activist and military scourge, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem was supremely unstuffy and approachable, irreverent and impatient of protocol, gregarious and boisterous, all at once. Taju was infectiously witty, and at the same time deeply caring for people. Not for him the lazy intellectualism of cloistered academics. He was very much at home writing in The New Vision and Daily Trust as he was espousing political theory in the Review of African Political Economy, Africa World Review and African Marxist. His intellect remained public property to the very last, exemplified by his refusal to suffer Africa’s real and putative dictators and their multinational collaborators gladly.

Born in Funtua, Katsina State on 6 January 1961, Tajudeen attended the Government Secondary School in Funtua and then Bayero University, Kano, where he distinguished himself with a first-class honours degree in Political Science. He later broke new ground by becoming the first Rhodes scholar from the north of Nigeria at Oxford University, where he earned his doctorate in Politics. Instead of pursuing the traditional route through the academy followed by many of his friends and colleagues, Taju was always breaking new ground and refused to be boxed into the cage of sterile scholarship. Not for him the pursuit of single issue or agenda. He was always in search of solutions, in a variety of ways. Though he never committed to a life in the academy, he was very much involved in 1980s debates on the Left, the state, class, the market and imperialism and subsequently in 1980s and 1990s debates on democratisation and development. He remained ever so critical of the tyranny of borrowed paradigms within social science research. Instead, he chose a life dedicated to the transformation of the African continent.

As an institution-builder, Taju was instrumental to the establishment of several research bodies, activist institutions and associations in Africa. He was the founder and first coordinator of the Africa Research Information Bureau, the founding chairperson of the Centre for Democracy and Development, the general secretary of the Pan African Movement Secretariat, the co-director of Justice Africa, the director of the Pan African Development Education and Advocacy Programme (PADEAP), the founder and proprietor of Hauwa Community College and a major driving force behind the Organisation of African Unity's (OAU) transformation into the African Union (AU). In between all this, as well as being a doting father and loving husband, he also served as a member and later as the chair of the board of governors of his daughters’ school in Haringey Borough, London.

Even as his ideas evolved with maturity, he never abandoned the goals of a socialist and united Africa, even when conventional wisdom swung heavily against these ideals. A visionary leader, Taju's enduring legacy remained his courage of conviction and the clarity of his ideas, through which he brilliantly and lucidly laid out the scientific necessity of a united and socialist Africa. In several of his academic and newspaper writings, particularly 'Pan-Africanism: Politics, Economy and Social Change in the 21st Century' (Zed Books 1996) arguably his magnum opus and his Pan-African Postcard articles, Taju exposed and attacked the imperialism of Western social science as a pernicious and yet subtle form of domination masquerading as the promotion of African division. Taju was a force of nature at social and intellectual gatherings, always ready to denounce the so-called scientific objectivity of the social sciences as a screen for the pursuit of particularistic, imperialistic interests. But even as he remained consistently critical of Western social science, his scholarship bore no malice as he always engaged the same Western scholars, activists and institutions on their own turf. That probably explained his last, and to many, somewhat inexplicable, relationship with the United Nations Millennium Campaign.

Taju exhibited total commitment to democratic ideals. As much as he recognised the inability of the average African politician, especially in his troubled homeland, he never used their inability as an excuse for justifying military intervention, as several other colleagues of ours did unashamedly. Indeed, at a time when many of his colleagues from his Bayero days were the ones hunting us in the UK and across the world either as military officers or security apparatchiks for perpetuating military domination, Taju stood respectably clear of such machinations, remaining a scourge of military dictators and a huge source of hope and inspiration to younger academics.

For Taju, the personal was also political. As someone quite close to him for two decades, I can say that he was infectious with his love and care. He doted over family and friends. He taught many of us what true friendship is. Although eclectic in his choice of friends, he would always ask after his friends and even casual acquaintances. As he traversed the length and breadth of the continent, Taju would always be in touch with friends in every city. That booming voice on the phone was unmistakable, even if you had not seen him for years. My abiding memory of the soft Taju was at his wedding in Tunis. I knew Mounira was special the day Taju said to me 'Man, this thing is getting serious and I think marriage is on the cards.' It was three days of revelry and fun in the Chaieb family home in Tunis with the father subjecting many of us to funny but critical scrutiny.

Of course, Taju was not without his own foibles. He was human, after all. Many who knew him remarked his less than organised lifestyle, characterised by a penchant for missing his flights and driving rough (I even held myself responsible as the one who taught Taju how to drive). But these foibles paled into insignificance placed side-by-side with Taju’s extraordinary qualities. In my two decades of knowing Taju, he was always ruminating about how to make a fundamental difference in the lives of ordinary people. He was for the most part the conscience of ordinary people and a scourge of powerful people. Many who know him can affirm Taju’s irreverent treatment of so-called powerful people. I encountered him speaking with Olusegun Obasanjo, Thabo Mbeki, Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, Wole Soyinka and Meles Zenawi, and he was one African who never wavered in speaking truth to power, often in the most undiplomatic manner.

The greatest tribute we can pay this African exemplar is to continue in his ways by building institutions and structures that will serve the purpose of our time and beyond. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who once said, 'Not to participate in the major events of one’s time is not to have lived.' Taju not only participated in the major events of his time, he charted and shaped the course of many events through his scholarship and activism. Africa has lost a gem, indeed one of the brightest in our firmament. The democratic struggle in Nigeria has been short-changed by this consistent advocate of empowerment for the ordinary people. But the struggle must continue. And as he would have told all of us here, 'Don't agonise, organise!'

* Kayode Fayemi is the former director of the Centre for Democracy and Development.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.