An Interview with Biodun Jeyifo

Yes... I take the view that the biographical is very important for scholars of Comparative Literature, or Literary and Cultural Studies, whose life experiences go back to the late colonial period, who have been lucky to have lived so long. I was born in 1946 and the first fourteen years of my life were lived in late colonial Nigeria, so I grew up in the period when there was an intensification of the nationalist movement. And I was born in Ibadan, which at that time was the biggest city in black Africa. There were around one and a half to two million people living there at that time, and it was also the cultural and intellectual capital of the country. So I grew up... I mean this is all in hindsight now, you know... but at the time I was growing up, at least for the first ten years of my life, I wasn’t that aware of the nationalist movement. I would say that it was ten years of my life, up to the upper levels of primary school. I think I had this—I don’t think this was clear to me, I think it was to my generation—this kind of romance of empire, you know, because of all of the rituals of the Eyal Peretz