Professor Okello Oculi was a cat with many lives. He outlived the several dictators who would have been delighted to roast him, but he has left a long trail of inconsolable mourners in Nigeria where he made a home and raised a family. In all, he lived in Nigeria for 48 years, longer than he ever lived in the country of his birth, Uganda.
Okello was my valued friend. His notoriety as a pan-Africanist intellectual, poet, novelist and social engineer/political scientist preceded him. He had made a name at the Ahmadu Bello University as a lecturer and researcher of the progressive school. Those were the days when being a progressive intellectual was not necessarily a death sentence.
Before joining the faculty in ABU, two unrelated events had shown him that the path he had chosen was going to be full of exciting moments and possibly dangerous. On one occasion, he wanted to spend some time in Jamaica to see some friends and generally look around the West Indies but he was stopped at the airport and questioned about his revolutionary credentials. In those days, and, to some extent, even today, radical academics were always under suspicion of being subversive elements. They were therefore an endangered species in most countries governed by puppets of colonial overlords.
Idi Amin’s Uganda
The second event that threatened to terminate his trajectory as an academic happened in his native Uganda in 1971 when he was an assistant lecturer at his alma mater, Makerere University under the supervision of his mentor and head of department, Prof. Ali Mazrui.
General Idi Amin’s soldiers had stormed the faculty and picked up Okello. Usually, any person picked up like that would never be seen again. Luckily, Mazrui was then on good terms with Idi Amin and he quickly intervened to get Okello released.
Mazrui himself told the story: “One day, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, my secretary, Anna Gourlay, entered my office (as head of department of Political Science) and said anxiously that some soldiers were taking Okello away.
“I emerged from my office to face the two soldiers holding Okello. I enquired on whose authority they were picking up a member of my staff.
“‘Ask Captain Ochima’, one of the soldiers replied (Ochima was the soldier who had announced Amin’s coup in January 1971 on the radio.)
“When I failed to reach Ochima on the phone, the soldiers took Okello away. I next tried desperately to connect with Amin’s powerful private secretary, Henry Kyemba. In 1971, my own standing with Idi Amin’s regime was high. I was also a high profile Muslim intellectual in post-colonial Uganda. We waited anxiously for feedback. Finally, Amin’s private secretary called me to say Okello Oculi had been located and would be returning to Makerere within an hour. To our very great relief, we were reunited with Okello in reasonable time”
It was clear that the country’s new leaders were becoming increasingly dangerous and anti-intellectual. Luckily, Okello secured a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarship in 1972 for a fellowship and doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin, USA.
Nigerian Option
Okello was not a spring chicken when it came to cold calculation regarding how the reactionary governments of the third world behaved. With a PhD in Political Science in the bag, he knew that he would be considered even more dangerous in Idi Amin’s Uganda, so he opted to go to Nigeria. He was to spend the next 48 years of his life in the country.
One of Okello’s regrets about how Africans deplete the ranks of their intellectuals pertained to the loss of his friend, the historian Walter Rodney, whom he had advised not to return to Guyana but to join him, Okello, in exile in Nigeria or some other country. Rodney said he would return to Guyana and that nothing bad would happen.
But On June 13, 1980, Walter Rodney was killed in a car explosion in Georgetown. The Guyanan regime claimed that he was killed by a bomb which he intended to throw at a prison in order to release men arrested on treason charges. The rest of the world cried that Rodney was assassinated through a bomb planted by the regime in a radio provided by a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force. The elimination of Rodney was a major loss to the black race and to the progressive movement worldwide.
Okello enjoyed his time at ABU and many of his former students are now movers and shakers of the Nigerian society in many spheres of life. On leaving ABU, he served as a Review Editor for political science journals at the University of Abuja, guiding scholarly discourse and mentoring younger academics. He was also a regular columnist and member of the Editorial Board of Daily Trust newspaper. He played an important role in helping the newspaper inaugurate its now popular annual African of the Year prize.
His pioneering work with his Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Mock Summits—launched at Ahmadu Bello University and later extended to secondary schools and the African Union headquarters — earned him wide respect as an educator and innovator.
I had the good fortune of attending two of those summits and I could see, first hand, the incredible possibilities of making young secondary school students concentrate on the serious business of statesmanship. I have no doubt that in the years ahead, we are going to see some of those students in the corridors of power all over the country. The seed has been sown.
Late last year, Okello shared his dream to institute a Diallo Telli prize in honour of the first secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity. The prize, he said, would be awarded to an African diplomat who demonstrates creativity, courage, and brilliance in the service of the continent. It is hoped that his many friends across the wide spectrum of competencies he has traversed in the last 48 years will rally round the family to ensure that this dream together with his mock summits are sustained.
What better way to bid this great son of Africa goodnight than to fetch from his fount of poesy
Farewell
Gone with harmattan
It’s our season of song.
In its wake, we too begin to shed our leaves;
last year’s indulges with wickedness and joys;
like picking extra pieces of meat as a wife blew out
A flying ant from God’s left eye.
In our grill, we will cultivate four rows of sunsets and sunrises; massaging boils; pruning cracking toenails with each step; dredging old pots for stale ideals, soured horizons; whipping our appetite with toothy vengeance with each Time-out called.
The great Ali Mazrui proudly flaunted the characteristics he shared in common with Okello as follows: Both of them were political scientists with literary pursuits; both studied in the US; both reconnected in Africa through affiliation with Nigerian universities; both married Nigerian women and promoted pan-Africanism; both became East Africans in exile who met more abroad than in East Africa.
As Okello embarks on his last safari to collect his prize for a life well spent in the service of Africa, our prayerful thoughts are with his wife, Debra, his son, Sembene and his extended family in Uganda and the rest of Africa.
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