03/11/2020
A year ago today we lost our Director and teacher, Pius Adebola Adesanmi. Today, we are thinking of him—his writing, his teaching, and his Tweets.
James Yeku, professor at Kansas University, wrote this piece that includes his student’s review of “You’re Not a Country, Africa”. Carleton’s AFRI 3003 course, African Social and Political Thought taught by visiting professor Dr Samuel Oloruntoba, will be teaching a segment on Pius Adesanmi’s thoughts on humanism. The vessels of life that are our bodies will parish, but our words will live on.
“I remember the circumstances of Adesanmi’s death, and the way he appeared to preempt his final exit through a Facebook post. For some, this prescient sense of discernment has connections to Adesanmi’s acceptance of himself as Abiku, that “roaming spirit-child fated to repeated crossings between the worlds of the living and the dead”, as he describes it. Adesanmi proudly enthuses that, “my undergraduate students in North America can’t have enough of me”, whenever he taught J.P. Clark’s or Wole Soyinka’s ‘Abiku,’ foregrounding his own embodied iteration of the Yoruba worldview and spirituality that defined his writings”(Yeku, 2020).
