That he won a Western Regional government scholarship to pursue his secondary school education is illustrative of his early scholastic promise and brilliance. Yet, the precocious youngster was thrown out of the Gbongan-Odeomu Anglican Grammar School, Gbongan, Osun State, in form 2, his scholarship withdrawn, following the political crisis in the region in the First Republic.
His father’s political affiliation had thrown into potential jeopardy the nascent educational career of Adebayo Biala Alamu Williams who had his primary school grounding at Saint Luke’s Anglican Primary School, also in Gbongan.
For a person of lesser fettle, determination, courage and persistence, that traumatic disruption of his educational trajectory could have had irretrievably terminal implications for his scholastic dreams and aspirations. Indeed, it is a measure of the tenaciousness that was later to define Williams’s life that, as he later narrated, ‘I made a vow that my colleagues would not take their GCE O’ Level School Certificate ahead of me. I made another promise that if they were ever going to the university at all, they would not get there ahead of me, and I was able to fulfill it. So I started training myself from 1966′.
Today, the son of Late Pa Johnson Bolarinwa Williams and late Mama Maria Oyedun Williams, born in the then rustic Gbongan community of Osun State, is one of Nigeria’s most respected Professors of the Arts and Humanities. His 75th birthday on September 9 attracted widespread attention, both within and beyond Nigeria.
Admitted into the then University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, in 1971, Williams obtained his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the institution, earning a PhD degree in the Theory of African Literature in 1983.
Easily one of Nigeria’s most prolific and incisive public intellectuals, Professor Williams is a widely published scholar, a consistently brilliant, provocative and audacious journalist and an academic of global repute and influence. The virility and pungency of his written word demonstrates and vindicates the oft-cited aphorism that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’.
Not content to bury his head in the safe obscurity and anonymity of the ivory tower, Professor Williams was one of those intellectuals who deployed his cerebral endowment in the struggle against the unjust annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, brutally oppressive military dictatorship and for the restoration of democratic governance to Nigeria.
It is in recognition of his sacrificial role in this regard that the President Bola Tinubu administration conferred on him the National Honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON).
His active involvement in journalism over the last five decades has served as the connecting link between his ideas and theories adumbrated in learned peer-reviewed journals and his articles published in newspapers and magazines accessible to the general public.
Even though he communicates through his journalism with a mass, largely non-scholarly audience, the sophistication and profundity of his popular writings still shine through. This is why the military dictatorships against which he wielded his pen did not hesitate to hound him into exile. Even then, it is a testimony to his courage and daring that he opted to return to the country to continue to participate in the struggle for democratic restoration before the expiration of military rule.
Professor Williams’s journalism has seen him writing brilliant and hard-hitting columns over the years for diverse mediums, including the Nigerian Tribune, Guardian, Newswatch, The News, Tempo, Africa Today and now The Nation newspaper. An accomplished novelist, his creative works, ‘The Year of the Locusts’ and ‘The Remains of the Last Emperor’ won the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) prizes for 1988 and 1995, respectively. His last novel was titled ‘Bulletin from the Land of Living Ghosts’. He was the winner of the Odunewu Prize for Informed Commentary in 1993 and 2000.
His stellar academic career encompasses Professor Williams serving for over two decades as a senior academic and professor at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, teaching and researching as Professor of Liberal Arts, Savannah College of Arts and Design, Georgia, USA, and research appointments at the University of Birmingham, England, and the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands. He has also held the Amy Freeman Lee Distinguished Chair of Fine Arts at the University of the Incarnate Word, Texas, USA.
He had offered public service leadership at various times as Director-General of the Africa Policy Group, a London-based think tank; Chairman, Lagos State Electoral Reform Panel; member, Board of Trustees, Obafemi Awolowo Institute of Governance and Public Policy, and Chairman, Lagos State Gubernatorial Advisory Committee.
In his native Gbongan that sprang him, he holds the revered traditional chieftaincy title of Asiwaju Otun Olufi of Gbonganland.
We agree that Professor Williams is long overdue to be conferred with the Honorary Fellowship of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL).