HE was just 25 but an icon in a protest of global proportions in the early 1960s. It was not in Nigeria but in faraway Athens, known glibly as the birthplace of western civilisation. That was not the beginning of being first in his life.
That age marked the rage of the young. They fulminated against injustice. The thirst of democracy, or at least cooperative government, was hitting its stride. Paris stunned the haughty Charles De Gaulle and echoed the French Revolution, if not as savage. They didn’t need an English Poet like William Wordsworth to praise the protests as he did the event in 1789: “Bliss it was that dawn to be alive.”
London bowed to the unruly youngsters. New York boiled. The students of the world chose Greece that day, and a Nigerian, Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi, painted the front row African. The media, in their racist impulse, wondered who the hell was that black man to teach them about democracy. Adelusi-Adeluyi had to polish his Greek to understand the impudence.
He became the secretary general of the worldwide students body, and he hopped on the plane every week, building coalitions, learning about the world, breathing in different climates, absorbing cultures, hearing accents, confronting habits, teaching the world about him and his race. He logged over 100 countries from Asia to Europe to the Americas. On the eve of one of such trips, he just finished his exam at Ife. He was full of the sap of his years. And as he turns 80 in a few days, he acknowledges it was a time for ferment. As Plato wrote, “Youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.”
But even today, he is not the dynamo at 25, but he will not yield to the Chinese proverb that says, “When I was young I did not have the wisdom; when I was old I did not have the strength.” He set forth at dawn, apologies to Wole Soyinka. In his interview with me on TVC, he attributes it, the way all the modest do, to the grace of God. But it was that and more.
Adelusi-Adeluyi is known as the owner of Juli Pharmacy. It oversimplifies him. The Ekiti prince’s biography is packed like his compound name. Few who saw him at 25 probably thought he was a student of history, or philosophy or literature. But he chose pharmacy as a course of study, just as he had chosen language studies before he was 17 and was not admitted at Ibadan because he was too young. Before he became a pioneer student at Ife – now Obafemi Awolowo University – he was a broadcaster with the first broadcasting firm in Africa – WNBS-WNTV.
Throughout his life, he has been what commentators call a renaissance man. He is good at many things. He can do everything, an amoebic talent. The term originates from the time after the Middle Ages in Europe when the world hatched itself out of the chokehold of the Holy Roman Empire. The man of that age was Leonardo Dan Vinci. At Ife, my teacher, Professor Femi Omosini, described him as “the universal man of the Renaissance, a veritable jack of all trades and master of many.” He was everywhere: painting, philosophy, engineering, biology, physics, etc. We remember him mostly for his painting, especially Mona Lisa’s smile. That is the way with renaissance men in history like Michelangelo, Cicero, Benjamin Franklin, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson.
Adelusi-Adeluyi belongs to the Nigerian offering of the renaissance man. He is a writer, a humanist, an administrator, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a lawyer, journalist, philanthropist, democrat, student activist. He was a singer at church and teacher of the gospel, and was called oga dancer for his dancing prowess. But like all renaissance men and women, Adelusi-Adeluyi compressed his doings into one ensign: pharmacy. Just as Leonardo did his for painting. In his biography of Leonardo, former Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson says such persons “marry observation and imagination.” So he brought all his talents in engineering, philosophy and biology into that enigma of the Mona Lisa smile, and other paintings like Jesus.
We have had quite a few of such men from Adelusi-Adeluyi’s generation. Soyinka – writer, activist, actor, democrat. Rasheed Gbadamosi – entrepreneur, activist, playwright, philanthropist. Beko Ransome-Kuti – medic, philanthropist, activist. Mamman Vatsa – soldier, poet, statesman.
Few know – or remember – that Adelusi-Adeluyi made headlines as the first pharmacist to clock the first position in law school final exam. Or that he was the first Nigerian to own a company listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. Or that he was the first governor of Rotary Club all over Nigeria and much of West Africa. First, he was in the position of secretary general of the International Students Conference in the Hague.
He was in sense a political economist, earning the position once as chairman of Oodua Investments. He was also the first president of the West African Pharmacy Federation. He was the first pharmacist to be made minister of Health. He laments that he has not had company, since no pharmacist has risen to such a posh state since he ascended it. He also launched forays into international commerce; hence he became the national president of the Nigerian American Chamber of Commerce.
When Nigeria became independent, he was a boy. Sixty years after, he witnessed Nigeria in its ante-bellum maelstrom and become a maestro like quite a few. But he is evidence of some of the few fine men who did their bit. But his bit, like Soyinka, Achebe, J. P. Clark, Awolowo, Sam Amuka, Peter Enahoro and Anthony Enahoro, was big. The individual is important, but the nation still is a rot, because you have to harness the talent.
Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his famous essay, Civilisation, noted that “Each nation grows after its own genius.” He said “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.” That is the opposite of Tolstoy’s collective view of the past. The nation has geniuses as individuals but not as a soul. Here the individual genius has been alienated from the nation’s soul. Adelusi-Adeluyi, in the words of Emerson again, “hitched his wagon to a star.” He waxed into a star. Not his country. So while Soyinka calls that era “a wasted generation,” he can pick quite a few Adelusi-Adeluyis who hitched their wagons to a star. They did well for themselves, but the society has not done well for us through them.
– Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation