Olatunji Dare at 80: The Man of Letters as a Repairer

Wale Adebanwi

“My generation of students of the famed Mass Communication Department which included Waziri Adio, Simon Kolawole, Allwell Nwanwko, and Lanre Issa-Onilu, missed Olatunji Dare at the University of Lagos by one year. How unlucky we were! He left the department to join The Guardian at the end of the academic year that ended before we resumed in late 1988. However, we were lucky to have been ‘taught,’ in fact, ‘trained’ remotely by him through his engaging and compelling prose on the pages of The Guardian. What my generation and others learned from Dare was not taught only through the quality of his prose and his enthralling style, but also through the forceful, even if, often times, indirect ways in which he raised the most critical issues of social, political, and economic life…

With humour and subtlety, he showed the absurdity of power and privilege. At the same time, in a Marxian sense (though he was not dialectician in the Marxist tradition), he occasionally laughed at the failure of ordinary people to recognize their fundamental interests.”