Former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Professor Abubakar Adamu Rasheed, has called on Nigerian academics to confront the existential challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and digital authorship.
Speaking at the 60th anniversary and 41st annual conference of the English Scholars Association of Nigeria (ESAN) at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Prof. Rasheed paid tribute to literary icon Chinua Achebe, urging scholars to extend the frontiers of African literature into the digital age.
A Legacy of Intellectual Recovery
In his keynote address, Professor Rasheed, a former Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University Kano, stated that Achebe’s legacy transcends the writing of novels, describing him as the architect of a new African narrative.
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“Chinua Achebe is universally recognised as the father of modern African literature,” Rasheed said. “His achievement went beyond writing novels. He helped alter the terms upon which African experience entered world literature.”
He noted that one of the greatest contributions of modern African literature was the recovery of agency for African people.
“To narrate oneself can become an act of intellectual recovery,” he said, citing author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s warning about “the danger of a single story.”
“No individual is exhausted by one description, and no community can be adequately represented by one narrative,” Rasheed added. “If language gives identity expression, literature gives it memory and imaginative form.”
The Digital Frontier and Identity
Addressing the theme of the conference, ‘Rethinking Identity in Language, Literary and Communication Studies in the Digital Age,’ Prof. Rasheed argued that the digital transformation of society is not merely a technological shift for the humanities to adapt to but a profound humanistic problem.
He charged the scholars to move beyond nostalgia and engage with the complexities of the modern era.
“A diamond jubilee should not become an exercise in nostalgia,” he warned.
“The proper way to honour an intellectual inheritance is not to preserve it unchanged, but to extend it intelligently.”
According to him, the current generation of scholars must tackle algorithmic communication, misinformation, changing reading cultures, and the technological future of African languages.
“They confronted their historical moment. We must confront ours,” he charged.
A History of Scholarship
ESAN, founded in 1966 as the Nigeria English Studies Association, is marking 60 years of organised English scholarship in Nigeria.
Professor Rasheed recalled that the association’s pioneers grappled with colonial inheritance, linguistic plurality, and nation-building.
He noted that over the decades, Nigerian scholars have contributed significantly to global discourse in stylistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis.
“Human beings have always lived by stories. We tell stories about where we came from, what we have suffered, what we value and what we hope to become,” he concluded.
The three-day conference drew English scholars, linguists, and communication experts from across Nigeria and beyond to ABU Zaria.
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