The Tejumola Olaniyan Foundation: Mapping the African Diaspora
The late Dr. Tejumola Olaniyan
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
It seems as if the late Tejumola Olaniyan — an internationally renowned UW-Madison professor who died unexpectedly in November 2019 —was meant for greatness. How else can one explain how he came from humble beginnings in a small village in central Nigeria to influence a generation of scholars while mapping out the cultural African Diaspora? Olaniyan always caught the eye of people who helped propel him further in his academic career.
Now that Olaniyan has passed, Moji Olaniyan, his widow, and others want to preserve the impact that his work has had as well as use the body of his work — and the spirit of his work — to propel future scholars forward, giving them the support that Teju once received. On April 9th, former colleagues and academics from across the United States plus friends, family and members of Madison’s African community met at Monona Terrace to commemorate Teju and to launch the Tejumola Olaniyan Foundation.
The Foundation will preserve and promote the scholarly work of Olaniyan, preserving much of it in Moji’s and his home before hopefully a permanent place will be found for it on the UW-Madison campus.
The foundation will also provide support to scholars.
"I want to promote scholars everywhere who are doing collaborative work,” Moji said. “Teju dedicated his life working with others from various fields, especially the up and coming, people who need to produce published papers. He made it worth their while and opened up avenues for other people to be established in the field no matter if they are Black or White or Hispanic. His Indian colleague was crying on Saturday and telling me how she wouldn’t be where she is now if it weren’t for Teju. All of those stories make us believe that we must continue that spirit of collaboration instead of competition.”
And third, the foundation will provide focused financial support to scholars to continue their scholarly work.
“Finally and very dear to my heart also is mentoring the next generation of scholars” Moji said. “We want to preserve, promote and empower the next generation of scholars. We’re already hard at work on that. For the first time in the history of UW-Madison, we now have endowment funding for students studying in the area of Global Black Culture Studies to go and do research anywhere in the world. The faculty group that is charged with that through the African Studies Program on campus actually awarded the first award for that endowed fund. They announced the first awardee at the luncheon.”
Right now, the hub of the Tejumola Olaniyan Foundation is in Moji’s home.
“We have the reading group right now of students who are doing the cultural work,” Moji said. “And they are from California, Mississippi, Cornell and a bunch from Nigeria. We are going to bring them here to Madison. And they are all working on Black Cultural Studies. They formed a reading group and they read his work to help them with their understanding of what their Ph,D.s will be about. They meet in the house now. This is a three-level house. And we have dedicated half of the house to the foundation work while we are looking for a permanent home. They meet here every last Saturday of the month and they are here for about 3-4 hours discussing his work.”
The Foundation will also work to preserve and continue the work that Teju initiated in his native Nigeria.
“One of the things that Teju did while he was alive was he spent 6-7 weeks on the campus in Nigeria,” Moji said. “He worked on competency building. He has an agreement with the campus he can use the classrooms and lecture rooms for that 6-7 week period. And then they would have about 25 graduate students from across Nigeria attend this institute. He would take all kinds of things from the U.S. to Nigeria and share them with the students. He would leave them with books that they would need for the next steps on how to be a graduate student. We want to begin something like that. We want to have some graduate students from here go back.”
And it was always about what impact Teju could have on other scholars.
“Teju was always a bookworm,” Moji said. “He enjoyed so much looking at things differently. The faculty panel on Saturday was titled, ‘Reflections on Teju as a Thought Provocateur someone who would provoke you to think again. He just provoked you to think frankly.”
And he enabled the scholarship of others through books.
“Every time he would go back home to Nigeria for the summer — he went back once per year — he would start packing up his luggage,” Moji recalled. “He would take two full boxes of books. He took nothing but books back to Nigeria. He did not take anything from me for my parents. He would just dismiss me. He would wait until the last minute and I would be laughing at him to get the boxes on the scales to make sure the weight wasn’t over. He would carry books back to Nigeria and I can only link it back to his humble beginnings. He had a thirst for knowledge and where books can take you. I can only link it to the very fact that he read himself out of poverty. He was very, very passionate about education.”
Teju Olaniyan’s scholarly impact may continue well into the future. Moji Olaniyan will not let Teju’s knowledge and spirit die with him. And like any writer, Teju has conducted research that has yet to be published.
“He looked at things through the African Diasporic lens,” Moji observed. “And he was very intentional. One of the things that is going on right now is that in his computer —I haven’t had the heart to poke around in it — I asked one of the younger colleagues of his to come and look for a manuscript on his computer. He has a contract to publish it with Uganda press. The young man came and spent four hours. He said, ‘Oh my God. This is a forest of research dating back to 1988. It is very well organized and someone should harvest that stuff.’ He was just very intentional.”
Teju’s impact will be felt for generations of scholars to come.
While Teju left many resources for present and future scholars, it is not enough to fully carry out Tejumola Olaniyan’s legacy. People can make donations at the foundation’s website, https://www.olaniyanfoundation.org/. For more information, email Moji Olaniyan at moji.olaniyan@gmail.com.
