In April 2024, Professor Olutayo Charles Adesina, a historian at the University of Ibadan, won a Global Professorship award: £879,117 (about ₦1.8 billion).
The project is titled, “The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and the Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century”.
The project traces its historical roots to the 1940s–60s heyday of University College Ibadan (UCI), a time when the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, language and literature underwent significant transformations..Adesina argues that three strands fed each other: (1) nationalist historiography—scholars writing Ibadan and Nigeria into world history; (2) academic social science—UCI’s seminars, archives and field methods; and (3) vernacular knowledge—the city itself: family histories, praise poetry, guild memories and neighbourhood archives.
For the first time, he highlights that these were not separate layers but mutually constitutive social epistemologies, with the “town” and “gown” collaboratively defining what counted as knowledge. His sources move from canonical works of Ajayi, Biobaku seminars, Atanda’s studies to extensive interviews and fieldwork across Ibadan’s quarters, markets and compounds.
The award matters beyond the sum. At a time when decolonisation debates can sound abstract, Adesina roots them in Ibadan streets and UCI corridors, showing how social knowledge was actually built. The project promises books, open archives and collaborations connecting campus to city. In doing so, it gives Nigeria a case study and the world a method—for how universities and their host cities might think together, then and now.
I spoke with him today, Saturday, 21 March, 2026, about the project and his relationship with the Central Council of Ibadan Indigenes (CCII). Suave and intellectually humble, Professor Adesina left me with notes I’ll one day fold into my memoir as a university administrator.
Professor Adesina has already presented this Ibadan project to scholars at the King’s College London and Oxford. On December 4, 2025 at the African Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, he gave “The Town and Gown in Ibadan: Re-exploring the Legends of Mbari. Earlier, on March 5, 2025, at a lunchtime seminar in Roscoe Building 2.3, University of Manchester, he presented “University College Ibadan: The ‘Gown’ in the People’s Imagination, 1948–1962.
- Tunji Oladejo, mnipr, JP, writes from the University of Ibadan and is the Chairman of The Progressive Forum, Ibadan (TPFI) via oladejo65@gmail.com. 08077284442
