DEATH, NATIONAL MEMORY AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HEROISM

Ancestors occupy a central place in African cosmologies and social practices. The death and the remembrance of Lt-Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, the Military Governor of Western Nigeria who was killed during a military coup in 1966, is used in this essay to critique the assumptions in the literature about ancestors, by linking the recent dead with the long dead in a lineage of ancestral practices. I focus on the ways in which Fajuyi's death was used in constructing ethno-national memory and history in the context Of 21st-century challenges faced by the Yoruba in national politics, particularly in relation to unequal ethno-regional relations. Here, I attempt to historicize commemoration as a ritual of ethno-national validation.