This is a combined personal tribute to two personages: Flt-Lt Jerry Rawlings and Comrade Bassey Ekpo Bassey. I have isolated them from a longer list of personages that came to my mind to publicly remember—at this time. The other personages, all comrades, who will also be publicly remembered in no distant future, include Curtis Joseph, Arthur Nwankwo, Olu Adebayo, Bjorn Beckman, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Ingrid Essien-Obot, Yima Sen and Balarabe Musa.
Although this is a combined personal tribute to two personages, the circumstances in which I met them were not personal. It is these circumstances and what happened immediately after our first meetings—rather than the personages’ careers and larger lives—that are here remembered. I met Comrade Bassey Ekpo Bassey in Zaria at the end of July 1977.
Comrade Bassey and I came separately to the 1977 Zaria Conference from Calabar with nothing more than the knowledge of each other’s existence as young Nigerian Marxists. He was the Political Editor of the Cross River State-owned Nigerian Chronicle and a popular Leftist columnist of the newspaper. He called his weekly column “Unpopular Essays”, inspired, perhaps, by Bertrand Russell’s collected essays of the same title.
To cut this long still shorter, a few days after the Zaria Conference, the Calabar Group of Socialists was formed and the Movement for Progressive Nigeria was transformed into a radical Students’ Movement in the University of Calabar. Bassey and I had discussed these steps on our way from Zaria to Onitsha. Now joined by Bene, we hit the ground running, as they say. Agenda? Peoples Power and Socialist Revolution.
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