OLUFEMI BABATUNDE AJAYI

Plant pathologist, deacon and the professor who taught Ibadan to save its cassava

In 1968, a young lecturer at the University of Ibadan noticed that the cassava on his family's farm outside Ogbomoso had begun to curl and yellow. Most people called it bad luck. Olufemi Ajayi called it a research question, and he spent the next forty years answering it.

The son of a Baptist catechist, he was the first in his family to finish secondary school, winning a place at Baptist Boys' High School in Abeokuta and then at University College, Ibadan. A doctorate in plant pathology at the University of Reading followed, and he returned home in 1967 with a suitcase of reference books and a promise to his father that he would not stay abroad. He kept it.

At Ibadan he rose from lecturer to professor, served a term as Dean of the Faculty of Science, and worked alongside the researchers at IITA on the diseases that threatened West Africa's staple crops. Students remembered his terrifying red pen, his habit of arriving at the laboratory at six in the morning, and the afternoons when he would take a whole class out to a farm to look at a single leaf for an hour. Dozens of his students now teach in universities from Lagos to Leeds.

He was a deacon for thirty years, a lifelong Baptist who nevertheless followed his wife, Titilayo, to Anglican harvest services every October and sang the hymns louder than anyone. He loved amala with ewedu, Fela's early records played at a respectable volume, and long arguments about cricket he had never seen played.

Prof. Ajayi died peacefully at home in Bodija in March 2023, four years after losing his wife. He is survived by his three children, nine grandchildren and a generation of scientists.

“A farmer who loses a crop has not lost luck. He has lost information. Go and find it.”