Is it mere coincidence or it’s predestination? Two great friends, the Late Brig. Noble Mayombo and Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem died in the same month of May. When Mayombo passed on, I remember Tajudeen calling me from Canada. He instructed me to go to Kabalagala and look after Fatumouta Toure, who was very close to Mayombo. He said he was on his way to Uganda for the burial of Mayombo. I asked him how possible it was for him to get to Uganda when burial arrangements were almost done. “I will be there” he said.

The last major event I had with Taju was in Gambia at the Heads of State Summit. There, Taju and a select group of Africans were to have dialogue with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and President Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia. After the interaction, we went out for tea. It was then that Taju walked over to Kagame against all the protocol and hugged him. Taju then began introducing us. When it was my turn, he said “I am sure you know this rebel Nkunda”. Kagame said “Yes I know him but you Taju, you are more of a rebel than him”. Ever since that time Taju preferred to ask me, whenever we spoke, how the jungle was treating me in apparent reference to my namesake Gen. Laurent Nkunda’s exploits in DR Congo.

Humour was always something you could not miss on Taju. We would sit until the wee hours of the morning listening to him speak about politics, theology, revolutionary movements and the collapse of what he so much wished to have-a united Africa.
Apparently the previous night before his death, he was speaking to friends. He was amused over the fighting between Uganda and Kenya over Migingo Island in Lake Victoria. In Kenya they pronounce the Island as ‘Mingingo’ while Ugandans call it ‘Migyingo’. And his question was “if the two neighbours can’t even pronounce the name of this island in the same way, why should they even want to fight over it”? And his question was: why not just blow the island off the map of Lake Victoria so that the anger that is consuming Ugandans and Kenyans could dissipate.
 
Alex De Waal, his close associate, writes that Taju was educated at Government Schools in Funtua from where he went to Bayero University, Kano, where he graduated with a first class honours degree. He was a winner of the Nigerian Government’s Merit Award as the best student of Political Science between 1980 and 1982.  But the climax of his stance on imperialism came when he applied for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. He challenged the selection committee by dressing in traditional Nigerian attire for his interview and demanded to know why the panel should want to associate someone like him with the name of the grand imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. To the credit of the Rhodes scholarship, they selected him, and Tajudeen spent three years at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, writing his DPhil degree in politics.

Taju’s email signature was “organize don’t agonize”; a true reflection of the manner in which the man wanted to be remembered. Already a Tajudeen Memorial Africa Union Fellowship for African activists and scholars has been established in remembrance of his contribution to the cause of liberating Africa. And for sure more of these will in the coming months come to create the biggest name of a man who knew it all.
 
At the time of his death he was putting on record how the liberation movements in Africa eventually took power and how they had failed to live up to their promises.

The author is a human rights expert and
specialist on refugee issues
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