Nigeria, July 24 -- On the morning of 14 May, in his quiet bedroom in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, an old man's breathing simply stopped; the final breath left the modest bedroom of a man who had spent ninety-two years refusing to let power write its own history.

Samuel Olusegun Osoba, one of Nigeria's best-known social historians, closed his eyes, and in that soft, unremarkable moment, Nigeria lost one of its last living links to a genuinely radical intellectual tradition.

He was not a kingmaker, not a court historian, but an academic rebel. For a generation of Nigerian scholars who came of age cutting their teeth on his lectures, who learned the mechanics of class struggle and colonial extraction rather than the genealogies of emirs, obas, ...