Eskor Toyo: an Icon Departs
…as the “Lenin of Africa” dies at 86 [1] Prof Eskor Toyo, fondly called “the Lenin of Africa” by his close associates, died at 7.30pm on December 7, aged 86 years. He had been bedridden for over two years, after a series of strokes. Before ill health made it impossible for his powerful brain and limbs to work, he was one of the most brilliant and committed revolutionaries on the Nigerian Left. Named Asuquo Ita at birth in 1929, at Oron, within the present day Akwa Ibom, Eskor (a “guy name” for Asuquo) became an activist in his teens, inspired by the radical Zikist National Vanguard, in the 1940s. He became one of the first set of Marxists in the country by the late 1940s and mobilised solidarity for the families of coal miners killed at Iva Valley on November 18, 1949, on the platform of the National Emergency Committee constituted in the wake of the massacre. He was equally at the barricades during the 1950 strike of the Amalgamated Union of UAC African Workers’ ...