ABU, English scholars hold 41st annual conference
The English Scholars’ Association of Nigeria (ESAN) in collaboration with Department of English and Literary Studies, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria have held 41st Annual Conference and Diamond Jubilee.
The conference, with the theme: “Rethinking Identity in Language, Literary and Communication Studies in the Digital Age”, took place on Tuesday, 8th September, 2026, at the CBN Centre for Economics and Finance, Main Campus, Samaru, Zaria.
Speaking at the occasion, Vice-Chancellor Ahmadu Bello University, Prof Adamu Ahmed, said the gathering was more than a conference, but an invitation to rethink “who we are, how we represent ourselves, and how our identities are being reshaped by rapidly changing world of digital communication”.
Prof Ahmed also said for generations, language and literature have been among the principal ways through which individuals and societies have lived.
He congratulated ESAN and the Department of English and Literary Studies for organizing the conference and wished all participants successful deliberations.
Earlier in a welcome address, the Chairman, Local Organizing Committee, Prof Saminu Isyaku, said the theme of the conference is both timely and intellectually significant.
Prof Saminu emphasized that in an increasingly digital and interconnected world, traditional understandings of identity are being continually negotiated, reconstructed and represented through language, literary practices, media and diverse forms of communication.
He said the conference would provide a vibrant intellectual platform for scholars, researchers, teachers, practitioners and postgraduate students to interrogate these transformations from diverse theoretical, methodological and disciplinary perspectives.
Prof Saminu thanked the Vice-Chancellor and the University Management for their unwavering support towards the success of the conference.
In a keynote speech, the former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof Abubakar Adamu Rasheed, explained that English was both a language of colonial history and indispensable language of national and international communication.
Prof Rasheed, who is also the former Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, also explained that literary canon has been shaped largely elsewhere, yet Nigerian students belonged to histories and traditions extending far beyond those canons.
According to Rasheed, universities existed within one of the world’s most linguistically diversed societies, where English increasingly perform the paradoxical role of an inherited language being appropriated with distinctly Nigerian language.
He said the achievements of those scholars was not to resolve the tension permanently, their achievement was to make the tension intellectually productive.
He reiterated that over the years, Nigerian scholarship helped consolidate African literature as an indispensable field of enquiry, which expanded the study of Nigeria and African varieties of English.
He said English in Nigeria ceased to be merely a borrowed linguistic possession, but an object of creative appropriation, scholarly interrogation and cultural negotiation.
Prof Rasheed thanked the organizers for the opportunity given to him and wished fruitful discussions.
Highpoint of the event was induction of four of distinguished scholars as fellows of ESAN and an honorary conferment of the ESAN fellowship on the Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Prof Adamu Ahmed.
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Public Affairs Directorate,
Office of the Vice-Chancellor,
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
(NEWS/AHW)
Wednesday, 9th September, 2026
