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The author argues that the familiar Vedantin and messiah image of Rāmakrsna Paramahamsa was created deliberately by his great disciple Svāmā Vivekananda. The Svāmī's global Hindu evangelical mission called for the master's respectable image. Hence he rejected the sincere rendering of the Paramahamsa's biographies by others and, in place of the rustic ecstatic but authentic Gadadhar, fabricated the awesome figure of a modern messiah-the Vedantin Paramahamsa. This paper documents the history of this purposive distortion.

Many Nigerian intellectuals have persisted in their enthusiasm for a socialist revolution. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists, novelists, and playwrights in the universities have presented a Marxist critique of the political economy and society, and variously sought to provide a socialist solution to the multiple ills of their country. For example, in November 1985, Tunji Braithwaite was insisting that ‘socialism is the way out’ of the political and economic impasse besetting the nation, while Krees Imodibie was claiming that the Nigerian social ethos expressed the essential precepts of socialism. Even the National Political Bureau appointed in 1986 by President Ibrahim Babangida to devise the blueprint of a civilian government for the 1990s recommended, albeit rejected by the Armed Forces Ruling Council, ‘that Nigeria should adopt a socialist socio-economic system’.

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