Christopher Okigbo and these times

 

 

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

 hekweekwe@hotmail.com

 

 Wednesday, May 19, 2004

 

Christopher Okigbo is Africa’s most celebrated poet. He occupied the poetry chair of the continent’s post-conquest literary academy in the 1960s – with Chinua Achebe in charge of the novel institute and Wole Soyinka as head of drama. Since then, Okigbo’s poetry has influenced the work of several poets including those of his generation such as brothers Michael and Kevin Echeruo, Pol Ndu and Okogbule Wonodi, and the post Biafra War generation poets especially Sesan Ajayi, Chukwuma Azuonye, Onuora Enekwe, Obiora Udechukwu, Chimalum Nwankwo, Akomaya Oko, Olu Oguibe, Esiaba Irobi, Niyi Osundare, Maik Nwosu, Uche Nduka, Obi Nwakanma, Nnorom Azuonye, and Nnamdi Azuonye. Elsewhere, Heavensgate, Okigbo’s 1962 published poetic work, enriches the concluding thoughts in Jay Wright’s poem, “Beginning Again” (from his The Homecoming Singer), an exquisite exploratory journey into self-discovery and African American affirmation across time and space. With immense satisfaction shown by the protagonist as he is about to complete his voyage, Wright quotes four lines from that Okigboan landmark signature inscribed in the opening cycle of poems in Heavensgate that has been the focus of intense scholarship and debates in the past 40 years:

 

And now my ancient rhythm calls me,

Out of ashes and fraternal death,

“Before you, mother Idoto,

naked I stand…

a prodigal…

lost in your legend…”

An aching prodigal,

Who would make miracles

To understand the simple given.

 

Okigbo was born in Ojoto, Igboland, eastern Nigeria, on 16 August 1932. He was the fourth child of James Okoye Okigbo, a schoolmaster in the local catholic primary school, and Anna Onugwalobi Okigbo, his most beloved mother who would impact so powerfully on his writing throughout his career. The work and memory of Okigbo’s maternal grandfather who was a priest of the local river goddess, Idoto, would have a profound impact on the artistic development of the future poet as we shall elaborate soon. Like his siblings including the renowned economist Pius Okigbo, Christopher Okigbo studied at the local primary school where his father worked. In 1945, he was admitted to the prestigious Umuahia Government College where he distinguished himself both academically and in sports, especially cricket. Umuahia holds the impressive record of having produced several other leading African artistic and literary figures such as sculptor and painter Ben Enwonwu, novelists Chinua Achebe, Chukwuemeka Ike, Chike Momah, Ken Saro Wiwa, Elechi Amadi and I.N.C. Aniebo, and novelist and poet Gabriel Okara.

 

On completion of his studies at Umuahia, Okigbo was admitted to the University of London College, Ibadan. As was the case earlier for schoolmate and close friend Chinua Achebe, Okigbo enrolled initially at Ibadan to study medicine but subsequently changed his course to the humanities, graduating in western classics in 1956. Okigbo had arrived at Ibadan that would within a few years play an historic contributory role in the transformation of African literature in the 20th century. Okigbo soon joined the impressive circle of bourgeoning writers, artists and scholars on the university student body, which included Achebe, Amadi, Ike, Momah, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, John Munonye, Nkem Nwankwo, Obi Wali and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. Later, Okigbo became a member of the Mbari Club of Writers and Artists (also based in Ibadan). Others in Mbari included Achebe, Soyinka and Clark-Bekederemo, as well as Ulli Beier (writer and critic), Janheinz Jahn (historian), Ezekiel Mphahlele (novelist, critic and academic), D.O. Fagunwa (novelist), Amos Tutuola (novelist), Demas Nwoko (sculptor and painter) and Uche Okeke (painter and poet).

 

Okigbo edited the university publication, University Weekly, where he often translated Latin and Greek poetry into English. He also contributed his own poetry to the literary and cultural journals Horn (which was then edited by Clark-Bekedermo), Black Orpheus (published by the Mbari Club), and Transition (then based at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda). In 1962, Okigbo published Heavensgate, which received extensive critical acclaim. The work is organised in five sections that map out the protagonist’s spiritual awakening and life’s quest: “The Passage”, “Initiations”,  “Watermaid”, “Lustra” and “Newcomer”. Four years earlier, shortly after his 26th birthday, Okigbo had come to the definitive conclusion of what he felt his life’s mission was, as he recalled later:

 

 [T]here was a stage when I found that I couldn’t be anything else. And I think that the turning point came in December 1958, when I knew that I couldn’t be anything else than a poet. It’s just like somebody who receives a call in the middle of the night to religious service, in order to become a priest … and I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I just obeyed.

 

Yet, besides his poetic engagement, Okigbo found time for other tasks and these are incredibly eclectic by any standard. Between 1956 and 1967, Okigbo had been a civil servant, a high school teacher, a literary journal editor, West African representative of the Cambridge University Press, business associate in an industrial enterprise, university librarian, co-founder (with Chinua Achebe) of a book publishing company, and a major in the Biafran resistance army. But it was his poetic work that preoccupied him.

 

Formidable Enterprise

 As the opening lines of “The Passage” demonstrate, Okigbo had indeed completed the necessary labour required, since his “call”, to embark on his exalted mission. The poet-protagonist would now await his initiation for service as he stands before the shrine of his people’s river goddess – the goddess, Okigbo reminds his readers, who is at once “the earth mother and … the mother of the whole family”:

 

BEFORE YOU, mother Idoto

naked I stand

before your watery presence,

a prodigal

 

leaning on an oilbean,

lost in legend.

 

Under your power wait I

on barefoot,

watchman for the watchword

at Heavensgate;

 

out of the depths my cry:

give ear and hearken …

  

“Earth mother” or the ani goddess is arguably the most revered deity in the Igbo pantheon as she is the guardian of society’s moral order. Okigbo’s maternal grandfather, as was indicated earlier, was the priest at the shrine where ani or Idoto is worshipped. Okigbo was perceived by his family at birth as the reincarnation of his grandfather who had died earlier. The grandson was therefore expected to “carry on” with the grandfather’s “duties” later on in his own life; hence, the very intensive and extensive scholarship of the spiritual and religious heritage of diverse experiences of humanity within which Okigbo’s formidable poetic enterprise is typecast. As the poet himself did recall, “… in 1958, when I started taking poetry very seriously, it was as though I had felt a sudden call to begin performing my full functions as the priest of Idoto.”

 

Femi Nzegwu has in Love, Motherhood and the African Heritage, her path breaking study on African literature, discussed the respective seminal contributions that Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa have made in the development of contemporary African literature, following decades of the European conquest and occupation of the continent. Beginning with Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe focuses on what Nzegwu describes as the “high drama of state politics, international politics and racism” discourses that have raged variously on invasions, seizures, expropriation, alienation, liberation and restoration. Nwapa, on the hand, launches a “new theatre of discourse focusing on women centrally” in her publication of Efuru (1966) – to interrogate the African “home or domestic life environment” in the wake of the occupation, as Nzegwu observes. Okigbo’s own contribution at this historic site of mapping out the tenets of Africa’s renaissance scholarship is his focus on redeeming the occupation’s assault on the spiritual embodiment of African existence. He must have wrestled intensely with that crucial question posed by the Umuofia interlocutor in Things Fall Apart when the Africans engaged a representative of the occupation regime in a brief exchange of ideas on the pressing existentialist subject of the day: “‘If we leave our gods and follow your god,’ asked another man, ‘who will protect us from the anger of our neglected gods and ancestors?’” Okigbo surely considered the answer to this question and other girding features related to it as a momentous task that required a rigorous and expansive scholarship of contemplation. He reflects upon these meditatively in Limits: “And the gods lie in state/And the gods lie in state/without the long-drum./And the gods lie/veiled only with mould,/behind the shrinehouse./Gods grow out,/abandoned;/And so do they …” 

 

The outcome of this scholarship would incorporate syncretic excursions across the world’s faiths and traditions with its discourse presenting at times daunting challenges to the reader. These features of Okigbo’s work have attracted criticism from some, a reaction that barely bothered the poet. Chinua Achebe has rightly observed that Okigbo “relished challenges and the more unusual or difficult the better it made him feel.” Okigbo would have equally felt unperturbed by those critics, particularly after his death in 1967, who indicate their “preference” for his last poem cycle (contained in Path of Thunder) in contrast to his earlier works on the grounds that the former was “less obscure.” Okigbo had insisted all along that all his published poetic output “are, in fact, organically related.” Whilst Path of Thunder was first published posthumously in 1968, there is no compelling evidence here to suggest that this is not also related organically to the ensemble of the Okigboan poetics that emerged in 1962. The robust poetic voice that had spoken so eloquently on his people’s fate since the overrun of their lands by those imperial forces from Europe was equally resilient to pronounce vigorously on the gathering storms of a catastrophic pogrom and genocidal war that this same people would confront as from 1966. The poet himself was killed defending the people’s homestead during the genocide.

 

In “Initiation”, the second segment of Heavensgate, the poet had articulated the salient features of the ideological facade of the occupation regime that is of utmost importance to his long-term project:

 

so comes John the Baptist

with bowl of salt water

preaching the gambit:

life without sin, without

 

life; which accepted,

way leads downward

down orthocenter

avoiding decisions

 

Or forms fourth angle –

duty, obligation:

 

square yields the moron,

fanatics and priests and popes,

organizing secretaries and

party managers; better still,

 

the rhombus – brothers and deacons,

liberal politicians,

selfish selfseekers – all who are good

doing nothing at all;

 

the quadrangle, the rest, me and you …

 

For Okigbo, the spiritual is a crucial sphere of resistance and restoration because the ultimate objective of the occupation’s assault is aimed at funnelling a catastrophic fault-line in the soul of the people – to complicate their determined process of recovery on the morrow of the restoration of independence. Such is the urgency felt that towards the end of the haunting meditations in Heavengate, Okigbo evokes his saintly mother’s memory, the poet’s organic link to his ministering duties at Idoto, to come to his aid: “Anna of the panel oblongs,/protect me/from them fucking angels;/protect me/my sandhouse and bones.” Evidently, Okigbo responds to this emergency by weaving a multi-layered and panoramic canvass of often-complex fabric of overarching architecture of ideas that meditate on the variegated ensemble, which constitutes the spiritual landscape of the people. This is the creative background from which the “poet of destiny”, about whom the distinguished critic Emmanuel Obiechina has discussed so authoritatively, emerges.

 

Okigbo’s poetry is constructed at various levels of an intensely pursued labour of exposition. It is studious, insightful, if not prophetic; it is vividly picturesque: intimate, interactive, meditatory or intercessional, dialogical, monological, haunting, incantatory, improvisational, lyrical. Okigbo sings, sings and sings. He is town crier, griot and diarist. He chronicles the people’s everyday life experiences – individual, at home with the family, during meditations, at school, on the farm, at the market place, their joys and celebrations, their aspirations, their fears, their disappointments, at the community, and the debates on society’s course of direction. Everything, everything, seems to be a subject for intense scrutiny and record. This explains the improvisational nature of Okigbo’s artistry with the numerous ellipses found in his poetry and sentences finishing off with dots: “out of the depths my cry:/give ear and hearken …”; “SILENT FACES at crossroads:/festivity in black …”; “where all roads meet:/festivity in black…”; “listening to the wind leaning/over its loveliest fragment …”  At some occasions, there is evidence that an update has occurred on an item in the chronicle and this is final (“& the cancelling out is complete.”) or that an entry is still provisional (“& this poem will be finished.”) It also explains the repetition of lines (“in palm grove”,  “& the mortar is not yet dry …”, “I was the sole witness to my homecoming …”), words and phrases in a number of his poem-sequences. Words often repeated include “mother”, “drums” (including variations on the word: “AND THE DRUMS”, “lament of the drums”, “the drums of curfew”, “Long-drums”, “The drums’ lament is”), “prodigal” (including variations on the word: “a prodigal”, “I have visited, the prodigal …”), “watchman”, “thunder” (with variations on the word: “thunder among the clouds”, “thunder of tanks”, “This day belongs to a miracle of thunder”, “Hurrah for thunder” “How does one say NO in thunder”),  “dance” and “elephants”.

 

INFLUENCES

 Okigbo’s scholarship and influences are expansive: Igbo history, mythology, art and philosophy, ancient world religious and spiritual heritage encompassing Kemet (ancient Egypt), Babylon, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Greece, Roman, and Nri, as well as the poetry of Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Yeats, Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound, Hopkins. Equally, Okigbo’s aesthetic appreciation was varied and virtuosic. As he wrote Heavensgate, Okigbo, who played the clarinet in jazz bands and whose favourite jazz composers included Ellington, Parker, Monk and Mingus, recalled that he was “working under the spell of the impressionist composers Debussy, Caesar, Franck, Ravel …” In his emotionally charged “Lament of the Lavender Mist” (from the “Four Canzones” – poems he wrote between 1957-61, published in Collected Poems, 1986), the pain of disenchanted love in a couple’s relationship in the final lines of the poem is palpable enough: “The moon has ascended between us-/Between two pines/That bow to each other;/Love with the moon has ascended,/Has fed on our solitary stems;/And we are now shadows/That cling to each other/But kiss the air only.” Was Okigbo listening to that insistent and captivating 2-way dialogue on “What Love” between Mingus (on bass) and Eric Dolphy (on bass clarinet) in the Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus seminal album as he worked on “Lament of the Lavender Mist”? If indeed he was, it is tempting to speculate that Mingus’s very humorous composition (on the same album) entitled “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” provided the creative musical background mood as Okigbo wrote his lines on Kepkanly, the 1930s’ primary school teacher in occupied Igboland. This is an exhilarating parody of the seeming confidence and exacting arrogance of the occupation regime, which the poet compares with Kepkanly’s mathematical preoccupation:

 

Elemental, united in vision

of present and future,

the pure line, whose innocence

denies inhibitions.

 

At confluences, of planes, the angle:

man loses man, loses vision;

 

…

 

Yet, just as Kepkanly’s experience later shows (the teacher dies of “excess of joy” after receiving salary arrears awarded by a salary-review commission appointed by the regime), the occupation’s apparent confidence – and therefore long term stability is at best tenuous; it does not have the organic stranglehold in society that it often portrays.

 

In 1964, Okigbo published Limits and Distances. Both continue to focus on the poet’s concerns in Heavensgate, namely the state of Igbo religion and culture, in the aftermath of the European invasion. The poet’s syncretic strides across the globe’s ancient cultures continue apace. Distances is an intrusive sequence of reminiscences as the protagonist embarks on his journey to accept the calling of his destiny. We are reminded time and time again that “I was the sole witness to my homecoming …” The journey is long and enduring with the vividly mixed fortunes that such an enterprise would entail. These include coming across sites of promising and profound beauty (“Serene lights on the other balcony:/redolent fountains bristling with signs-”) to encountering some danger and challenges (“DEATH LAY in ambush that evening in that island;/voice sought its echo that evening in that island”), to yet more danger and challenges in the form of some Ku-Klux Klan-like procession (with “an immense crucifix/of phosphorescent mantles:”) but arriving safely at last to an ecstatic welcome: “Come into my cavern,/Shake the mildew from hair;/Let your ear listen:/My mouth calls from a cavern …” The journey of initiation now over, the protagonist only knows that this signals the beginning of yet another phase of his mission, but the outcome of the one just completed is a resounding success as he, now a town-crier, proclaims:

 

I have fed out of the drum

I have drunk out of the cymbal

 

Kemet & Mbekwu

 Limits brings together two poems, “Siren Limits” and “Fragments out of Deluge”, which Okigbo had published earlier in the Transition journal. Limits is a lush environment with rich and lively flora of palm grove, bamboo towers, poplars, oil bean and the like. Rivers abound and it also boasts of an impressive birds’ sanctuary (sunbird, weaverbird, eagle) and a variety of other fauna including elephants, lions, and tortoise and python – “the twin-gods of the forest.” Significantly, the tortoise and the python, as well as the oil bean constitute the totems for the worship of the river goddess, Idoto. This evergreen lush of life is indeed the reverential and regenerative shrine for the priest of the goddess, engaged in his spiritual task of rebirth and service for the people. The poem is suffused with a range of symbolisms that underscore the solemnity of worship in progress: the “moonlit” sweep of night (very much associated with time for worship as well as the crucial egwu onwa story-telling sessions that children love – highlighted, in this context, with the presence of mbekwu nwa anuga, the wily tortoise), eggs (“I hang my egg-shells”), palm wine (“Hang, dripping with yesterupwine”), a tiger mask and a spear. As is the case with Okigbo’s symbolic interplays, they vary from the very subtle to the distinctly diverse and expansive. Here, he continues to pursue his interest in the image of the lioness (“Oblong-headed lioness-/No shield is proof against her-”), which he had begun in Heavensgate (“BRIGHT/with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness,/she answers,/wearing white light about her;/and the waves escort her,/my lioness,/crowned with moonlight”). Okigbo wishes to stress the element of continuity in some features of Igbo religion with those of Kemet, as he identifies with the “Kemet Thesis” of Igbo migratory origins. He introduces the popular Igbo story of the monkey and the lioness in this multi-layered imagery in which the former is so dazzled by the armpit of the latter that it destroys itself. The revered, powerful and dependable Idoto obviously protects her own. Idoto is linked to Isis, the Kemet goddess, who had the grand title of the lioness of the sacred assembly among others. Moonlight, eggs, pythons, wine, rivers, lush vegetation are also associated with the worship of Isis as is Idoto. Just as the worship of Isis and the feminine order in the ancient world was violently suppressed by an ascending patriarchy, so is the assault on Igboland by a rampaging occupation regime via its ideology of clearly anti-feminine/people religion:

 

Past the village orchard where

Flannagan

Preached the Pope’s message,

To where drowning nuns suspired,

Asking the key-word from stone;

& he said:

 

To sow the fireseed among the grasses,

& lo, to keep it till it burns out …

 

It is to uproot these fireseeds of conquest that Okigbo focuses on increasingly in his subsequent poetic enterprise. This began in 1965 with the poet’s “Lament of the Masks” which was his contribution to a book commemorating the life of W. B. Yeats, edited by D. E. Maxwell and S. B. Bushrui. Okigbo has until now referred to “the white elephant” or “the big white elephant” in a number of his poem sequences without much elaboration. This is now the opportunity to work through the theme which in this poem refers to Britain but could also be used in describing brutal African regimes as he certainly does in Path of Thunder. As usual, Okigbo picks up a “common thread” in his cyclical reading of history and juxtaposes seemingly disparate events along the course within a controlled time frame to enable us focus our mind more intensely on pressing issues of human concern. The “common thread” here is twin-track: aggression and universal human quest for justice. “Lament of the Masks” focuses simultaneously on Yeats on Britain in Ireland, that first outpost of the march of British imperialism, and on the challenges that those far-flung events have had, and would have on artists, like him, responding to the subsequent British outrage in Igboland/Africa. In that case, “Lament of the Masks” can also be read as a commentary by Okigbo on Britain in Igboland/Africa or Okigbo on the genocidal Nigerian state in Igboland. For the latter, it is important to note that Okigbo’s contribution to the Yeats study would have been written sometime between 1964-65; only two-three years after, Britain would emerge as the principal state that supported the devastating federal Nigerian military campaign against the Igbo which cost three million lives. The resplendent musicality of the lines on the resistance to the “white elephant” is vintage Okigbo:

 

THEY THOUGHT you would stop pursing the white elephant

They thought you would stop pursing the white elephant

But you pursued the white elephant without turning back –

You who chained the white elephant with your magic flute

You who trapped the white elephant like a common rabbit

You who sent the white elephant trembling into your net -

And stripped him of his horns, and made them your own

You who fashioned his horns into ivory trumpets -

They put yoy into eaves thatch

You split the thatch

They poured you into an iron mould;

 

For like the dog’s mouth you were never at rest,

Who, fighting a battle in front,

Mapped out, with dust-of-combat ahead of you,

The next battle field at the rear

 

That generations unborn

Might never taste steel –

 

Who converted a jungle into marble palaces

Who watered a dry valley and weeded its banks

 

…

 

Who transformed a desert into green pasture

Who commanded highways to pass thro the forest –

And will remain a mountain

Even in your sleep …

 

Before 1965 was over, Okigbo published Silences. He also planned to re-issue all his poems to date under the title Labyrinths. In his 4-page introduction to this new edition, Okigbo notes: “although these poems were written and published separately, they are, in fact, organically related.” Labyrinths, for him, is a “fable of [a person’s] perennial quest for fulfillment … [A] poet-protagonist is assumed throughout … a personage for whom the progression through ‘Heavensgate’ through ‘Limits’ through ‘Distances’ is like telling the beads of a rosary; except that the beads are neither stone nor agate but globules of anguish strung together in memory.” Labyrinths was not published until 1971, four years after the poet’s death. By the time it came out, Path of Thunder (his last poetic output published posthumously in 1968) and Silences were added to the volume.

 

Human Rights: Okigbo, Awolowo, Mazrui

Silences was Okigbo’s last publication before his death in 1967. Silences contains two poems – “Lament of the Silent Sisters” (first published in Transition in 1963), which is a variation on a number of themes on culture, love and spirituality that he had earlier dealt with in his works, and “Lament of the Drums”. The latter is a poem of support for two influential African politicians, Patrice Lumumba and Obafemi Awolowo. Lumumba was the leader of the Congolese liberation movement and prime minister of the new republic of the Congo. He was overthrown in a coup d’état shortly after the country’s restoration of independence by the then Colonel Mobutu, the army commander, with the complicity of a Belgian military garrison in the country. Mobutu would later transform himself to a dictator and embark on a 30-year old terrorisation of his population and the exploitation of the country that would rival that of Belgium King Leopold II the previous century. Awolowo was the Nigerian opposition leader who had been jailed for 10 years by the pro-British federal government for apparently plotting a coup in 1962. Okigbo is sceptical of the fairness of Awolowo’s trial and incarceration. He agrees with the popular opinion in the country that the government that had imprisoned Awolowo and rigged the general elections of 1964, still planned to impose its illegal rule on the people: “The robbers will strip us of our tendons!”; “The robbers will strip us of our thunder …”

 

Awolowo was later released from prison after a coup in 1966. But in a quirk in the course of history that would have been a fascinating challenge for Okigbo himself at his typewriter, if he had survived the war that broke out the following year, Awolowo failed to reciprocate Okigbo’s immense gesture of solidarity against state injustice and arbitrariness. Awolowo supported the federal Nigeria war against the Igbo. In return, he was appointed deputy chair of the war cabinet and minister of finance. He formulated the infamous federal war strategy of “starvation as weapon/quick kill” during the war which, three years on, accounted for 80 per cent of all Biafran three million casualties. After the defeat of Biafra in 1970, Awolowo continued with his virulent anti-Igbo project by enunciating the “financial/economic strangulation” of Igbo assets across Nigeria. All pre-war Igbo savings and other banking accounts were seized, which amounted to a ready income of £5 million in 1970 for the federal government. Finally, the Awolowo directive restricted any meaningful development activity in Igboland including the reconstruction of damaged transport, telecommunication, and power station facilities, a policy that all successive central governments in the country have strictly adhered to since 1970.

 

Whilst still on Biafra, we should recall that the most amazing criticism of Okigbo remains Ali Mazrui’s novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo. This is less of a pointed criticism of Okigbo’s poetry itself nor indeed of war, but on the poet’s active involvement in the Biafran resistance. In his imaginary trial of Okigbo after his death by some “after-life” tribunal, the novel attacks the poet for “putting society before art in his scale of values.” Furthermore, it alleges, “[n]o great artist has a right to carry patriotism to the extent of destroying his creative potential.” This is indeed a bewildering criticism coming from Mazrui who is an historian and political scientist. Artists and intellectuals over the ages have supported the defence of the human rights of their people. This defence has ranged from these artists and intellectuals focusing actively on the subject in their areas of creative endeavour to physically defending their people, their homeland, from whatever is perceived as a danger to these rights. The African humanity has been no exception to this trend. Alioune Diop, the critic and founding publisher of the respected Présence Africaine has noted that “[w]e live in an epoch where artists [and intellectuals] carry testaments, where they all more or less are committed.” African World artists and intellectuals such as Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, J.E.K. Aggrey, Zora Neale Hurston, John Coltrane, Molefi Kete Asante, Cheikh Anta Diop, George Washington Carver, Nina Simone, Amiri Baraka, Ella Fitzgerald, Walter Rodney, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Charles Mingus, Jomo Kenyatta, Thelonious Monk, Nelson Mandela, James Brown, Joe Henderson, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, King Jaja of Opobo, J.B. Danquah, Toni Morrison, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Louis Armstrong, Ben Enwonwu, Charlie Parker, Okot p’Bitek, Duke Ellington, Mbonu Ojike, George James, Aretha Franklin, Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Bishop, Eric Dolphy, Agostinho Neto, Billie Holiday, Bud Powell, Aimé Césaire, Martin Delaney, Nicolas Guillen, Sam Rivers, Amilcar Cabral, Mahaila Jackson, Ladipo Solanke, Booker Little, Jacob Carruthers, Steve Biko, Marcus Garvey, Casely Hayford, Dizzy Gillespie, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Martin Luther King, Countee Cullen, David Diop, Ivan Van Sertima, Tony Williams, Claude MacKay, Gani Fawehinmi, Oprah Winfrey, John Henrik Clarke, Jay Wright, James Africanus Beale Horton, Miles Davis, Theophile Obenga, Max Roach, Chancellor Williams, Malcolm X, Julius Nyerere, Maulana Karenga, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Jaki Byard, Léon Dumas, E. Franklin Frazier, C.L.R. James, Langston Hughes, Edward Wilmot Blyden and W.E.B. Du Bois have duly carried such “testaments” of commitment for the defence/liberation of threatened or subjugated African interests in recent history.

 

It was no different in Biafra, especially in defence of the people against the rampaging forces of genocide. Contrary to Mazrui’s assertion, no effort could have been nobler by anyone in Biafra, including artists and intellectuals, than to offer their support for such defence. There was therefore a concerted “testament” of commitment by several artists and intellectuals in support of the defence of Biafra as the following examples show: Flora Nwapa, Margaret Ekpo, Oyibo Odinammadu, Michael Echeruo, Ifeagwu Eke, S.J. Cookey, Alexander Madiebo, Sam Mbakwe, Janet Mokelu, Kalu Ezera, Philip Effiong, Ignatius Kogbara, Alvan Ikoku, Celestine Okwu, Ben Obumselu, Donatus Nwoga, N.U. Akpan, Adiele Afigbo, Michael Okpara, Akanu Ibiam, C.C. Mojekwu, Okoko Ndem, Ben Gbulie, Dennis Osadebe, Osita Osadebe, Chuba Okadigbo, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Okechukwu Ikejiani, Anthony Modebe, Alex Nwokedi, Chukwuedo Nwokolo, Pius Okigbo, Godian Ezekwe, Felix Oragwu, Ogbogu Kalu, Kevin Echeruo, Emmanuel Obiechina, Onuora Nzekwu, Chukuemeka Ike, Cyprian Ekwensi, Nkem Nwankwo, John Munonye, Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe, Onwuka Dike, Eni Njoku, and of course Christopher Okigbo.

 

Precursor

 The Biafra War is of immense importance in our understanding of the general direction of the tragic politics of post-conquest Africa, beginning from the mid-1960s. Biafra was a war of genocide, a war that was waged in its totality (with all the annihilative indices that this particular war strategy connotes) in a very limited expanse of territory (Africa’s most densely populated area outside the Nile valley) where the defenders did not have access to a “neutral” or friendly contiguous state for refuge and respite. This 1967-1970 war was waged by the federal Nigeria military government led by General Yakubu Gowon to overwhelm and destroy the corporate ability of the Igbo people to resist an aggression triggered, in the first place, because they were simply expressing their inalienable human right to freely decide to belong or not to belong to a political relationship, in the wake of the most horrendous spate of massacres the previous year. During the months of May-October 1966, about 100,000 Igbo were hunted down and killed in several northern towns and cities and elsewhere in the federation in a pogrom that was planned and executed by the northern Nigerian political, military and religious establishment with the full acquiescence of the Gowon junta in Lagos when it itself seized power on 29 July. Among these casualties were hundreds of teachers, students, pupils, civil servants, technicians, artists, military/security officers, medical doctors, nurses and other medical staff, and businesspeople. Most were killed in their houses, offices, businesses, schools, colleges and hospitals, as well as those who were attacked at railway stations and on trains, bus stations and buses, airports and in cars, lorries and on foot as they sought to escape the pogrom for their homeland in eastern Nigeria. Thousands of others sustained horrific injuries, several of whom were maimed for life. No known safe passages for the Igbo (victims or would-be victims) for flight or escape to their homeland from northern Nigeria or elsewhere in the country were planned, nor adhered to, by any of the prosecuting forces involved in the pogrom throughout the course of this tragedy.

 

In the Biafra War itself, three million Igbo were killed. This figure is much higher than the casualties recorded in each of the following four wars: Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, Angola and the Sudan. To underscore the brazen brutality of the war in Biafra, we should stress that the duration of each of the former conflicts mentioned was in fact much longer than Biafra’s. The three million dead represented a quarter of the Igbo population then. No Igbo family in the world escaped the immediate or long-term impact and consequences of this holocaust.

 

The Igbo, who 20 years earlier had been in the vanguard for the liberation of Nigeria from British conquest and occupation, had suffered an incalculable catastrophe – the second in 100 years since their defeat by British imperialism. No other African nation had suffered such a grand-scale holocaust and impoverishment in 200 years. King Leopold II of Belgium’s troops had in the 19th century killed three million Africans in the Congo as they ravaged the country in search of ivory, diamonds, and the like – enormous wealth that would soon transform the nascent Belgian state into a modern European country. This was the aftermath of conquest that David Diop, the irrepressible young Senegalese poet, had in mind in his dirge: “The white man killed my father/My father was strong/The white man raped my mother/My mother was beautiful.” But unlike the one nation-focused target of the Igbo genocide, the Congolese scourge included peoples from several nations and nationalities that make up contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Central African Republic, Angola and Zambia. Not even Diop, who did not live long enough to witness Biafra, would have comprehended the extent to which an African leadership would go to match or outstrip the grisly records of the Congo. Equally reprehensibly, this leadership which ordered and sustained the war against the Igbo and some of whose principal members still control and mal-administer contemporary Nigeria, had the unenviable record, not to talk of responsibility, of literally clearing the undergrowth from which the gruesome killing fields that have since littered Africa expanded almost inexorably. Biafra projects an enveloping shadow across Africa within which subsequent devastating wars and state-implosions on the continent have become ever more intelligible. The haunting milestones of Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire attest to this. These latter wars have resulted in the death of nine million Africans in the past 30 years.

 

Expression

 It is with the advantage of hindsight that the world is now able to evaluate the incredible foresightedness evident in Okigbo’s last poem cycle, Path of Thunder, which he worked on before the outbreak of the Biafra War. Okigbo had intensely studied the unfolding political development in Nigeria between 1962-66 particularly, and came out with a “testament”, his last “testament”, in which he “prophesised” a war as an outcome of the crisis and which, astonishingly, ended with a foreboding of his own likely death:

 

AND THE HORN may now paw the air howling goodbye …

 

For the Eagles are now in sight:

Shadows in the horizon –

 

THE ROBBERS are here in black sudden steps of showers, of caterpillar-

THE EAGLES have come again,

The eagles rain down on us –

 

POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of howitzers, of detonators-

 

THE EAGLES descend on us,

Bayonets and cannons –

 

THE ROBBERS descend on us to strip us of our laughter, of our thunder-

THE EAGLES have chosen their game,

Taken our concubines –

 

POLITICIANS are here in this iron dance of mortars, of generators –

 

THE EAGLES are suddenly there,

New stars of iron dawn;

 

So let the horn paw the air howling goodbye …

 

O mother mother Earth, unbind me, let this be

My last testament; let this be

The ram’s hidden wish to the sword the sword’s

Secret prayer to the scabbard –

…

 

AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore

Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;

The new star appears, foreshadows its going

Before a going and coming that goes on forever …

 

Christopher Okigbo’s contribution to the development of 20th century African literature is extraordinary given the slim volume of his “collected works” of poetry. Kevin Echeruo, the 22-year old poet and painter whose work was very much influenced by Okigbo and who, himself, was killed in 1969 fighting for the Biafran resistance, had dedicated the following poem, “Lament of an Artist,” to the memory of Okigbo soon after he fell at Ekwegbe, near the university town of Nsukka in 1967:

 

SHE will weep for me,

Now the priest has left

The palm grove,

Left the palm groves

The masks dance

In blood …

 

Am I Christ for sacrifice?

 

Lord hear our prayers,

Give the faithful departed

His pen and deep ink-pot

And Idoto shall rejoice

When ögbanje and his bangles

Shall return,

Never to leave

The Palm Grove for the Theatre.

 

The ögbanje has indeed since returned and on this occasion, thankfully, he does not seem to be in a hurry to depart soon.

 

 

Professor Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe, 2001