Steve Obidi: Poetry Lines In Search Of The Truth (Book Review)

 Book: Eternal Truth (Poems: Timeless Wisdom for Purposeful Living)

Author: Steve Obidi

Pagination: 122

Publishers: Kraft Books Limited, Ibadan, Nigeria

Reviewer: Banji Ojewale

Russian-American poet and essayist, Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, going on to become, in 1991, the United States Poet Laureate, which classed him ‘’among the most influential Christian poets of the 20^th Century.’’

1966 Coups, Biafra, Asaba Massacre, Gowon: Adebayo Williams On Chuks Iloegbunam

 By Tony Eluemunor

“I prefer to be accused of nastiness than to join in the national pastime of consigning events of a few years ago into prehistory”.

Chinua Achebe wrote that in the preface of his book of essays, Morning  Yet On Creation Day, to explain why he had to include essays on the Biafran war in that book instead of pretending that the war never took place. Here and now, I second that “motion”.

Tatalo Alamu, in his offering titled Ninety Bouquets For Jack Gowon published in the Nation newspaper of November 3, 2024, poured encomiums on Gen. Yakubu Gowon, “as an exemplary Nigerian patriot, a soldier-statesman and shining moral exemplar for many of his compatriots”.

Nigeria: What Goes Around Comes Aground

 By Banji Ojewale

The universal principle is that what goes around must come around. It’s not so in Nigeria. With us, when what goes around goes around, it does more than coming around. As it makes its return trip, it comes aground, grounding us, leveling us, merging us with the miry mud. That’s been our history, extinct and extant. We create institutions and leaders from this back-and-forth process to form an endless cycle of vulnerable links in governance that remind us of the late poet, Christopher Okigbo: 

"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…" (Path of Thunder).

*Buhari and Tinubu 

 It is a villainous star, a kind of abiku that gives short-lived joy to the home where it surfaces at birth. Our present is nothing but a horrid replay of our unpleasant encounters with the past. We sowed the wind yesterday; but today we’re reaping what’s greater than the wind. What goes around comes aground.

Federal Republic of Fiction @ 63

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria is fiction. The country’s Constitution has been transferred to a new shelf in the library: the shelf containing fictional works. The latter-day patriots of Nigeria can cry all they want against me, but in this instance I only choose to stand solidly in solidarity with the words that Samuel Johnson uttered on the evening of April 7, 1775, to wit: “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

There can never be a short supply of toadies and ill-assorted scoundrels defending the many fictions of the government of Nigeria in this new age when former activists and revolutionaries have turned into government spies and informants. 

D. O. Fagunwa And His Overbearing 'Helpers': A Novelist's Predicament

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Whenever the full history of Nigerian literature is written, Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa (popularly known as D.O. Fagunwa), the Yoruba language novelist, will certainly occupy his rightful place as one of its pioneers. Although literate in the English language, Fagunwa chose to put his indigenous language in the limelight by employing it in the writing of his novels which not only enjoyed wide readership among the Yoruba-reading population of the then Western Nigeria, but also attracted critical response from both Yoruba and non-Yoruba scholars.

                                         *D.O. Fagunwa

Given Fagunwa's education and exposure, it may be unfair to draw the conclusion that he was blissfully unaware of the limitations he was imposing on himself in terms of readership and critical appreciation when he chose to write in Yoruba. What seems more likely the case is that he was willing to sacrifice on the altar of cultural and linguistic nationalism the fame he would certainly have gained beyond his ethnic block and the hefty financial reward that would have come rolling to his doorstep had he chosen English as his medium of expression.

According to Professor Ayo Bamgbose, although “Fagunwa…was quite familiar with certain works in English literature, including translations of stories from Greek mythology...two possibilities were open to him. He could use his knowledge of English literature to produce a European type of novel…or he could create something of his own, drawing his inspiration from traditional material. It was the latter course that Fagunwa chose. Fagunwa based his novels on the tradition of the Yoruba folk-tale (Bamgbose, 1974).”

Renowned Writer And Scholar, J.P. Clark, Dies At 85

 
                                         *J.P. Clark 

One of Nigeria’s pioneer writers and retired professor of Literature, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, is dead. He died Tuesday morning, October 13, 2020. He was 85. 

A statement jointly signed by Professor C. C. Clark and Mr. Ilaye Clark, for the family, revealed that Professor Clark-Bekederemo died surrounded by his immediate family. 

Odia Ofeimun: The Writer And His Society

By Dan Amor

When it dawned on me recently that my boss, Odia Ofeimun would turn 70 today, I was confused. I was confused not because I didn't know what to write about my master or how to write it but about which one to write on. I asked my humble self: should I write about the poetry of Odia Ofeimun, or should I write about Odia Ofeimun's language and philosophy or about Odia Ofeimun and his aesthetics? 

*Odia Ofeimun

Indeed, I was really confused, for it is patently difficult to write about a griot whose life experience cuts across almost all facets of human endeavours. As a polyvalent genius, Odia is grounded in almost all the major contemporary schools of critical theory: from analytic philosophy to reconstructed Marxism, from poststructuralism to postcoloniality, and from feminism to recuperated phenomenology.

Pius Adesanmi: The Human Oxymoron Politicians Must Learn From

By Banji Ojewale

Professor Toyin Falola has put it most concisely: Pius Adesanmi is the man who leaves and lives. He argues that although Adesanmi is leaving the scene, still he lives. He’s gone, but he’s not done. He’s gone, but he’s still on. He’s dead, but not dusted. There is more to Falola’s dirge than the lyrical alliteration.

*Professor Pius Adesanmi 

There’s also more to the oxymoron of a departure that yet defies an exit. To capture or press a point, you must confront it with its alter ego. To prove Adesanmi 'lives' on, you challenge his death with the greater fact of what he has left behind that offers assurance of his being alive, as it were. You put the two opposite each other: Adesanmi’s death and his works and life that touched many he seems to have left orphaned.

University Of Ibadan At 70

By Sunday Saanu

From faculty to faculty, drums will rumble and grumble so thunderously as the campus of the University of Ibadan (UI), will be kept agog with all manner of festivities involving dancing, singing, acting – all in celebration of the Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan which turns 70 years this November. In marking the milestone, however, the management of the university, headed by Prof. Abel Idowu Olayinka has declared a year-long ceremony, beginning from October this year to November 2019 in order to fully commemorate a university that has remarkably imparted the world.

Established in 1948, UI which is admirably tagged “the First and Best,” could be described as a relatively young university when compared with some prestigious universities across the globe. For instance, a 70-year old UI can’t be compared with the University of Cambridge in England which is 809 years old this year, neither can UI at 70 match the record of Harvard University, which marked its 382 years this year.

Is Christopher Okigbo’s Star Here Again With Us?

By Banji Ojewale

“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, in Path of Thunder

*Okigbo 

Nigeria appears to be falling again under the excruciating spell of a star presaged by this remarkable poet of limitless possibilities.

At the time Christopher Okigbo wrote the poem shortly before his death in 1967, the young republic had writhed in a series of setbacks dating from the Western Region upheavals. Okigbo had a keen mind that correctly interpreted these crises as the shadows of some bigger, more devastating whirlwind into which we were being drawn. 

Again, Where Is Nnamdi Kanu?

By Obi Nwakanma

Last week, I felt nauseous just watching “our own WS” stand at a podium talking-up the Buhari gesture of naming June 12 “Democracy Day” and awarding the GCFR to the late Moshood Abiola. It was a dog-shit fare clothed in damask. I half hoped that Soyinka would not be part of this hollow ritual; but in the end Soyinka’s presence there served to remind us all that Nigeria is a circus; and the relationship between circus masters, puppeteers, and the circus animals is that they are all there to entertain us. 

*Nnamdi Kanu 

And Nigerians were properly entertained in what I still regard as the hollow ritual of forgetting. Every time, this government and its mind-warpers try to turn us all into amnesiacs, so that we will forget for instance, that Muhammadu Buhari himself was not only a key beneficiary and supporter of the abrogation of June 12, he himself led a military coup that overthrew a properly elected civilian government on the last day of 1983.  Nigeria began to slide radically down the order of things from that very coup. 

Remembering Christopher Okigbo Fifty Years On

By Kola Omotoso

Mbari Club was a natural draw for an aspiring writer. Situated a mere street walk from Mokola Roundabout, past the ancient Palm Chemist and you were there in the midst of Chinua Achebe, Ulli Beier, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Duro Ladipo and Christopher Okigbo. Lindsay Barrett had arrived from Kingston Jamaica via London perhaps. Poetry published in their journal Black Orpheus was available at the counter bookstall. There was a bar somewhere at the back and a small performance and rehearsal stage, again somewhere in the two-storey building.

*Christopher Okigbo and Chinua Achebe

It was my second year as an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan. Student Union activities had been part of the life since my closest friend Ladipo was running for PRO of the student union government. Nigerian electoral politics was boiling over. The Action Group had imploded and the federal government of Ahmadu Bello in collusion with SLA Akintola had put Obafemi Awolowo out of action away in prison in Calabar for treasonable felony. Of course, nobody in Western Region believed any of this fable about treasonable felony. Awolowo as far as the region was concerned was still very much in action.

The federal elections of 1964 came and went. It was heavily rigged in the Western Region ensuring victory for the Akintola party now in alliance with Ahmadu Bello’s Northern People’s Party (jamiatu mutenen arewa). 

Christopher Okigbo Conference - Sept 2017: Call For Abstracts

Theme: Legacy Of Christopher Okigbo: 50 Years On

The Christopher Okigbo Foundation invites abstracts for 15 – 20 minute presentations during the International Conference to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the passage of Christopher Okigbo under the theme; “Legacy Of Christopher Okigbo 50 Years On.’’  

The conference will hold at the University of Ibadan on September 20 and 21, 2017.

The conference is to celebrate the golden anniversary of the passage of Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (16 August 1932– September 1967) the Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century. As part of the activities to commemorate his passage, a two- day Conference is being planned for September 20, 2017 at his alma mater, the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

In so doing, the Conference will also be celebrating the works of one of Africa’s most outstanding Poets as well as the achievements, friendships, partnerships and challenges of African Literature this past 50 years.

The conference will be a platform for writers, scholars, literary critics and other interested parties to engage, rethink and propose possible new directions for African Poetry and Literature.

In view of the above, we invite you to submit abstracts, not exceeding 200 words, on any of the sub-themes below:
1. Prophesy and Poesy in the works of Okigbo
2. Okigbo and the Poetics of Obscurity
3. Journey of self-rediscovery in the poems of Christopher Okigbo.
4. Traditionalism versus Modernity in the poems of Okigbo
5. War, Communality and the Okigbo Legacy
6. Alienation as a technique in Okigbo's Poetry.
7. The Okigbo Spirit in the Establishment of Modern African Poetry
8. Culture, Nationalism and the African Writer
9. Literary Influences, Impacts and Imitations across Generations
10. Okigbo in the Style and Function of Nigerian Literature

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30th April 2017.

All abstracts should be submitted electronically to:

Charles Akinsete,

 Department of English,

Univeristy of Ibadan

Emails: tolu304@gmail.com; waleokediran@yahoo.co.uk

Notification of abstract acceptance: 15th May 2017

Full paper submission deadline: 15th August 2017

*Obiageli Okigbo(xxxxx) and Wale Okediran (08035765553)
Chairman, Christopher Okigbo Foundation and Chief Advisor, Christopher Okigbo Foundation 

Nigeria: Seasonal Brinkmanship Again

Banji Ojewale

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, in Path of Thunder.

*President Jonathan (right) and General Buhari

Nigeria appears to be falling again under the excruciating spell of a star presaged by this remarkable poet of limitless possibilities.   At the time Christopher Okigbo wrote the poem shortly before his death in 1967 the young republic had writhed in a series of setbacks dating from the Western Region upheavals.

Okigbo  had a keen mind that correctly interpreted these rocking crises as the shadows of some bigger, more devastating whirlwind into which we were being drawn.  As he studied the events of his time, he decoded an abiku-like character in them.    The details and nuances which chroniclers ignored or gave little attention to, he noted and scrutinized to find out why they exerted such powerful but hardly visible influence.

Chinua Achebe: 'Peaceful World My Sincerest Wish'

 Professor Chinua Achebe In Conversation With Iranian Journalist, Nasrin Pourhamrang

 ---------------------------------

          *Chinua Achebe

Recently, the classic African novel Things Fall Apart by Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, was translated into Persian by Ali Hodavand and released in Iran. Nasrin Pourhamrang, Editor-in-Chief of Hatef Weekly Magazine interviewed the author on a wide range of topics from Art, culture and literature; politics, cultural and linguistic preservation; to the legacy of colonialism and his forthcoming book, There Was a Country-A Personal History of Biafra.
Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan. His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as Director of External Broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. Achebe joined the Biafran Ministry of Information and represented Biafra on various diplomatic and fund-raising missions. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad. For over fifteen years, he was the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He is now the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.

Chinua Achebe has written over twenty books – novels, short stories, essays, children’s books and collections of poetry. His latest work There Was a Country – A Personal History of Biafra will be available from Penguin publishers in September. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honorary doctorates from more than forty colleges and universities. He is also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award; the Peace Prize of the German Book trade (Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels) in 2002; the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in 2007; and the Gish Prize in 2010.