Christopher Okigbo Conference / Harvard /September 07
I have been making notes, and reviewing photographs with the intention of constructing an essay, an exploration into an historical Conference in which the poet, Christopher Okigbo, was the catalyst for reopening and addressing the Nigeria/Biafran Civil War.
An unresolved war. An unresolved nation. As someone pointed out, the Pogroms against the Igbos living in northern Nigeria (1966) were the first of several such events that have defined several African nations for the last forty years. A “One Nigeria” - with the declaration of the country’s Independence in 1960 was to have been the initiation of a post-colonial emergence of new democracies through out Africa. Nigerian writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Okigbo - among several others were at the literary vanguard of imaginative writing that would redefine both the country, as well as the International perception of life in that nation. In many ways they succeeded, particularly in the latter. Ironically, the Civil War, and its series of subsenquent military governments, has left the country’s identity and well being in tatters. The Conference, its historical moment, reconnected many of currents that produced the initial war - the drive toward Biafra’s succession, and the forces of reconciliation. Soyinka, a Yoruba, though he was imprisoned by both sides - and a ferverent opponent of military rule, tirelessly worked for a Federalist form of reconciliation, inclusive of the Ibo, and inclusive of the minority tribes within Biafra, many of whom opposed the war. Achebe, an Igbo, and Biafran supporter, despaired of any rapprochement. Both writers were school mates and close friends of Okigbo. To have Achebe and Soyinka seated together on a public panel, reflecting on the life, work and decisions of the poet to support Biafra felt like a monumental moment, practically heart breaking in its emotional intensity. You could have cut the air with a knife.
What I have said here is a terribly limited paraphrase of many political issues! As a young lecturer in the English Department - as well as the weekly Sunday night host of the student poetry group - at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka - the intellectual seat of the succession, as well as opposition to that option - I found myself deeply immersed between these forces. Aggrieved by the genocide in the North against the Igbos, yet deeply ambivalent about a separate state - what I thought would be a suicidal option. As an invitee to the Conference, the event provided a personal way to revisit the site of a historical trauma. Indeed, much in the way the past remains present, forty years hence I found myself back in it, wrestling with the old arguments, turbulent contradictions and demons. Indeed, in my conference journal, I find myself quoting anew the same colleagues I was quoting in the journal I kept at Nsukka prior to the war! And yet this event ‘enriched’ my awareness of the actual history of the war - of which I was separate - and I was freshened by new voices and insights of young writers and scholars who participated in the Conference. Nothing was resolved. Yet, here in this host country of Igbo and Nigerian diaspora, there was the richness of having this history open and on the table. I wait to say more.
Apolgies in advance for the mixed(!) quality of these photos!
Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s most distinguished novelists, (Things Fall Apart, among many more). For many years a resident of the U.S.A.
Pages from my journal notes.
Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and international resident, & Dr. Michael Echeruo, my former colleage at the University of Nigeria, English Department, a leading scholar of English and Igbo language, and once a principal figure in the formation of Biafra’s identity. Since the nineties, a resident of the USA and distinguished member of the Syracuse University English Department (I think that’s fair).
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a a Yellow Sun, a recent much heralded novel of the Igbo experience of the war. (And much more!)
(Right) Obi Okigbo, daughter of Christopher Okigbo, and director of the Christopher Okigbo Foundation. (Left) Name? A research fellow at W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
Hat worn - on the last day of the Conference by Patrick Oguejiofor, Chairman of the Christopher Okigbo Society of Nigeria.
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(Left to right) Felix Okeke-Ezigbo, Stephen Vincent, Chukwuma Azuoye;
University of Nigeria, Nsukka (then declared Biafra), June 1967.
The Conference also marked my reunion with three former students at Nsukka: Chukwuma Azuonye, who organized he event, Obiora Udechukwu, artist, and, Dubem Okafor. In 1966-67, they shared my Introduction to Literature class and, equally important, were members of our weekly, Sunday evening campus Poetry Group. The group continued to meet and write during the war. Infrequently, at best, I would receive letters and poems during that period. For the historical record, the poems and correspondence are archived, with much of the rest of my African materials, at Northwestern University in the Library’s archives in Special Collections. Any one doing a history of the Biafran side of the war could no doubt benefit from a reading of both poems and letters.
Forty years since the start of the war, and among the first times we have met with each other, here are some pictures. My are we reshaped, and some silvered, by the years!
Dr. Dubem Okafor, here looking like a traditional village elder dispensing greetings and advice to visitors, here on the steps of Harvard’s Barker Center, no doubt doing a little of the same! Okafor is the President of the Muticultural and Literacy Institute in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Obiora Udechukwu (posed with yours truly) is painter, as well as Professor of Fine Arts and Coordinator of the African Studies Program at St. Lawrence University. During the Conference, an exhibit of his new work opened at Sherman Gallery, Boston University. Gosh what a shaky photo!
Below, Dr. Chukuma Azuonye, on the left, is former dirctor of African Studies at University of Boston Massachussetts; he is now a fellow at the Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and currently editing the collected poems of Christopher Okigbo.
