He arrived in 1932 wearinga buliet scar on histhroat; his grandfatherhad died of a bulletwound in a war on behalf of his town, Ojoto.The legend of Christopher was that he was areincarnation of his grandfather, Ikejiofor;and well he might be for he was small andwiry like his grandfather, had a shrill voicelike him, was as stubborn and obstinate andalmost as invariably right as he and as un-daunted by challenges. His parents namedhim Ifekandu - meaning 'greater than life';they baptised him Christopher, the name hewore to his grave.

He showed his gut early by learn-ing to cry unremittingly even with-out provocation, to cry (or betterstill to shriek) even more so whenprovoked, to master the alphabet onhis own before he was taught toread and write, to drive five tonschool lorry (of course, without per-mission) before he had any drivinglesson and for which, of course, hewas appropriately punished by theschool Headmaster; to play the trum-pet, to play the piano without beingable to read a word of music, to read for aUniversity degree in the Classics withoutany previous foundation whatever at schoolin Latin or Greek, to write verses better inGreek than in English, to be engaged in aUniversity as Assistant librarian without anytraining in librarianship. These and moremarked Christopher out as a boy of manygifts and talents and someone to be watchedand guided to greater heights to find hismettle in the appropriate calling.

time jazz musician and, most uniquely of all,a poet. No job was beneath him, no task toodaunting, no challenge too intimidating for asoul that was free of cant and humbug and fora mind that could only be described as hum-ble almost to the point of acute intellectualarrogance.

More at home in Latin and Greek than inEnglish literature, he read all that came hisway, rejected much of what he read and builthis own aesthetics and poetic grammar by hisown effort. He was immersed in the currentphilosophic rave of the time: he devoured theexistentialism of Martin Heidegger and JeanPaul Satre but rejected its nihilism and inac-tion. He was fascinated by the Dadaist move-ment of the twenties but rejected as infantileits manifesto as presented by Crosby exceptfor the precept that the artist should strive for

what the movementcalled pure po-

etry, namely,

est rank and quality for outstanding excel-lence. Almost prophetic, his vision and hissounds were certainly rooted in the socialculture of the time; and since the malaise ofwhich he wrote and against which he warnedhas now come home full blown to roost, hispoems ring today with astonishing freshness.

Although he had abounding zest of life,Christopher could, at any time, withdrawfrom life to concentrate his mind and thoughtsingularly on the work before him. He could,and often did, as occasion demanded, retreatinto himself for two three days with littlefood but armed only with a pen and paper toscribble all day and all night long until thelast drop of verse in him had oozed out ontothe pages of the note paper.

A Toast ofChristopherOkigbo

After graduating from University, hedid all manner of jobs as occasiondemanded and as his temperamentchanged: sometime cigarette salesman forthe Nigerian Tobacco Company, sometimetutor in English and Latin in a secondaryschool atFiditi (in Oyo State), political activ-ist on the near anarchist side of the divide,civil servant, failed businessman, residentrepresentative of a major publishing house(for which this very building was hired as hisofficial residence), librarian, publisher in hisown right, and soldier. In his free time, hewas a chess enthusiast, an outstanding crick-eter, a prolific and recondite raconteur, a part

that hes h o u l d

write not nec-PIUS OKIGBO essarily to commu-

nicate but toexpress him-self. The reading aloud of the poetry of AllenGinsburg, Fellingetti, Duncan, BrotherAntoninus and the crowd of the Beat Genera-tion was just coming unto the scene inAmerica. For Christopher, the poet's taskwas to present his thoughts in significantform, to address reason through sense. Hetherefore wrote a poetry that read better ac-companied by the music of either DeBussyor Duke Ellington as the mood dictated. Yet,he demanded of himself and his peers thehighest rigour of thought and language. Apurist, he would refine and refine and refinehis poems until the final product showed thehighest economy of words and phrase oftenembedded in a private vocabulary of his ownand almost unintelligible to the reader. It didnot matter that the reader would mistake hislocal -idiom for some abstruse mythologicalreference taken from his vast arsenal of Greekor Latin literature.

c[hristopher plunged into the creativepage of his life of only ten or soyears and wrote as if he knew he hadno tomorrow; in that time, he created a workmarked not by volume but only by the high-

He had the most abiding respect for two of hiscontemporaries with whom he thought heformed a trinity: Chinua Achebe in novel andWole Soyinka in drama with himself in po-

etry. Their galaxy had also verydistinguished satellites close by:John Pepper Clark, Gabriel Okarain the literary and Demas Nwokoetc in the visual arts. He had, how-ever, placed himself above the pale

of competit on in his chosen field. How elsecan one explain his refusal to be nominatedfor the competition for the Langston Hughesaward for African poetry in which, in spite ofhimself, he won the first prize, or his para-doxical behaviour in agreeing to travel toKampala, Uganda, for a conference of writ-ers at the expense of the organisers only tomount the rostrum and refuse to read hispoetry to non poets.

Chris rejected the label of African writer; hewas not a Nigerian or an African poet; he wassimply a poet, whose tastes and sensibilitieswould make him a poet in any colour orclimate or vegetation. That twenty-sevenyears after his death, with no new workcoming or likely to come from him, he is stillread avidly more abroad than at home andrevered everywhere is, perhaps, the greatesttribute that can be paid any artist of note thisside of eternity. It is this permanent lustrethat makes Christopher Okigbo the poet'spoet.

Chris was in his life time and in his death thegreatest friend I ever had; it was not becauseChris was my brother for he had other broth-ers and I too had them, but because betweenus there was a total communion of souls andof mind. We both shared the same joys andlaughter in reading and re-reading the Greekand Latin classics in the original: Vergil,Tacitus, Cicero, Homer etc., or the English

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Okigbo's last residence, Cambridge House, Ibadan, as it is today

masters - Mallarme, Joyce, Elliot, Pound,small letter Cummings, Rimbaud, not to talkof the standard University English classroomclassics of the middle and later period. For I,too, had read Latin and Greek in my ownearlier training, adventured towards a degreein English literature only to give it up twothirds of the way to finally take a degree inmodern history. Is it any wonder then that Ishould have the rare privilege to have intro-duced him to the literature of the Americanexiles: Hemmingway, Dos Passos, Elliot,Pound, Crosby, Cowley, among the morewell known.

t\J51~*tJ I / l /< \

Endowed with a curious charm built onfrail physique and penetrating witand intellect which often transfixedhis friends, Christopher soon learrut that toget on with his work he had to forget theirfaces and their names soon after themomen-tary pleasure or thrill was over. He couldtherefore, at once, in simultaneous cycles ashis moods took him, be both exceedinglywarm and exceedingly cold. His friends stoodby him to the last; his foes denounced him asemotionally a grasshopper.

He successfully wooed and, after a whirl-wind courtship that would have racked thenerves of any young woman, married SefiJudith Attah, the devoted mother of our ador-able daughter. Obiageli. For Sefi was per-haps the only girl he met and knew whounderstood his quixotic personality. And inreturn, he showered her with the most pas-

sionate and enduring love.

Christopher has been tried (by AliMazrui) for exhibiting and revealing a personal commitment to theeradication of the social evils of his times. Sobe it. Some of us are nothing if not snobswriting for snobs; some of us are merelyaesthetes who would step over the murkaround us and live as if nothing was wrong.Chris lived intensely, felt intensely and ex-pressed himself intensely. Only someonewith the most abstruse form of taxidermycould have 1 ived through the Eastern Nigeriaof 1966-70 and pretend that the psycho pa-thology and trauma of the society could nottouch him and that his life would ever remainthe same again or that he could just go aboutwriting inanities while the life experiencearound him betrayed the most desperate crav-ing. Let no one dare to condemn him for we,the members of his immediate family, knowwhat it is to lose a revered one having in thesame war lost one favourite uncle, two ador-able undergraduate nephews and a favouritebrother in Chris. Chris was immersed in thelife of his time - for more than any other artistof his generation he communed with the socalled common man of his time - the markettrader, the street hawker, the buka restaura-teur, the foot soldier, the taxi driver. He didnot look down on them and he did not treatthem as his inferiors. They were men likehim. For he was as easily at home with thenobles and the governors as he was with thetaxi drivers with whom he could go to eat and

drink as coequals without conde-scension.

The battered Nigerian psyche oftoday, the anomie and thecatalepsis we see, hear and smellall around us, the lingering livingdeath that casts its pall over us, theanguish and the torment of bodyand soul that cry out all the timefrom the wizened faces of infants- these are today's sources ofChristopher Okigbo's poetic vi-sion of thirty years ago. Of suchstuff was this extraordinary geniusmade that his fame far outshonethat of any one of the members ofhis vastly distinguished family thathad at one and the same time aworld class forest pathologist, aneconomist, a lawyer, an agrono-mist as well as the poet laureatehimself. He was indeed a meteor,and like a meteor he flashedthrough the sky for a short speck of

thirty-five years, which is indeed merely adot in infinite time, and dug a hole in theground for himself.

He was born wearing the mark of war;he died of bullet wounds sustainedat a war he fought on behalf of hisnew country, Biafra. He died at the hands ofhis soJcalled countrymen, at Opi junction, atthe outskirts of the University he had helpedto build and nurture; he died at the tender ageof thirty-five, in the defence of his mostcherished values: honour, valour, truth, jus-tice, equity, integrity and, most of all, free-dom. We have a duty, in his honour, to keepthese values alive in our younger ones forthat is the true testament to his greatness.Towards this goal, I am authorised to an-nounce that the OKIGBO famHy is creatinga Trust to establish and administer, witheffect from the coming anniversary of hisdeath, in October, scholarships and prizes inClassics and Poetry in the two Universitiesthat gave Christopher Okigbo his foundationand his freedom: the University of Ibadanand the University of Nigeria. Even in thiswe have been anticipated first by WoleSoyinka, one of the most loyal of his friends,and now by Chief Berkhout. To both of themI offer my salutations.

I now give you the toast of CHRISTOPHEROKIGBO the poet, born 1932, died 1967,lived at Cambridge House, UAC Crescent,Onireke, Ibadan.GR 8 JULY 1994

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