CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO

Ben ObumseluDaphnisego in silvis hinc usque ad sidera notus,

Formosi pectoris custos, Formosior1

I

begin with these words taken from Vergil for a variety of reasons. First, it is necessary to recall that Okigbo was primarily a student of Latin poetry. He did say a great many charming things about his debt to Stephane Mallarme, Debussy and Cubist painters. In mid career, he certainly profited from a thorough study of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Nocturnes and Yoruba praise poetry. But we should acknowledge that he went through six years of punishing undergraduate study of Latin scansion and translation. He was admittedly not a great scholar. He lacked patience; loved the drama of human intercourse and the freedom of the open air far too much; and recoiled instinctively from the drudgery of undergraduate discipline. But the wit and steady beat of Vergillan verse stayed in his imagination all his life. He was not able to repeat that measure in English verse. But even so he always tried to achieve syllabic regularity in his versification. He insisted that every poem he wrote had a tune of which he alone had the original score. Reviewing Heavensgate when it first appeared, Ulli Beier dwelt almost exclusively on this musical quality in the work. The poems, he said, were insufficiently visualized.

But we can hear his verse, it fills our minds like a half-forgotten tune returning to memory. Everything he touches vibrates and swings and we are compelled to read on and to follow the tune of his chant, hardly worried about the fact that we understand little of what he has to say.2

Beier thought, quite erroneously, that what produced the music was the memory of African ritual chants; and he went on to explain the obscurity of the poems in terms of the inaccessibility of cultic rituals.

He (Okigbo) wants to carry us away on his chant - or rather on his incantation. For incantation is, I think, the best word one can find for Okigbo’s poetry. The moment you start to read you feel that you have intruded into the sacred enclosure of a secret cult. You have no right to be there, but you are too fascinated to leave. The chanting can be understood by the initiates alone, but you are receptive to its beauty.

It has often been assumed that the title of Okigbo’s first volume of poems comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29; and that the poet imagined himself as a fledgling

... at break of day arising

from sullen earth, (to) sing hymns at heavensgate

But Okigbo hardly ever read Shakespeare. In any case, it is not the newborn poet who is at heavensgate in these poems. It is the old self, precisely the situation of Daphnis in the eclogue of Vergil which I cited.

The first poem Okigbo ever wrote, ‘Debtor’s Lane’ was practically a translation of the opening lines of Vergil’s Eclogue I. We shall see later that in lamenting the death of Segun Awolowo in 1964, it was to an episode in Vergil’s Aened V that he turned.

I have a third reasoning for beginning with a reference to Daphnis at heaven’s gate. The statement in that poem that Daphnis the poet is far more lovely than his poems holds true of Okigbo. Everybody, or nearly everybody, loved him. By his freedom from practical anxieties, his willingness to try anything, and his intolerance of the hypocrisies of good form, he had an unusual power of taking life’s burdens away. People from all walks of life flocked round him: senior government officials, university teachers, hawkers, house maids, foreign diplomats, army officers ... His hospitality at Igbosere Street, Lagos and Cambridge House, Ibadan was unstinting up till the middle of the month. When beer could no longer be paid for, the very air of the house was still intoxicating enough. His conversation was loud and extravagant. It was the delight of utterance that moved him rather than the need to communicate. Eager to please, he chose invariably the most outrageous way to do so. It was easy, perhaps correct, to dislike him. Professor David Knight, a fine Canadian scholar and novelist of exemplary rectitude, began his commemorative sonnet for Okigbo with a strong expression of distaste:

I remember you sprawled in a deep wood armchair, with beer

On the flat arm, bickering with your wife, not nicely, nastily.

I didn’t like you...3

Yet, with all his contradictions, Okigbo remained for his innumerable friends the finest example of that abundant indiscriminating love which Badeliare called “the holy prostitution of a soul that gives itself utterly with all its poetry and charity... to the passing unknown.” His one perfect and unforgettable poem was himself.

Okigbo started writing poetry late in life when he found himself in terrible difficulties; and those difficulties throw a light upon the nature of his poetic aims. He wrote nothing as a university student. He had come to Ibadan trailing the clouds of an awesome reputation as a cricketer, footballer, hockey player and pianist. Even in those early days, he had begun to cast his eyes on the possibilities of the wider world with its great careers, great loves, and great fortunes. He socialised, talked and played the piano. That he chose to study Latin and Greek literatures meant that he had ambitions in humane learning. But he could not become a scholar because he was an athlete. Nor could he become an athlete because he dabbled in the bogus politics of Professor Chike Obi’s Dynamic Party. Nor could he be a political activist because he was tempted by the urbane dissipations of a man of leisure. He was incapable of that merciless lopping off of the heads of sundry distractions upon which solid achievement must depend.

The same multiplication of interests followed him to Lagos when he took up an administrative position in the Ministry of Information. He was at the same time close confidant and private secretary to the minister, chief operations officer of Kitson and Partners doing shadowy business with the Italian firm of Bozotti, athlete, politician, and supplier of goods and services to several foreign companies.

To further lengthen the odds, Okigbo always defied the nature of things. When he drove a car, he insisted on changing gears without using the clutch padal. It was a form of play on which he exercised considerable patience. When his wife sent him a horse (which he

names Satan), he immediately sped to the polo field, was carried up by the horse and, clutching the animal’s neck, he galloped round as a polo player. He could not get off his bed the morning after their frolic.

It has generally been said that Okigbo joined the Biafran Army at the outbreak of civil hostilities in 1967. Professor Ali Mazrui has even convened a court of immortals to try the poet for getting involved in tribal warfare. Unfortunately almost all wars are tribal wars. And Okigbo did not, in fact, join the Biafran Army. He simply went to the war front as thousands of students flocked to the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and to the Spanish Civil War of 1936/39. He wanted, like Xenophon during the Persian invasion of Greece (499-449 BC), to write his Anabasis. But he did not merely wish to report the historical struggle. He was determined to match his untutored military instincts, not against Federal troops, but against Sandhurst-trained Biafran officers. “I am going to disprove Sandhurst,” he said. As it happened, Sandhurst-trained officers were cagy and survived. He wasn’t and did not. In 1971 at Oxford, I saw in a dream a long line of soldiers stretching block after block and marching to the tune of the Beef Eaters. Carried upon their shoulders was a single super-gun which also stretched block after block. And beside the soldiers sauntered Okigbo whistling tunelessly. As I began to laugh and cried out “He has done it again!” I woke up still laughing.

Even in his approach to the writing of poetry he was piratical. He did not deign to supplicate the Muse and learn her ways. He did not consider that she is a shy young lady to be approached in stages. His purpose always was to take her by storm.

In 1958, however, realities took their revenge. Okigbo’s commercial companies, which had only existed notionally, folded up. His marriage, contracted that year with a most charming girl, was in difficulties. He was thrown out of his position in the Information Ministry; and he did not have a penny to his name. His expense account at Kingsway Stores was stopped. Other misfortune followed with attendant complications.

In the wake of the crisis, Okigbo retired to Fiditi in Oyo State to teach in a grammar school. He needed that quiet corner to recuperate and make a new beginning. More importantly, he needed to re-examine himself and find the resources to build a new life. It was here in Fiditi that he turned to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and started writing poetry.

Eliot was a particularly appropriate choice for a man in Okigbo’s situation. For he spoke about the emptiness of all worldly striving, about the wreckage which litters the shores of time, about the soundless withering and wailing of all life. It was heart-warming to identify with this distinguished writer who repudiated all the enterprises from which Okigbo had just retired. With its intellectual refinement, its casual references to German, French, Italian, Latin and Greek literatures in the original languages, its acquaintance with Bhagavad Gita, Dante, St. Augustine and the chants of Siberian shamans, its unsettling existential wit, its mastery of both expository and lyrical poetic forms, Eliot’s poetry both tranquilized the heart and stimulated Okigbo’s active emulation.

Reading poetry can be a truancy from real life. For poetry often deals with wonderful things that did not happen and could not happen. Eliot speaks about the glorious life of the spirit; and this could easily become, for Okigbo, a continuation of the romantic dreaming which vitiated everything he attempted. The change from sport, dream business empires, and dream loves to poetry could easily be no change at all.

But writing poetry is also a practical activity. It imposes its own strict code of discipline. And it habituates the mind to hardwork and self-criticism. By hindsight we can see that writing poetry changes Okigbo’s life by giving a legitimate outlet to the turbulent poetic stream in his nature and by confining it within accepted limits.

It is well, however, to realise that Eliot’s poetry is practically inimitable. Its fine conceits and paradoxes, its fires that burn and save, its splendid earth studded with sapphire and garlic, its silent sister supremely ignorant and wise, are not conceptions one can take away and re-locate elsewhere. They are part and parcel of a specific philosophical, religious and anthropological outlook. You cannot take the imagery and leave the outlook behind.

In reading ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist,’ for example, we easily begin to see that Okigbo’s thoughts and the Eliot imagery which he occasionally borrowed are in conflict. The events in the love affair on which the poem is based are not described. But the disconcerting emotions of the real-life drama are clear enough. However, as we begin to encounter phrases like “lightning without rain: or “thunder without smell of water”, phrases which come from ‘The Wasteland’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’, the situation becomes confused. The problem is not that of assigning meanings to such phrases. The problem is that the meanings we do assign cannot be reconciled with the religious context in Eliot’s poetry. Okigbo would seem to be putting Eliot’s ascetic words to jocular sensual uses. The effect is that ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist’ fails to hang together as a poem. Yet it ends in a magnificently sustained lyric on the decay of unfulfilled passion which is one of the best things Okigbo ever wrote.

Heavengate composed in 1961/62 at Nsukka is a re-working of the theme of ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist’. In doing this longer set of variations on the same theme, Okigbo resolutely suppressed the personal elements in the experience. Indeed, it is these personal matters which are the unavowed secret:

Secret I have told into no ear,

save into a dughole, to hold, not to drown with -

Secret I have planted in the beachsand.

The suppression is, however, not complete. ‘Watermaid’ in the Heavensgate sequence is a fine lyric indeed. The central image of a bright angelic presence is beautifully sustained. And there is a wistful melody which harmonizes the conception. The basic idea must have been suggested by the description of Mary in ‘Ash Wednesday’ as

One who moves in time between sleep and walking, wearing

White light folded, sheathed about her, folded;

But there are a few images in the poem which do not relate to an inspiring presence. For instance, the phrase

gold crop

sinking ungathered

can only refer to sexual opportunity missed; and it makes nonsense of the Eliot quotation and to Okigbo’s extra-textual references to Grave’s ‘The White Goddes’.

The problem which faced Okigbo as a new poet still learning his trade was two-pronged. He needed a poetic idiom capable of raising his own personal experience to the intensity of great art. The famous poets he studied could teach him something about the basics of the trade. But they could not teach him how to create musical phrases and how to invent the imagery appropriate to his own individual expression. Secondly, Okigbo did not want to speak as an individual in his poetry. He wanted to be the voice of a universal music in which the timeless concerns of mankind are turned into song. So far he could not master this art by reading Eliot. So far his own obsessive brooding with a cruel past obstructed him. But the art of T.S. Eliot remained with him almost permanently as an example.

In speaking of his models, Okigbo almost inevitably mentioned the nineteenth-century French poet, Stephane Mallarme. He did indeed read the poet in the Penguin French text with English prose rendering. But these prose translations were no use at all in dealing with an extremely difficult poet who insisted so much on condensation and refinement of form. And Mallarme would have been a congenial guide. Like Okigbo, he had no use for any philosophical, religious, or mythical consolations. He totally condemned the kind of poetry that has a message. The glory of the poet’s art lay, for him, in the intensity of the poetic process itself, which like God or Edomite princes, was capable of creating out of nothing. The poet, in this view, needs nothing to raise his art to the highest pitch; the intensity is in the art itself. This was a possible answer to the question Okigbo was asking in 1961/62. But there is no simple echo of Mallarme in his work. With his love of curiosities, it is easy to imagine the play he would have made of the idea of the poem as “I enfant d’une nuit d’Idumee...”

By the time that ‘Lament of the Lavender Mist’ was written, Okigbo had aready started reading the poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Senghor was a founding member of the Committee for Black Orpheus; and from the beginning that journal based in Ibadan featured his work. The June 1961 edition had ten of Senghor’s poems taken from the last collection titled Nocturnes. Senghor’s poetry, as Okigbo read them in Ulli Beier’s English translation, was as sustained in its eloquence as T.S. Eliot’s. And it shows a similar unity of theme and imagery. But the structure and the rhetoric of Senghor’s poetry are radically different from the American poet’s. Senghor does not use the symphonic form; and his imagery is a shower of brilliant sparks which dazzle the reader by their variety of colour and trajectory. Moreover, Senghor’s verbal tropes are not the foci of his meaning in the same way that Eliot’s rivers, fires, and mythical thunder claps focus his Christian concerns. Senghor’s images are truly incidental, exaggerated in tone, and sensual although the sensuality is modified by the subtleties of a style which, as Senghor’s French biographer Armand Guibert pointed out, “sustain the posture and illusion of chastity” without the substance. Instead, they widen connections and associations to create a shadowy zone of unstated meanings round the subject matter of the poem. This is the so-called surrealistic imagery which, in Senghor’s own account, is an African thing not deriving from Andre Breton and the French surrealists but from the Wollof and Serer griots of Senegal from whom he learnt his trade.

Senghor’ Nocturnes (which contained five elegies) introduced Okigbo to the “elegies” and “laments” which dominate his subsequent work. They taught him to “score” his poems for traditional musical instruments. Above all, they demonstrated the “surrealistic”

image which is capable of raising any and every poem to the pitch of art without mythological or philosophical props.

From 1962 onwards, Okigbo produced a series of fine poems: ‘Lament of the Silent Sisters,’ ‘Lament of Drums,’ ‘Elegy of the Wind,’ ‘Elegy of Slit Drums,’ ‘Elegy for Alto’ and ‘Distances’ in which the new kind of image he found in Senghor was put to use. Of these poems, ‘Lament of the Wind’ is one of the most fully realised and perhaps the most memorable. It surveys the poet’s past life, admits his failures and discouragements, and looks forward exultantly to future creative possibilities. In this new confidence to use all the resource of the various traditions he inherited in speaking about his own life, his convictions and dreams lie true originality. As we read ‘Elegy for the Wind’, we are aware, of course, of some allusions to Senghor’s ‘Elegie de Circoncis’. It is through Senghor that we discover the connection between sexual mutilation in the circumcision ceremony, the demolition of home and country in order to rebuild them, and the mutilatioin of words in the search for new poetic forms.

Ah! mouir a I’enfance, que meure la poeme se deint la syntaxe, que s’abineux

tous les mots qui ne sont pas essentials.

Le poids du rythme suffit, pas besoin de mots-ciment pour batir sur le roc la cite de demain.

Okibgo’s words about circumcision are quite explicit:

The chief priest of the sanctuary has uttered

the enchanted words:

The bleeding phallus, Dripping fresh from the carnage cries out for

the medicinal leaf...

The application of this description to the preparation for his own belated maturity is clear enough. There are no verbal debts to Senghor. The poem is totally individual in its idiom and verbal and musical excitement; and it confidently proclaims the poet’s awareness of his place in the world.

Generally speaking, the effect of Senghor’s poetry on Okigbo was liberating. It taught him a new kind of eloquence and turned his attention back to the African tradition. The direct impact of Senghor’s Gallic refinement was perhaps lost in Ulli Beier’s English translation; but that only enabled Okigbo to rely on his own poetic resources.

There now remains one important stream of poetic ideas to discuss before concluding this review of what Okigbo inherited. Beginning from his very first poem, he could only take the form of an exotic African decor. But with the dawning of the Yoruba poetic revival in the early sixties, new possibilities presented themselves. By 1964, a large corpus of oriki,oriki orile, ijala, iwi, odu Ifa, ege, rara chants, and poetic plays was generally available thanks to the efforts of Professor S.O., Bakare Gbadamosi, Ulli Beier, Timi of Ede, Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola et al. The contributions of Duro Ladipo deserve special mention. He was one of the first persons to give systematic study to traditional Yoruba poetic technique and to demonstrate its viability for contemporary creative uses. His Oba Koso, premiered at Oshogbo in 1962 and acclaimed at the Berlin and Commonwealth Festivals in 1964, was a revelation to every Nigerian poet of the new

possibilities of indigenous tradition. Okigbo closely studied the oriki collections of Bakare Gbadamosi, Ulli Beier and the Timi of Ede. So impressed was he by what he read that when Professor Desmond Maxwell invited him to write a centenary poem in honour of W.B. Yeats, he based his tribute very closely on the praises of Oba Olunloye of Ede. From that moment on the technique of the oriki became a part of his poetic resources.

What astonished Okigbo in Yoruba poetry is its creative freedom, its utter disregard for reason, plausibility, realism, decorum and even the modesty of nature, in the creation of expressive forms. In the hunters’ songs collected by Professor Babalola, the baboon is apostrophized as

Eni iya re wo, wo, wo, t’obu s’ekun

O I’ewa n’ io p’omo oun,4

He whom his mother gazed and gazed upon and burst out weeping,

Saying her child’s handsomeness will be the ruin of him.

Of palm wine, the akewi affirms:

You are that which the horse drank

Drank, drank, and forget his horns;

You are that which the cock drank

Drank, drank, and forgot to urinate;

You are that which the guinea-fowl drank

Drank, till a cry pierced his throat

And he took to the wilds.5

The oriki of the leopard is different in kind but no less elevated in its imaginative flight.

Gentle hunter

his tail plays on the ground

while he crushes the skull

Beautiful death

who puts on a spotted robe

when he goes to his victim.

Playful killer

whose loving embrace

splits the antelope’s heart.6

The terrible creature is contemplated serenely as it presents itself to pure imagination without regard for human concerns. Yet there is real tension in these poems. They can surely stand side by side with any poetry in the world.

The oriki, of course, has its own special qualities; its coinage of portmanteau words very similar in nature and intention to Zulu izibongo, the piling up of proverbial sayings and other parallel constructions; the exploitation of homophones, alliterations, assonances and

other sound effects; and the exploitation of sexual and even excremental humour. Some of these effects get lost in translation and, as it is often said, what is lost is the poetry. But Okigbo found his own love of irrational imaginative leap re-enforced and legitimized by Yoruba poetry. He also felt free at last, liberated, to give up the lofty pose of T.S. Eliot’s ascetic verse and come close to a colloquial idiom.

I will cite just one passage from Okigbo’s centenary poem for W.B. Yeats to show how excited he was with the qualities of the oriki. Of Yeats he says:

You who converted a jungle into marble palaces who watered

a dry valley and weeded its banks -

For we have almost forgotten your praise names -

You who transformed a desert into green pasture,

You who commanded highways to pass through the forest -

And will remain mountain even in your sleep.7

What the oriki of Oba Olunloye, in the Timi of Ede’s translation, had said was:

The son of Olunloye, who converted

A thick jungle into a habitable place;

Who made impassable bush

Into a broad trodden path...8

Okigbo turns these words into an intoxicating chant in English. He keeps close to the basic idea; but we note that his last line which appears to be an original concept is, in fact, an adaptation of one of praises of the elephant.

Erin Laipo, oro labebeija

Elephant, you are a mountain even while crouching.9

Lastly, it is time to have a taste of Okigbo’s performance in the middle of his career by considering one of his poems a little closely. For this purpose, his favourite ‘Lament of Drums’ would be appropriate. Written in 1964 at the height of the Western Nigerian crisis, this poem commemorates the imprisonment of Cheif Obafemi Awolowo and the death of his eldest son in a road accident. But no explicit reference is made to these events. No anecdote or statement of any kind is envisaged in the poem. The object is song, or as Stephane Mallarme would have it “ to paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.”

The form of the poem is symphonic, with five movements contrasted in their imagery and rhythmic flow. But to speak of a symphonic form might easily suggest that the poem is European in its conception. This is not so. The idea is to create an episodic structure in which the different units are variations on a common emotional theme. Far from being in the European tradition, ‘Lament of Drums’, as the name implies, is conceived as funeral drumming in an African village. The first section is, in fact, an adaptation of Professor J.H. Nketia’s translation of the prelude of an Akan drum dirge. Its purpose is to introduce the elements which make up a drum orchestra: the wood of the drum heads, the antelope skin of the tympanum, the cane drum-sticks, and the ensemble of elephant ivory

trumpets. In making this roll call, the poem uses, at least in Okigbo’s own reading of it, spondaic line endings to imitate the sound of drumming in such lines as

Give us our hollow heads of long drums

and Thunder of tanks of giant iron steps of detonations.

Indeed the last line is not organised so much for its meaning as for the crowding of dentals (d’s and t’s) to give the effect of drum music.

In the second section of the poem which is also introductory, the drums are brought down from the smoky attic in which they are kept. Towards the end of the section the gruff choir of masquerades is heard

Like a web

of voices all rent by javelins.

Typically, however, Okigbo’s setting is all human history in every culture and every period. Accordingly, there are references to the “high buskin” of Greek tragic actors whose ordeal refers back to the passions of the god Dionysus, to the “chaliced vintage” of Christ’s last supper, and to the fourteenth century “Babylonian” captivity of the papacy in Avignon. The character of the poem in this regard is reminiscent of Eliot.

The third section of the poem is the slow movement. It is slow on account of the longer slower lines. It is slow on account of its dwelling upon the details of one episode. It is slow also on account of the solemn elegaic mood which it induces. There are no drum beats here. The underlying substance is the story in Vergil’s Aeneid V in which Aenea’s sleeping helmsman is swept overboard and drowned. The later reference to Celaeno alludes to an episode in Aeneid III in which a swarm of harpies descending upon the sailors’ dinner

With filthy claws the sumptuous meal they eat

And mix their loathsome ordures with the meat.

The target here is the Nigerian government in 1964; and it is typical that they are not just classical monsters, but also the beggar masquerades of Ibadan streets. The whole section is scored for two voices like Vergil’s Eclogues I and V.

There is no need, however, to insist upon the story line in Vergil. The poet resolutely refuses to indulge in any narrative; and the hints he offers deliberately differ from line to line. We are not dealing, however, with African cult secrets, as Ulli Beier thought. We are dealing instead with a poetry of mood evoking regret and sympathy through suggestions of desolation, abandonment, grief without redress, despair, and death. The narrative hinted at and constantly shifted, only provide the pegs for fine elegaic poetry in which all the traditions which Okigbo inherited come together. The last stanza

Fisherman out there in the dark - O you

Who rake the waves and chase their wake –

Weave for him a shadow out of your laughter

For a dumb child to hide his nakedness

is utterly memorable in refusal to commit itself to denotative meaning. There is no real sense in which fishermen “chase the wake” of sea waves or “wave” shelters out of their laughter. The art depends on sound effects (the a’s in the second line for example) and the control of suggestion.

After a drum recapitulation in the fourth section, there follows in the fifth a concluding coda, ‘Ishthar’s Lament for Tammuz’. The title suggests that another lament similar to the drowned man in the preceding section will follow. Instinctively the poet realised that the ambitious symphonic structure he had chosen required that the “sea” movement should be complemented by a “vegetation” movement in which images of a wasted land could be explored. The rich Tammuz Ishthar Myth, found in all the archaic cultures of the Middle East from Summer to Israel, Greece and Egypt could provide a good opportunity for political images to complete the structure. But no effort to do this is made; nor is there any treatment of the theme of the eternal return of the season which is the core of the myth. There is one casual reference to the withering of the crops and no more. The poem has already run its course.

‘Lament of Drums’ is not an entirely satisfactory poem. It shakes out a vast territory which it cannot fill. But poems that are entirely satisfactory are very few indeed. Looked at closely, even great works of art remind us of Hemingway’s old fisherman who brings back to land only the bones of the shark as evidence of the battle he had fought. Fusing within one poem the tragic sorrows of so many lands pre-historic, classical, and modern, and giving them their place in an African funeral dirge is impossible of realisation. It is a scheme that would not appeal to men who play polo without knowing how to ride a horse.

But extravagance is not at issue here. The issue is the irrationality of the creative process itself, the dark inscrutable workmanship (as Wordsworth phrased it) which controls our moments of creativity. Okigbo was particularly sensitive to the turbulent and contradictory demands of his own nature, and sensitive too to the manifold cross-cultural pressures on his generation. By playing before us his own reconciling images, images charged with melody and gem-like luminosity, he stimulates our imaginations to a similar effort of reconciling our conflicts.

Okigbo devoted his short life to the pursuit of whatever seemed great or beautiful in human achievement. In the sport field, in social and business life, in intellectual activity and the arts, he was incapable of resisting the solicitation of great deeds. He did not sit back to appreciate and enjoy these things. He received from their appeal inspiration and energy to do likewise. He read and wrote poetry for just five years, and that short interim, in the practice of any serious art, could only be a period of apprenticeship. His enormous promise remains in the end largely a promise. But even so, what he wrote was so charged with the greatness and beauty of his extraordinary spirit that they have communicated to African youth in almost every English-speaking country the inspiration and energy to do likewise. No poet is better known or more sedulously copied by young poets. His spirit, therefore, lives on.

The words of Vergil with which this paper opens might well stand at the wooded roads junction where he died:

In these woods I lie

Known from here to the sky

Christopher

illustrious in every thing

but more so in my being.

Notes:

1 Vergil, Eclogues II: 11, 43 and 44.

2 Ulli Beier, Black Orphens 12 (1962), pp. 46 and 47

3 David Knight, The Army Does Not Go Away, Amansi (Toronto) (1969), p.26

4 S. O. Babalola, The Content and Form of Yoruba Igala, Cambridge University Press (1966), pp. 98 and 99.

5 Wole Soyinka’s translation in Frances Ademola, Reflections: Nigerian Prose and Verse, African University Press (1962).

6 Ulli Beier, Yoruba Poetry, Ambridge University Press (1970) p.81

7 D.E.S. Maxwell and S. Bushrui, W.B. Yeats Centenary Essays, Ibadan University Press (1965) p.7

8 Chief Lunlade, Ede: A Short History translated by I.A. Akinjogbin, Ministry of Information, Ibandan (1961) p.61

9. S. O. Babalola, op cit. p.65. This praise is, in fact, an African correspondence. Compare with the Zulu – Unoduhlemezi Ka Menzi as a Shaka Praise.

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Christopher OkigboEncyclopedia Article

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Christopher Okigbo (1930-1967), Nigerian poet, who within his short lifetime established himself as a central figure in the development of modern poetry in Africa and as one of the most important African poets to write in English. Born Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo in Ojoto, a town near the city of Onitsha in southern Nigeria, Okigbo excelled more in sports than in academics during his youth. He attended Government College, Umuahia, in the late 1940s, then went on to study Western classics at the University of Ibadan, where he received his B.A. degree in 1956. After graduation from the university Okigbo held various jobs in business and government. He taught secondary school from 1958 to 1960, and then worked in the library at the University of Nsukka in eastern Nigeria from 1960 to 1962 before becoming a representative for Cambridge University Press in West Africa.

The two collections of verse that appeared during Okigbo’s lifetime established him as an innovative and controversial poet, although his poetry also appeared in the important West African cultural magazines Black Orpheus and Transition. The two collections—Heavensgate (1962) and Limits (1964)—reveal a personal, introspective poetry informed by a familiarity with Western myths and filled with rich, startling images. Labeled obscure by some critics, his poetry is demanding and allusive. It draws as freely from modern poets, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as it does from the Roman Catholic religion of his family in Ojoto. Okigbo maintained that his poetry should be viewed as an organic whole as it expressed his coming of age as a poet.

Okigbo moved to the city of Enugu on the eve of the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970), intending to set up a publishing house with Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe that would bring out books aimed at young readers. When war broke out Okigbo joined the Biafran forces, who sought to secede from Nigeria. He was commissioned as a major, and in August 1967 he was killed in action. His last poems, published posthumously with much of his earlier work in Labyrinths; with Path of Thunder (1971), show a new focus on the impending civil disturbance in his country.

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Of Chameleons and Gods Domain: Literature. Genre: Poem Collection, Satire. Country: Malawi, Africa.

Jack Mapanje(1981)

Article contributed by

Fiona Johnson Chalamanda, University of Stirling

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2011

Jack Mapanje's first collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods made a very particular impact in Malawi after its publication in 1981 because the Censorship Board recognised its implicit criticism of the autocratic regime of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and subsequently withdrew the book from circulation, despite its international reputation. The notoriety of the poems' political gesture has often deflected from the skill and beauty of the poems as they transform elements of Malawian oral culture into syncretic literary forms. Mapanje makes particular use of the praise verse form in making ironic, understated and satiric commentary on the political situation and its supporters. This rhythmic speaking voice is apparent in the poem “When This Carnival Finally Closes”:

When this frothful carnival finally closes, brotherWhen your drumming veins dry, these very officersWill burn the scripts of the praises we sang to youAnd shatter the calabashes you drank from.

Mapanje's ironic tone is a technique for what he calls, in his introduction, an attempt to find “a voice or voices as a way of preserving some sanity”, referring to the repressive

circumstances of surveillance. The chameleon trope of Malawian creation mythology figures in the volume's title and in a number of his poems, indicating the ambiguous camouflaging impulse of his dissenting writing. Yet Mapanje also shows a concern for the everyday, for the people and the ways of life affected by neglect and corruption. In these poems, it is a tender tone which dominates:

Do we now troop past the skeletal mothersBefore their sons' burial mounds weepingWith broken bowls of rotten weevilsAnd shards of sour brew for their libation?

Mapanje's Of Chameleons and Gods is so successful because it is so carefully, cautiously crafted, accumulating force through its self-control. Even in the section written about the poet's experiences and impressions of living in London, Malawian riddles, proverbs, idioms, expressions and concerns continue to give the poetry a very localised feel.

Published 08 January 2001

Citation: Chalamanda, Fiona Johnson. "Of Chameleons and Gods ". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3156, accessed 29 April 2009.]

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Jack Mapanje's "Of Chameleons and Gods"

Date: 1985 - Present

Location: Africa

Subject: Political/Economic/Social Opinion

Medium: Literature

Artist/Author/Producer: Jack Mapanje

Confronting Bodies: Malawian Government

Dates of action: September 25, 1987

Location: Malawi

Description of the Art Work

"...In addition to being a published poet of international reputation, Jack Mapanje is a respected theoretical linguist. He is chairman of the Linguistics Association of SADCC Universities....has edited two anthologies of African poetry, broadcast for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and acted as judge in BBC and commonwealth poetry competitions.....Sadly, Mapanje's reputation has not saved him from three years of arbitrary and unjustifiable imprisonment, but it has ensured that his case has not been forgotten. In June 1988 he was the winner of the Poetry International Award in Rotterdam. This was accepted on his behalf by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature...

"... For many years Mapanje had exercise skill in evading the blue pencil. He was a member of the Malawi Writer's Group and played an important part in developing the distinctive language and metaphors whereby the group exercised its views. Expressions such as "leopards of Dedza" and "Chingwe's Hole," which recur in Mapanje's poems, are widely understood and have found their way into popular usage..."

Description of incident

"...Jack Mapanje was arrested by police at the Gymkhana Club in Zomba on September 25, 1987. Since then he has been detained without charge--and without any public explanation--at Mikuyu Prison. For the first twenty months of his incarceration, Mapanje was not allowed visits from his family or friends (he is married to a mid-wife, Mercy Mapanje, and they have three children). Nor has he been allowed to see a present--Mapanje is a practicing Roman Catholic.

In the absence of any statement from the government the precise reasons for his detention are a matter of speculation, although clearly it was Mapanje's writing which upset the authorities. His 1981 collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, is banned from circulating in schools and bookshops in Malawi. After his arrest, Mapanje was first taken in handcuffs to the University of Malawi, where he is head of the Department of English Language and Literature. The police searched his office and seized various manuscripts, including poems and the paper delivered at a Conference in Stockholm in 1986, entitled "Censoring the African Poem: Personal Reflections." This includes an account of his problems with the Malawi Censorship Board. It is likely that the authorities were also concerned about Mapanje's plans to bring out a second volume of poems, provisionally entitled Out of Bounds, and about an invitation for him to take up the post of writer-in-residence at the University of Zimbabwe.

When Of Chameleons and Gods was published in 1981 it was neither officially proscribed nor cleared for sale. Thus bookshops were not allowed to display it, but no one could be prosecuted for possessing a copy. In 1985 the Ministry of Education and Culture issued a circular banning its use in schools and colleges. In his 1986 paper Mapanje quotes the polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki to the effect that censorship "forces the writer to employ metaphors which raise the piece of writing to a higher level." He is amused that the Malawi Censorship board may have actually improved his poems.

Results of incident

"...With his use of metaphor and traditional forms Mapanje was able to out wit the censors. But finally he could do so no longer: his book was banned and he was imprisoned. Partly, of course, this simply reflects the effectiveness of Mapanje's criticism and the frustration of the authorities at his wit and skill...

...His poetry began to deal more overtly with political themes.... He now regards himself as Out of Bounds...."

No further information is available as to Mapanje's imprisonment.

Source: Human Rights Watch/Africa Watch, "Where Silence Rules, The Suppression of Dissent in Malawi," October 1990, Pg. 75-79

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Record no 322

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Jack Mapanje

Poet, linguist and human rights activist, Mapanje has published about five poetry books and has poems in three anthologies of poetry from Africa. These include Of Chameleons and Gods (1981), The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993), Skipping Without Ropes (1998) The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New and Selected Poems (2004), and the recent Beasts of Nalunga (2007), which was recently shortlisted for the Forward Prize . He co-edited Oral Poetry from Africa: an anthology (1983), Summer Fires: New Poetry of Africa (1983) and The African Writers’ Handbook (1999). He also edited Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002). Mapanje is the recipient of the Fonlon-Nichols Award for ‘his contribution to poetry and human rights’ and also received the Rotterdam Poetry International Award for his first book of poems. After political detention in 1987, while he was Department Head of English Studies at the University of Malawi, he was subsequently released in 1991. He has since lived outside Malawi with his family and currently teaches at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England.

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Chinelo Achebe-Ejueyitche

Achebe-Ejueyitche teaches and writes in New York State, where she lives with her family. Daughter of Chinua Achebe, the famous Nigerian novelist, she has also worked

in publishing. Her first book, The Last Laugh and Other Stories, was published by Heinemann in 1992.

The Jacaranda Tree

It was hot. And like pieces of yam roasting over slowly smoldering coals, people cooked in the unrelenting heat, fleeing into their homes when they could no longer bear it. Hoes lay forgotten on farms, foodstuff covered and abandoned in the marketplace. Lethargy settled over the tiny village; only the buzzing of insects and an infrequent pestle pounding a late meal could be heard in the stifling silence.

In a small bungalow, a mother and her three young children tried their best to ward off the heat while an ancient fan creaked ineffectually from the ceiling. The children fidgeted; just before dawn, they had been woken from an uneasy sleep by the sound of low flying planes and sporadic gunfire. It was quiet now, but the heat kept them on edge.

The youngest child played on a raffia mat piling wooden blocks on top of the other. From time to time, he would swipe at them, uttering a shriek of delight as they tumbled to the floor. But tiring of the monotonous game, he was soon diverted by the sight of his older siblings in a kicking match.

Their mother raised her head with an effort. “Alright, you two, that’s enough…”

She sat at the dining table, fanning her face with a small handkerchief, and then, sighing, turned to stare out the window beside her. Shading her eyes against the sun, she peered into the distance; there appeared a faint rippling of the leaves of the Jacaranda tree in front of the house. There it was, again; a barely discernible draft. She listened intently. Around her, it was still and quiet.

“I think you can go outside now,” she said hesitantly, and then nodded. “Take the baby with you; it might be cooler under the tree.”

The girl sat up eagerly, and prodded her younger brother in the ribs; but he had fallen asleep out of boredom, his little chest gently rising and falling with each breath. Scrambling to her feet, she went to the baby and picked him up, chuckling at his instantly upraised arms and expectant gurgles. She hoisted the child unto her waist, staggering slightly under his weight, and then with the sideways gait of a crab, made her way slowly and carefully to the Jacaranda tree in front of the house.

*

The helicopter flew east, and then turning on an arc, headed westward to circle the village. Its pilot noted a few domestic animals roaming the fields or that were tied up in yards; but there was no sign of human presence. He sighted several long bungalows that, no doubt, housed extended families. But there was the feeling, somehow, that some

supernatural force had swept through the village snatching away souls as they performed everyday acts.

But the pilot knew the village was not deserted. Just before dawn, he had trailed a company of military planes on exercise, startling a group of early-birds on their way to farms or the makeshift market. It was cool, even chilly, up in the skies; but below him, the steamed air rippled. People would be in their homes seeking relief from the sweltering sun. He would fly over the village one more time, he thought to himself, and then banked left.

A young soldier, barely a man, sat directly behind the pilot; slouched forward, his head bumped repeatedly against the seat before him. Lulled into sleep by the morning sun and thin atmosphere, his mouth had dropped open, a bit of drool collecting on his chin. But his hold never slackened on the rifle on his lap. The pilot had made several attempts at conversation, but encountering silence, had retreated into his thoughts.

The pilot was searching for the infamous Ulli airport. Military Intelligence had situated it in the area over which the helicopter was flying, only not its precise location. A regular road, it had been broadened to handle the take off and landing of aircraft. But during the day, the enemy covered the strip with branches so that from the air it resembled a tree lined avenue impossible to distinguish from other roads.

Frustrated, the pilot thought of heading back to the camp, but he did not like the idea of defeat. Growling at the soldier behind him to ‘wake up, and be sharp,’ he began a slow descent over the unfamiliar terrain, oblivious of the breath taking scenery below. The thick brush obscured his vision; but now and again, a neatly tended farm or abandoned school would suddenly materialize, forcing him to acknowledge that human beings like him inhabited the spaces below.

Suddenly, he saw a clearing in the distance. Three zinc-roofed houses with a few grazing animals quickly came into view. Imagining some movement under a tree right in the middle of the compound, the pilot flew lower; sure enough, there was a young girl and a baby in napkins playing under the tree. The pilot called out to the soldier in hushed tones, but his companion simply stirred and slept on. In one of the houses, a face appeared at a window, and then, aghast, quickly vanished.

“Wake up, my man!” the pilot called out more urgently, dipping the helicopter even lower.

*

Like everyone else in the village, the young girl could identify the drone of an aircraft long before its appearance in the sky. There were several underground bunkers in a nearby copse dug by the villagers for refuge during air raids, and she knew to head for the trees at the sound of a plane. But finding a plastic plate half buried in the grass, she put her baby brother down under the tree, and was transformed into a mother preparing the

afternoon meal.

So intent was she in her play that the young girl did not at first hear the helicopter flying steadily toward the compound. But, suddenly, there it was; hovering low, so low, that when she looked up, she could clearly make out the shape of a man staring down at her. Her heart swelled, and then jumped into her throat. And with a cry, she ran, colliding with her mother who had rushed out of the house, and was screaming questions that disappeared into the air. Straining against the drone of the helicopter, the young girl listened, and then froze. Her baby brother...

Whirling round with the shock of comprehension, she watched her mother stagger toward the Jacaranda tree, her mother’s movement magnified in her heightened senses. Suddenly galvanized into action, the girl raced into the house where her other brother lay sleeping, and frantically shook him awake. He woke up on cue and stood up, sleepily rubbing his eyes. She pushed him into their parents’ room, under their King sized bed, and then hurried back out to the verandah, petrified, yet fascinated by the enemy aircraft hovering over her mother and baby brother.

*

Seeing his mother race toward him, the baby had crawled out from under the Jacaranda tree; he stood up unsteadily, arms stretched out to her, then fell back again on his padded bottom. An eagle in flight, his mother swooped down and crushed him to her body, finally glancing up to stare into the expressionless face of the enemy. She walked back to the house with a quick pace, the fourth stanza of Psalm 23 a mantra in her head. Above her, the helicopter dipped and swayed, its heavy drone combating the afternoon calm.

At last, mother and child reached the house. Over the Jacaranda tree, the aircraft drifted, and then slowly lifted up into the sky. On the verandah now, the woman looked up, bemused, and then quickly urged her eldest child into the house. She crawled under the bed, huddled with her children, her limbs trembling with life of their own.

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Niyi Osundare

Osundare is Professor of English at University of New Orleans, USA, and one of the best-known poets from Africa. His works of published poetry include Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984), A Nib in the Pond (1986), The Eye of the Earth (1986), which won both the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize and The Commonwealth Poetry Prize in its year of publication. He was also a recipient of the prestigious Folon/Nichols Award for ‘excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa’. Other published volumes of poetry include Songs of the Season (1987), Moonsongs (1988), Waiting Laughters (1990), Selected Poems (1992), Midlife (1993), The Word is an Egg (2000) and Tender

Moments (2006). Niyi Osundare has also published four plays and essays on literature, politics and culture. Orality and performance are important features of his works, which have been translated into the Italian, French, Dutch, Czech, Slovenian, and Korean languages.

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Niyi Osundare

Osundare is Professor of English at University of New Orleans, USA, and one of the best-known poets from Africa. His works of published poetry include Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984), A Nib in the Pond (1986), The Eye of the Earth (1986), which won both the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize and The Commonwealth Poetry Prize in its year of publication. He was also a recipient of the prestigious Folon/Nichols Award for ‘excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa’. Other published volumes of poetry include Songs of the Season (1987), Moonsongs (1988), Waiting Laughters (1990), Selected Poems (1992), Midlife (1993), The Word is an Egg (2000) and Tender Moments (2006). Niyi Osundare has also published four plays and essays on literature, politics and culture. Orality and performance are important features of his works, which have been translated into the Italian, French, Dutch, Czech, Slovenian, and Korean languages.