Biafra: Biafra Heroes And Heroines Remembrance Day Seventeen [17]

By Comr Onyegbula Solomon, Comr Nwawube Ezeobi | The Biafra Post May 17, 2020 Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo born 16 August 1932 – died 1967 was a Biafran 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. In 1966 the Nigerian crisis came to a head. Okigbo, living in Ibadan at the time, relocated to Eastern Nigeria to await the outcome of the turn of events which culminated in the secession of the Eastern provinces as Independent State of Biafra on 30 May 1967. Living in Enugu, he worked together with Chinua Achebe to establish a new publishing house, Citadel Press. With the secession of Biafra, Ifekandu Okigbo immediately joined the new state's military as a volunteer, field-commissioned major. An accomplished soldier, he was killed in action during a major push by Nigerian troops in Nsukka axis of Enugu, the University town where he found his voice as a poet, and which he vowed to defend with his life. Earlier, in July, his hilltop house in Enugu, where several of his unpublished writings (perhaps including the beginnings of a novel) were, was destroyed in a bombing raid by the Nigerian air force. Also destroyed was Pointed Archives, an autobiography in verse which he describes in a letter to his friend and biographer, Sunday Anozie, as an account of the experiences of life and letters which conspired to sharpen his creative imagination. Several of his unpublished papers are, however, known to have survived the war. Inherited by his daughter, Obiageli Okigbo, who established the Christopher Okigbo Foundation in 2005 to perpetuate his legacy, the papers were catalogued in January 2006 by Chukwuma Azuonye, Professor of African Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston, who assisted the foundation in nominating them for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Azuonye's preliminary studies of the papers indicate that, apart from new poems in English, including drafts of an Anthem for Biafra, Okigbo's unpublished papers include poems written in Igbo language. The Igbo poems are fascinating in that they open up new vistas in the study of Okigbo's poetry, countering the views of some critics, especially the troika (Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike), in their 1980 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, that he sacrificed his indigenous African sensibility in pursuit of obscurantist Euro-modernism. "Elegy for Alto", the final poem in Path of Thunder, is today widely read as the poet's "last testament" embodying a prophecy of his own death as a sacrificial lamb for human freedom. Just because you did not stand idle by while your people are being decimated. You stood for freedom, you stood for justice, you stood for fairness. You shall never be forgotten, in the history of Biafra, you shall for ever remain evergreen in our heart of hearts. History and posterity shall remember you till the end of time. Poet Okigbo defended Biafra till he fell. Come on 30th May 2020 we will remember Ifekandu Okigbo as one of us who laid down his life for humanity cause.

Published by Anyi Kings