People · 1932-1967
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He turned down a prize in Dakar, wrote poems to the river goddess of his village, and believed his grandfather's priestly soul lived in him. Then he put on a uniform and went to defend the town where he had found his voice.
Ojoto is a town about sixteen kilometres from Onitsha, in today's Anambra State. Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was born there on 16 August 1932. His father taught in Catholic mission schools in the years when British rule was at its height, and the family moved from one mission station to the next, so the boy's early years were spent on the move.
His older brother, Pius, was a strong influence on him. Pius Okigbo would grow up to be a well-known economist and Nigeria's first ambassador to the European Economic Commission. A cousin, Bede Okigbo, became an academic. It was a family that took books seriously.
But there was another pull on Christopher, older than the Church. His father was a devout Christian, yet the son felt drawn to something else. In later life he came to believe that he carried the soul of his mother's father, who had been a priest of Idoto, an Igbo deity. Idoto is also a river, the one that runs through Okigbo's village, and in his poetry she appears again and again as a water goddess.
His first book, Heavensgate, published in 1962, opens with the poet standing naked before "mother Idoto". Two years later, in a sequence called Distances, he wrote of being "the sole witness to my homecoming", which readers take as his return, in spirit and in art, to the religion of his own people.
Before any of that, he went to school at Government College, Umuahia. He finished two years after Chinua Achebe and left with a name as a boy who read everything and could play almost any sport. The next year he was admitted to University College, Ibadan. He meant to study medicine, but in his second year he switched to Classics. At Ibadan he was also known as a fine pianist. When Wole Soyinka first sang in public, it was Okigbo who played for him. He is believed to have written music of his own then, though none of it has survived.
He graduated in 1956 and drifted through a string of jobs in different parts of the country while he started to write poems. He worked for the Nigerian Tobacco Company and for the United Africa Company. He taught Latin at Fiditi Grammar School. Then he became assistant librarian at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, and there he helped found the African Authors Association. Nsukka was where, as people later put it, he found his voice.
His poems began to appear in journals, above all in Black Orpheus, which set out to gather the best writing by Africans and African Americans. Okigbo's work carried a strong feeling for Africa after colonial rule, but he did not agree with the journal's thinking. He had no patience for Negritude, the movement that celebrated blackness itself. To him it was a romantic chase after a "mystique of blackness". Nor did he accept that Africans and black Americans shared one common experience.
He stood by that view even when it cost him. In 1966, at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, he was awarded the first prize for African poetry. He turned it down, declaring that there was no such thing as a Negro poet or a black poet.
By then he had left Nsukka. In 1963 he became the West African representative of Cambridge University Press, based in Ibadan, a job that took him often to Britain, where more readers came to know him. In Ibadan he was an active member of the Mbari literary club. These were his best years. He finished Limits and Silences, wrote Lament of the Masks to mark a hundred years since the birth of W. B. Yeats, shaped like a Yoruba praise poem, and wrote Dance of the Painted Maidens for the birth of his daughter Obiageli in 1964. He believed she was his mother come back. And he began Path of Thunder, the sequence that many now read as a prophecy.
In 1966 the crisis in Nigeria came to a head. Okigbo left Ibadan and went back east to wait and see what would happen. On 30 May 1967 the eastern provinces broke away as the Republic of Biafra. He was living in Enugu by then, and he and Achebe had been working together to start a new publishing house, Citadel Press.
When Biafra was declared, Okigbo did not wait to be called. He volunteered for the army at once and was made a major in the field. Those who knew him there called him a capable soldier. Later in 1967, Nigerian troops made a major push on Nsukka, the university town he had promised to defend with his life. He was killed in that fighting.
His losses did not end with his death. In July 1967, a Nigerian air raid destroyed his house on a hill in Enugu. Unpublished writing went with it, perhaps the start of a novel. Also lost was Pointed Arches, which he had described to his friend and biographer Sunday Anozie as an autobiography in verse about the life and reading that had sharpened his imagination.
Not everything was lost. Some of his papers survived the war and passed to his daughter, Obiageli, who set up the Christopher Okigbo Foundation in 2005. Professor Chukwuma Azuonye catalogued them in 2006, and in 2007 the collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Among the papers were drafts of an anthem for Biafra and poems written in Igbo, which answered critics who had said he had given up his African roots for difficult European modernism.
Path of Thunder came out in 1971, together with his larger collection, Labyrinths. Its last poem, "Elegy for Alto", ends with the poet as a ram praying to be let off its tether, and with an old star leaving the shore as a new one comes. People read it now as his own farewell. In 1987, Wole Soyinka set up the Okigbo Award in his honour.
