8 - The Will to Shine as One: Affiliation and Friendship beyond the College Walls

Summary

The quadrangle, the rest, me and you…

(Christopher Okigbo, Heavensgate)

It is 23 May 2013. The tropical sunlight streams through the tinted windows of St Philip's Church, Ogidi, illuminating the congregation's colourful outfits and the tapestry's vibrant hues. The church service is over and the rapt assembly listens to a succession of encomia. But for the centrally placed mahogany coffin, shining glossily with two white garlands atop, one could be forgiven for thinking that the occasion is a joyful thanksgiving rather than a funeral. In many ways, it is. After a fulfilled and fruitful life, Chinua Achebe has finally returned to the home of his ancestors. At exactly five minutes before two, on Professor Laz Ekwueme's prompting, around thirty-five elderly men, prominent among whom are the writers Chike Momah, Elechi Amadi, and Chukwuemeka Ike, cut through the sequence of increasingly politicized speeches to intone the Umuahian anthem, The Will to Shine as One:

We lift our voice to thee, O Lord

To Thee we sing with one accord

The will to shine as one.

From Morning till the approach of Night

With humble minds, with all our might

We seek this gift which is Thy light

The will to shine as one

As all of us, or black or white

Beseech Thee now us to unite

That all may seek this gift Thy Light

The will to shine as one

We beg thee now to show the way

That all of us may kneel and pray

And see and keep from day to day

The will to shine as one.

Less than forty-eight hours earlier, Achebe's body had lain in state at the Enugu auditorium of the University of Nigeria, the sanctuary in which Christopher Okigbo had poetically enacted his prodigal return and which he defended with his life in the Nigerian civil war. Here in Enugu, at the Citadel Press offices, both Ike and Achebe had held their final conversations with Okigbo. To the surviving Umuahian writers, the symbolic implications of this confluence must have been ineludible.