Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Eulogy for an Artist, a Statesman, a Teacher & Friend: Kofi Awoonor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Summary
Few people change and shape our lives. I was fortunate that one of those rare individuals for me was Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. And the changes started unbeknownst to me years before I met the man. As I came to know him, I came to know a grand affecting and effecting presence, a grand epicurean stoic.
The first time I read a poem by Awoonor was in the summer of 1964 as I was preparing to go off to Nigeria for two years; it was a poem published in the Beier/Moore Penguin anthology in 1963. For me it was much like Nigeria, Ghana and Africa, just an abstraction which I could not get my young head around, so little did I know. But the music stuck in a haunting way. ‘The Weaver Bird,’ still one of Awoonor’s best poems, would appear in an Mbari collection of his early poetry in 1964, Rediscovery and Other Poems, and Awoonor (then known as George Awoonor-Williams), would through that booklet become a part of the most important Pan-African arts movement of the twentieth century, the Mbari moment that brought together various artists from across Africa. And the writers in this period lasting roughly from the mid-fifties to the start of the Biafran War in 1967, would meet, not just in Nigeria, but in Sweden and Uganda and elsewhere: most we have lost: Brutus, Mphahlele, Achebe, and now Awoonor. All great African artists.
Two years passed, and Africa became less of an abstraction to me, not just because of my being there, but also because of what writers associated with Mbari were doing to redefine modern Africa for all of us.
KOFI, MY FRIEND, NOW I ADDRESS YOU
Kofi, you canoe upturning hippo, you have gone before us, leaving us behind, orphans grieving in the desert. You knew so well that the great trick in art is in making the ordinary extraordinary, and in your living life so fully you taught by example that the grand trick in life is to make each moment extraordinary, and in so doing, to laugh at that ultimate thief, Death.
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- Information
- Politics and Social JusticeAfrican Literature Today 32, pp. 151 - 157Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014