Eulogy for an Artist, a Statesman, a Teacher & Friend: Kofi Awoonor

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.