“Ah, that is a library destroyed by the fire of death,” said Gordon Darah, Professor of English at Delta State University, Abraka, and president of Nigeria Oral Literature Association (NOLA), in reaction to the news of the death of Isidore Okpewho, foremost scholar of Oral Literature and award-winning novelist, who bowed to death’s might on Sunday, September 4, 2016, aged 74.
Ernest N. Emenyonu, professor and chair, Africana Studies, UM-Flint, and editor, African Literature Today, said of Okpewho: “He will always be remembered as one of the most dedicated Africanist scholars of all time. In scholarship, unequaled; in creativity, unsurpassed. Let’s ‘call him by his rightful name’, Isidore Okpewho, one of the greatest scholars of our time!”
“The man was a giant, in scholarship and humanity. His legacy is imperishable,” said Okey Ndibe, novelist, political columnist, and essayist.
In a tribute and condolence message signed by his chief press secretary, Charles Aniagwu, Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa said, “We have lost a great man whose contributions to the literary world can best be described as legendary. He will be sorely missed by all and sundry whose lives he affected in many ways with his literary arsenal. I therefore urge all who mourn the demise of the late Prof. Isidore Okpewho to take solace in the fact that he remains alive through his literary works.”
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Anyone who ever came across the creative or critical works of Isidore Okpewho would no doubt agree in toto with all the above descriptions – even though they merely scratch the veneer, like the proverbial blind men’s attempt to describe an elephant – of a prolific author and scholar who was immensely blessed with a fertile and productive mind, a walking library of sorts.
To many ‘waka-pass’ students of Literature in Nigeria, Okpewho was best known for his novels The Victims (1970), The Last Duty (1976), and Tides (1993), which were at various times on the recommended texts list. Call Me By My Rightful Name, published in 2004, in my thinking, may not have enjoyed as much popularity in Nigeria, especially with the older generations.
But to ‘committed’ students of Literature, Okpewho’s literary output by far transcended his creative works. He was as much a critic as he was a creative writer, or even much more, authoring, co-authoring, editing and co-editing numerous scholarly works. Prominent among these include, inter alia, The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979); Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983); The Heritage of African Poetry: An Anthology of Oral and Written Poetry (1985); The Oral Performance in Africa (1990); African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity (1992); Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity (1998); The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (1999), co-edited with Carole B. Davies and Ali A. Mazrui; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook (2003); The New African Diaspora (2009), co-edited with Nkiru Nzegwu; Blood on the Tides: The Ozidi Saga and Oral Epic Narratology (2014), and, of course, his seminal professorial inaugural lecture, A Portrait of the Artist as a Scholar.
This is in addition to several articles (including forewords and introductions) in learned journals and books. The ones that readily come to mind are “The Aesthetics of Old African Art”, in Okike: An African Journal of New Writing (1975); “Myth and Modern Fiction: Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons”, in African Literature Today (1983); “Michael J.C. Echeruo: The Dignity of Intellectual Labour”, in Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, 1700 to the Present, Vol. 2, ed. Y. Ogunbiyi (1988); “A Personal Narrative from the Nigerian Civil War: Further Issues in Oral Narrative Representation”, in Uwa ndi Igbo: Journal of Igbo Life and Culture (1989); “Towards a Faithful Record: On Transcribing and Translating the Oral Narrative Performance”, in The Oral Performance in Africa (1990); “How Not to Treat African Folklore”, in Research in African Literatures (1996); “Soyinka, Euripides, and the Anxiety of Empire”, in Research in African Literatures (1999); “Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?”, in Journal of Folklore Research (2003); “The Oral Artist: Training and Preparation”, in The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial (2004); “Home, Exile, and the Spaces in Between”, in Research in African Literatures (2006), among others.
He was editor, Journal of African and Comparative Literature (1981-90), associate editor, Ibadan Journal of Humanistic Studies (1981-82), and associate editor, Okike: An African Journal of New Writing (1973-80).
A first-rate scholar, thorough-bred academic and pioneer of Oral Literature in Africa, Okpewho’s teaching career spanned over four decades and took him to State University of New York at Buffalo (1974-76), University of Ibadan (1976-90), Harvard University (1990-91), and State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton.
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In these over 40 long years, he taught and researched in the areas of African Literature, African American Literature, The African Diaspora, Postcolonial Literature and Criticism, Classical Literature (in comparative perspective), World Literature, Oral Literature, Folklore and Mythology, Jazz Studies, and Creative Writing (Fiction).
During this period also, he supervised several doctoral dissertations, prominent among which are “Writing Violence in Francophone West Africa: A Study of Representative Oral and Written Texts”, by Siendou Konate, Comparative Literature, SUNY Binghamton, 2005; “The Igbo Proverb: Communication and Creativity in Traditional Art”, by J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada, University of Ibadan, 1990; “The Making of the Folkscript”, by Sam Ukala, Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan, 1985; and “Between the Oral and the Written: Folklore and the Afro-Diasporic Narrative”, by Chiji Akoma, SUNY Binghamton, 1998.
As a reward for his relentless hard work, his The Last Duty won the African Arts Prize for Literature in 1972 (the novel has been translated into French, Russian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian); Tides won the (British) Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa in 1993; and The Oral Performance in Africa, which he edited, was Runner-up in the Nigerian Newsprint Manufacturing Company Prize in 1990.
Beyond these awards, Okpewho was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1982, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1982, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1988, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in 1990, National Humanities Center in 1997, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. In 2010, he was honoured with the prestigious Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) in the Humanities.
He was a member of numerous learned associations, including International Society for Oral Literature in Africa, Folklore Fellows International, International Society for Folk Narrative Research, African Studies Association, African Literature Association, American Folklore Society, Council of Black Studies, George Moses Horton Society for the Study of African American Poetry, Modern Language Association, Nigerian Literary Society (1978-90), among several others.
Born on November 9, 1941 in Agbor, Delta State, Okpewho graduated B.A. (First Class Honours) in Classics from the University of London in 1964 and bagged a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of Denver, USA, in 1976 and D.Lit. Humanities, University of London in 2000.
Until his death, Okpewho was Professor of Africana Studies, English and Comparative Literature, Department of Africana Studies, SUNY at Binghamton, as well as SUNY Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.
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