Kofi Awoonor
A rare gathering of writers in Lagos celebrates rather than mourn the late Ghanaian writer and diplomat, Prof. Kofi Awoonor, writes CHUX OHAI Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka and Prof. John Bekederemo-Clark led a group of Nigerian writers to pay glowing tribute to the slain Ghanaian poet and diplomat, Prof. Kofi Awoonor, last Saturday at the Freedom Park in Lagos. Although Soyinka and Clark were rarely seen together in public, their mutual respect for Awoonor made it necessary for both of them to attend the event, which was a special reading session in honour of the writer, who was killed during the recent terrorist attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, capital of Kenya.
The two seasoned writers, now nudging 80 each, cut quite a picture with the crowns of grey hair on their heads as they reminisced on their individual relationships with Awoonor and extolled his achievements as writer and diplomat.
Titled ‘Humanity and against’, the event also had in attendance, Prof. Femi Osofisan, Dr. Wale Okediran and Prof. Remi Raji, all of them past and present presidents of the Association of Nigerian Authors; Prof. Kole Omotoso and the only female writer in the gathering, Lola Shoneyin.
Before kicking off the event at about an hour behind schedule, the moderator, Mr. Kunle Ajibade, who himself is an award-winning writer, declared that the purpose of the gathering was to celebrate Awoonor and not to mourn him. With that, he invited Shoneyin to read an excerpt from one of the writer’s works titled At the gates.
Also Okediran, Raji and Osofisan took turns to pay tribute to the departed writer. While Okediran read from Awoonor’s acclaimed novel, This earth my brother, Raji and Osofisan read a poem each from their personal collections.
Okediran recalled meeting and interacting with Awoonor at different times between 2007 and 2008 in Accra, Ghana and in Port Harcourt and leaving on both occasions with positive impressions about the writer.
“We met at the Pan African Literature Conference in Ghana. On that occasion, he commended Nigeria for having one of the oldest surviving writers associations in Africa. Later, he came to attend the Garden City Literary Conference in Port Harcourt. I saw him as a very humble and talented poet, as well as a thorough-bred novelist,” he said.
On the other hand, Raji said his encounter with the late writer had occurred through the latter’s literary works. “In secondary school, the name, George Awoonor-Williams which happened to be Kofi Awoonor’s pen name-was prominent. If you were a student of literature and you didn’t read his books, you had not arrived yet. I never met him in person, but his writing was very impressive and influential. Africa has lost a remarkable and influential voice. His death is a reflection of the kind of barbarism that we have all over the continent now,” he said.
Osofisan told the gathering an interesting story about a conversation he had with another Ghanaian writer, Kofi Anyidoho, about two weeks before the news of Awoonor’s violent death hit the literati in both countries like a gale.
“Anyidoho told me that Awoonor gave him an envelope. When he opened it, he found that Awoonor had written in detail about how he should be buried after his death. He did this even before he travelled to Kenya. It was a premonition,”Osofisan said.
Thereafter, he read a poem, which he had exclusively written in memory of Awoonor a few days after he was killed in Kenya. Written under the pseudonym, Okinba Launko, the poem was titled, Two trees came into my garden.
In an uncanny way, the description of the two trees, the products of two stems cut down from the parent plant at the instance of Awoonor, as “two mermaids of green luxuriant hair rising up from prayer gaily” sums up the symbolism of the gifts, which Osofisan claimed the deceased had presented to him about five years ago.
Like Awoonor’s literature, the trees will now serve as constant reminders of the impact he has made in the lives of other people.
Omotoso’s account of his encounter with the Ghanaian writer drew the attention of the gathering to another side of him that many people did not know before now: his political activism. He recalled travelling on a Ghanaian passport, which Awoonor obtained for him, at the peak of military dictatorship in Nigeria.
“I knew Awoonor as a political person. I spent time with him in Brazil and Cuba when he was serving as Ghana’s ambassador to both countries. He was part of an African attempt to bring a better life to the people,” he said.
But it was Clark’s testimony of Awoonor’s activism as a writer and politician that held the gathering spell-bound for a while.
Clark began, “I remember meeting Kofi Awoonor for the first time was during a conference organised during the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal in 1966. The late Chris Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara, Cyprian Ekwensi and Wole Soyinka were also at that event. We were sheltered in a crowded boat because hotels had no rooms for us. I remember that Awoonor’s response for anything that didn’t please him was “bull shit”,” he said.
Clark told the gathering how he accompanied Okigbo on a mission to Ghana at the behest of the then Military Head of State, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, after the first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 and got to meet Awoonor again at the airport in Accra.
“Awoonor was the first person to welcome us from the plane. At the time, he was in charge of the Ghana Film Corporation. He was shocked that those of us who were writers were involved in the affairs of state in Nigeria of all places.
“Awoonor rose from being a writer to become the chairman of the council of state in Ghana. I was very shocked to hear that he was killed by a stray bullet in Kenya. The incident really shows the absurdity of life,” he said.
Finally, as expected, Soyinka’s address defined the tone of the event. It was a long, scathing speech that thoroughly denounced the current insurgency that has taken hold of Africa.
Describing the speech as his response to the arrogance and boasting of those who “took Awoonor away”, the Nobel laureate said that he, too, would have been in Nairobi on the day the Ghanaian writer was killed, having been invited to attend the event that had brought Awoonor to the Kenyan capital.
“Those who organized and carried out the outrage on innocent lives in Nairobi are carriers of the most lethal virus of corruption imaginable – corruption of the soul, corruption of the spirit, corruption of that animating humanistic essence that separates us from predatory beasts.
“I am no theologian of any religion, but I aver that these assailants delude themselves with vistas of paradise after life, that their delusion is born of the perverted reading of salvation and redemption.
“Those who attempt to divide the world into two irreconciliable parts – believers against the rest – are human aberrations. As for their claims to faith, they invoke divine authority solely as a hypocritical cover for innate psychopathic tendencies. Their deeds and utterances profane the very name of God or Allah,” Soyinka said.
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