Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo (1932-1967) was a Nigerian poet, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. Born in the town of Ojoto, about ten miles from the city of Onitsha in the Anambra State, his father was a Catholic missionary, and Okigbo spent his early years moving from station to station. Despite his father's devout Christianity, Okigbo felt a special affinity to his maternal grandfather, a priest of Idoto, an Igbo deity personified in the river of the same name that flowed through his village. Later in life, Okigbo came to believe that his grandfather's soul was reincarnated in him, and the "water goddess" figures prominently in his work. Heavensgate(1962) opens with the compelling lines:

Before you, mother Idoto,

naked I stand,

while in "Distances" (1964) he bemoans the fact that in returning to his indigenous religious roots, that

I am the sole witness to my homecoming.

Okigbo graduated from Government College Imuahia two years after Chinua Achebe, another noted Nigerian writer, after earning himself a reputation as both a scholarly student and a competent athlete. The following year, he was accepted to University College in Ibadan, originally intending to study Medicine, though he switched to Classics in his second year. In college, he also earned himself a reputation as a pianist, and he accompanied Wole Soyinka in his first public appearance as a singer. It is believed that Okigbo also wrote original music at that time, though none of this has survived.

Upon graduating in 1956, he held a succession of jobs in various locations throughout the country, while he began to make his first forays into poetry. He worked at the Nigerian Tobacco Company, United Africa Copany, the Fiditi Grammar School, where he taught Latin, and finally as Acting Librarian at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, where he helped to found the African Authors Association. During those years, he began publishing his work in various journals, notably Black Orpheus, a literary journal intended to bring together the best works of African and African American writers. Ironically, Okigbo rejected the premise of "Negritude" upon which the magazine was based, saying:

... anybody who is black now can write for Black Orpheus even though there might not in fact be any cultural meeting points between the various black peoples of the world.

From Nkussa, he was transferred to the University campus at Ibadan, where he was an active member of the Mbari literary club, and he began to publish collections of his work: Heavensgate and Limits (1964). Labyrinths, his magnum opus, was only published after his death, in 1971, and incorporates the poems from the earlier collections. Ibadan was only a temporary waystation. In 1963 he became the West African representative of Oxford University Press, a position that provided him an opportunity to travel frequently to the United Kingdom, where he attracted further attention to his emerging poetry.

In 1966 the Nigerian crisis came to a head. Okigbo, who was living in Lagos at the time, relocated to Eastern Nigeria to await the outcome of the turn of events which culminated in the secession of the eastern provinces as the independent state of Biafra on May 30, 1967. In 1966, he wrote his last work, the poem "Path of Thunder," leaving the manuscript with friends. That same year, he won the poetry prize at the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. Living in Enugu, he worked together with Achebe to establish a new publishing house.

With the secession of Biafra, Okigbo immediately joined the new state's military as a major, a rank given to many of the Nigerian intellectuals that rushed to support Biafra and held positions behind the lines. Okigbo, however, insisted on serving at the front. He was killed one month later, in a Nigerian assault on Nsukka. His house, with all his unpublished writing, possibly including the beginnings of a novel, was destroyed. "Elegy for Slit-Drum", a poem he had written a year earlier, seemed to many to be prophetic in the foretelling the sense of loss felt by the people of Biafra and of Africa at news of his death:

the elephant has fallen

the mortars have won the day

the elephant has fallen

does he deserve his fate