Homage to the late poet; Kofi Owonor


By
Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)


In one Sunday Nation article, Professor Ali A Mazrui analyzed the inter-politicality of The Jaramogi Odinga family and The Kennedy family by arriving at a difference that the Odinga’s have curse of long life but the Kennedy’s have a curse of early death through violent and untimely  mode of death .Mazrui made these analogies in reference to violent death of John F. Kennedy and the subsenguent Chappaquiddick bridge tragedy.Similarly,the salient difference between a European and American or a Japanese and African writer or African artist is that most of African writers die early in the mid of their lives through violent death but in contrast American and some European writers die peacefully and comfortably in their old age. Early and violent death is the dominant bane, fate and misfortune that now and then besmirch an African writer. This position is in recognition of a fact that my child-hood American popular literature writers in the name of Mario Puzzo author of the God Father and Robert Ludlum an author of several anti soviet spy series like; Borne dentity, Borne Ultimatum and Icarus Agenda plus very many others like The Matlock Paper had just to die recently in their late eighties. The most surprising of all is Phillip Roth whom I read at the age of twelve years while in my primary four.  Now I am forty years and this year 2013 Phillip Roth is still alive and active to the American literary civilization that he has been touted by the Ladbrokes as a probable candidate for Nobel Prize in literature. But sadly enough on 22 September 2013 in Nairobi the black angel of early  death has carried ahead its  foul duty by claiming the life of Africa’s most honorable literary scholar Professor Kofi Owonor during the helter-skelter of Alshabab terrorist lynch of the upscale West Gate Mall in Nairobi.
Actually this essay is meant to be a deep felt homage to the late Kofi Owonor, Killed by Islamic terrorists in Nairobi. However, the essay also goes ahead to decry the violent and early deaths of several other African writers. The deaths which have almost turned Africa into a literary dwarf if not a continent of artistic bovarism. Kofi Owonor, who peacefully and honorably came to attend Story Moja Literary festival to be held in Nairobi, was violently shot by the Islamic fundamentalist terror group known as Al shabab. Whose gunmen lynched the Mall in which was Kofi Owonor and his son. The terrorist were sending out the Muslim catchword on which if one fails to respond then he was known not to be a non- Muslim on to which he is shot or held hostage for ransom.Fatefull enough, Kofi Owonor was not muslim.He was an elder, an Africanist, a scholar, a poet, a realist, a rationalist, a Christian, a religious non-fundamentalist and a literary liberalist. He could not respond with any tincture of religious irrationalism to the question of the terrorist. He was shot dead and his son injured. Too sad. This is actually the time when Christian positivism goes beyond rigidity of other religious affectations in its classic assertiveness that the devil kills the flesh but not the soul. And indeed it is true the devilish terrorist killed Owonor’s flesh but not his literary soul. They are such and similar situations that made Amilcar Cabral to observe in his Unity and Struggle, in a section on Homage to Kwameh Nkrumah to rationalize that the sky is too enormous to be covered by the palm of a sadist nor to be vilified by the spitting of the filthy ones; Truly, like Nkrumah, Kofi Owonor was the sky of African intellect never to be covered by the brute of the cannon from the parrel of a Muslim terrorist.
Kofi Owonor is not alone neither are we alone. You, my dear reader and I  we are not in any historical nor literary solititude. In Africa God has blessed us with the opportunity of the dead relatives in the name of the living dead. We are not the first and the last to grief. Owonor is not the first and the last to dance with fate. Even Ali A. Mazrui in his literary expositions of 1974 otherwise published as the trial of Christopher Okigbo.A  novella in which Mazrui cursed ideology as an open window into the moving vehicle that let in  a very bad political accident to Nigeria in the name of Biafra war which claimed life of  Christopher Okigbo at the Nzukka battle front. This was one other sad moment at which Africa lost its young literary talent through violent death.
Reading of African literary biographies in all perspectives will not miss to make you attest to this testimony. Both in situ and in diaspora.Admirable African American writers like Malcolm X, and Dr Luther King all died through violent death. Even if in the recent past, the Daughter of Malcolm X revealed to Sahara Reporters, Nigerian Daily, that Louis Farrakhan was behind the assassination of her father, wisdom of the time commands us to know that it was evil politics of that time that made Malcolm X to die the way international politics of today in relation to crookedness which was entertained during the formation of the state of Israel that have made the son of Africa professor Kofi Owonor to die.
An in-depth analysis into the life and times of African writers and artists will show that the number of African cultural masters who die violently is more than the number of those who died normally in their old age. Some bit of listology will show help to adduce the pertinent facts; Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Lucky Dube, Walter Rodney, Tom Mboya, J M Kariuki, Che que Vara, Ken Saro Wiwa, Anjella Chibalonza, and Jacob Luseno all but died through violent death. Lumumba died in a plane crash along with Darg Hammarskjöld only after penning some socialism guidelines. After writing I write what I want, a manifesto for black consciousness Steve Biko was arrested and tortured in the police cells during those days of apartheid in south Africa.Biko died violently while undergoing torture in police cells. Lucky Dube was fatefully shot by a confused ****. Walter Rodney who was persuaded by his student who is now the professor Isa Shivji at Dare salaam University not to go back to his country of Guyana, desisted this voice and went back only to be assassinated in the mid of the rabbles that domineered Guyanese politics those days of 1970’s. This happened when Rodney had written only two major books. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, being one of them. Tom Mboya was shot by a hired gunman in down-town Nairobi, some one kilometer away from the West Gate Mall, at which Kofi Owonor has been shot. Mboya could have written a lot. Even more than Rudyard Kipling and Quisling. But fate or bad luck had him violently die after he had only written two books; Challenges to Nationhood as well as Freedom and After. Both of them are classically nice reads until today. He had also submitted sessional paper no. 10 to the Kenya government which was a classical thesis on Africanization of scientific socialism.
J M Kariuki, Che and Saro Wiwa are all known for how they violently died. Powers that be and terrorists that be, expedited violent death against these writers. Thus, brothers and sisters in the literary community of Africa and the world as we mourn Kofi Owonor we must also let Africa to unite in spiritual effort to rebuke away the evil spirit that often perpetrate terror of violent death which  especially  claim away lives of African writers.

References
Ali A. Mazrui; Trial of Christopher Okigbo
Amilcar Cabral; Unity and Struggle

Ekhafu ya kamevele niyo ekamayanka elurende!
It goes a Bukusu saying, from Kenya,
It has it English equivalence as;
The most productive Milch- cow
is the one that often dies at the creek,
And truly Proffessor Ali A.  Mazrui
Africa’s global intellectual Milch-cow
Has died today from his drinking creek,
At Birmingham hospital in New-York,
His death is a deep wound
To the world of knowledge,
An impeachment to the voices
Subscribing to classical reasons,
An old wine skin to the new wine
Of nothing but global democracy,
I mourn you Mazrui in this solemn dirge,
I grieve for you deeply from my heart
I grieve for you as you grieved Okigbo,
When the bullet took his youthful life
at Nzuka battle front during the Biafra,
My mind’s eye is seeing you,
Like my Mr. Giraffe the driver
In your political epic
That tried Christopher Okigbo,
Mazrui the global son
Sired in the neoclassical times
We shall miss you,
As there is no whence
That cometh another Mazrui
From all the four corners of the earth
Rarely will he come one more Mazrui,

You failed your O’level exams at Mombasa Sec School
As you humbly basked in Muslim poverty, in 1943
Not because you were a stooge
But a genius of cultural radicalism,
Refusing to answer a history question;
Who is the Archduke of Canterbury?
Dismissing it as academic sham,
For what value has Archduke of Canterbury
to an African, Asian or Mexican boy?

You were denied a chance to study
At the then colonial Makerere University,
You sublimated to Edinburg and Oxford,
You come back into its deanry of political science
You met Milton Obote face to face,
When he was an African-English song bird of Gulu
You shouted loud when Id Amin plotted to **** Okello Oculli
You were then detained for this noise of humanity
You voice was heard,
And you were exported to southern Tundra
As an exhibit for non-white intellectual
Mazrui let me mourn you for the efforts
That sired intellectual democracy in Uganda,

When I reminisce of you Mazrui,
Pages of African Conditions open
Widely before my mind’s eye,
I see your intellectual pilgrimage
From Rudyard Kipling to Julius Nyerere
As you made your Al Hajji stone
at the graveyard of  Shakespeare the bard,

You met Daniel Moi face to face
Daniel Moi the Kalenjin Cow of Dictatorship
And black Maestro of ethnic terror
You took this despotic Moi cow to the well,
You pleaded for it to drink politics of reason
But Mazrui I pity, you were unlucky;
Kalenjin cows never drink whatsoever
From the democratic wells of political reasons,

Mazrui Maalim the star of Islam,
I envy your for your elonguence
I envy you for the unique power of ideas,
I envy you for unique intellectual bravery,
I envy you for constant intellectual dynamism
For your firm stand against utopian socialism
For your intuition into Nkrumah’s Leninist czarism,
And Senghorean cultural despair in paradoxical negritude,
For your firm stand against Ngugi’s literary tribalism,

Mazrui the stellar saint of Swahili Nation
I remember your glowing tribute
In eulogy of Julius Nyerere the swahilist,
When you held the world stand-still
With your cadence in tribute to Mandela
You have used every English word in your scholarship,
Indeed Mazrui you are the African sky
that cannot be vilified by any  ***** mouth,


Mazrui the angel of good thought
You cautioned Wole Soyinka in 1988,
When he embarked on his racist mission
That made him to call you a white African
Or a non- African African, An African Arab
In his blurred thoughts in dint of bigotry
Emanating from your Jekyll and Hide
Vintageously Serialized at Albert Schweitzer,
You sang to him ballads of the scholar
On the African of the soil and African of the blood,

Rest in peace Mazrui at the Fort Jesus
Let your glorious name and teachings
Remain permanent to the future people
As the stubborn stones of the Fort Jesus,
As your name takes the official knighthood
Of the leopard skin on death of the leopard,

create a golden route for a poet like me,
let the embodiment of song carved itself
in the palms of the world beyond till lyrics
of faith light to ease the thought of my mind.
If you die before me, tell papa not to cry.
the shrine he left in my hand is still well
planted in the imaginations of his generations.

tell Fela &Giwa that Nigeria is no better,
tell Chinua Achebe that the water in our
throat cries of dry ground they stepped on.
we may not be a better cinematographer
capturing the deeds of this land but your
still photos can crop some timelines to go
with you till I come along to join your trail.

if you die before me, send a word across.
let me know the existence of heaven & hell
if Shakespeare & Okigbo & Buchi are there
so I can change course to path my emotion,
the artistic photography of the tales of hell
are the codeine conscience of anxiety in us.
we die before the masquerade halt in the air.

Husky tears would I drop on your grave
to be taken to Mandela & Luther King.
there are roses I will take from the clay ***
Of my father to your graveyard to give to Ify
my hearted lover in the morning of miracles.
if you die before me, this tattered call would
I make to our ancestors for a perfect survival.

this land is a disco dance hall you must tell
Yar'du of Fate & tears crossing our eyes
in a patterned way to be christened life's joy.
this land is a feminist like Chimamanda A.N,
this country is a pun star you must tell Ken.
tell my cousin Ezekiel to wait for me longer,
I am coming. to join him in benedicted rein of
our country.

If you die before me, I'll be on your graveyard
for a life time cracking up the foundation of
the world to find death. I will ask him if the
other phase is  better than here before coming.
suffering is not meant to be dreamed twice,
Two week-ed weaknesses are the wink wires
connecting our lives in a radioed embryo .

this is my recap
a captured scene
Let's bake life and dreams
till death call us all to himself
then the world becomes empty
love finds love mingling in hands...
die before me & be my eyes beyond.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingfrustration.