Unsung sentinel: Isidore Okpewho 1941 – 2016
There are only two things we Nigerians truly worship: money and power. In some of my moments of exasperation, I fear that we have become the quintessential Third-World dystopian anti-civilisation. After an honest day’s work, for me, the happiest life is a life spent in the company of great minds discussing great ideas. By contrast, hell, for me is a life without books, without friends with whom to hold an intelligent conversation. Sadly, there are no men of ideas in Abuja where we currently make our home; only politicians, crooked civil servants, shylock landlords, hustlers and thieves. The university is in faraway Gwagwalada. And it is not worth its name – being a den of scholastic knavery, cultism and campus whoredom.
A society where the youth model their ideals after what they see on Nollywood movies – a society that respects only moneybags and men of power — is a society that is not only sick; it is a society that is fit only for barbarians.
In Brazil, if you won the Nobel Prize, you would be treated with the protocols deserving of a former Head of State, with all the rights and privileges thereof. It would also mean you would have their equivalent honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR). Not in our benighted Nigeria. Perhaps this is why the late Chinua Achebe, doyen of African literature, noisily rejected the award of Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) on more than one occasion.
I have only one measure of true greatness: whether the person will be remembered 50 years down the road. A wise sage once reminded us that, at least, in a hundred years’ time, none of us will be here. Life’s fitful fever and frenetic unrest will be over in, at best, a century. All of us will sooner or later fall prostrate under a cold gravestone. Nobody will live forever. No one can take their billions with them to the grave, not to talk of pompous titles, prebendal preferments or governmental sinecures. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher! What will matter is our legacy – what we leave behind for future generations; the memories in the hearts of those whose lives we have touched by our deeds of goodness, love, compassion and generosity.
I have a private list of those I consider to be the truly great Nigerians. Only a few of our moneybags and politicians feature on that list. I call them the unsung sentinels – those who love our country and people and truly seek our common good – the genuine patriots. Most of such people are never on the frontline of the newspapers. They are the silent ones, the quiet ones, who continue to hold the torch of hope – in spite of the looming darkness and gloom of our confused and illiberal age.
One of those on my list for many years was Isidore Okpewho, writer, literary scholar, classicist and novelist. He passed away after a brief illness in New York on Sunday 4th September, age 74. I was never fortunate to have met him in person, but I have read most of his books. There are people with whom you feel a spiritual kinship with without ever having met them. He was one of such. He also taught some friends of mine who were undergrads at Ibadan in those days. They mentioned his name with hushed reverence and esteem.
The late Professor Isidore Okpewho was born on November 9, 1941 in Agbor, Delta State. He grew up in his maternal hometown of Asaba, the current State capital. He attended the local St. Patrick’s College, from where he proceeded to the University College, Ibadan, where he studied Classics. That Department was started by the distinguished British scholar John Ferguson. I met Ferguson’s widow in the beatific English countryside of rural Sussex during one blissful summer in the mid-nineties. She reminisced tearfully of the happy years she and her husband spent in Ibadan in the fifties and sixties. John Ferguson loved Nigeria and was devoted to his students.
To my knowledge, the Department he pioneered remains the sole one devoted to classical studies throughout the length and breadth of our country of nearly 200 million people. In the eighties, enrolment in the Classics Department had dwindled to such a small number that the university contemplated closing it down altogether. And yet such a small department has produced giants in politics, industry, literature and international diplomacy: Bola Ige, jurist and statesman; Gamaliel Onosode, a captain of industry and a prince of many a corporate boardroom; Christopher Okigbo, Nigeria’s greatest poet by my own estimation; and Emeka Anyaoku, distinguished elder statesman and international civil servant par excellence.
Isidore Okpewho graduated at Ibadan with a first class honours degree in 1964. He left a record at Ibadan by writing a brilliant prize-winning essay completely in the Latin language. He worked briefly with Longman Publishers before returning to academia, doing graduate work leading to a doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Denver in the United States. He was probably in Denver at the same time as one of my elderly kinsmen, the distinguished engineering scientist and first-rate mathematician Professor Shekarau Yakubu Aku. One of his teachers most likely would have been the South African novelist and scholar Es’kia Mphahlele who spent several decades as a distinguished professor of Literature at Denver. Okpewho was later to crown these achievements with a prestigious D.Litt from the University of London.
He pursued a stellar academic career, first, at the University of New York at Buffalo during 1974-76. He subsequently returned to his alma mater, Ibadan, where he rose to the position of professor and Head of the Department of English during the years 1976-90. One of his lasting legacies was that he was the composer of the University Anthem, with its famous lines, ‘For the mind that knows is the mind that is free’. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University during 1990-91 before settling at his final academic home at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
An author of over a dozen books and novels, the late Okpewho won many laurels for his contributions to the world of scholarship and letters: African Arts Prize for Literature (1976); Commonwealth Writers Prize (1993); Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) (2010); Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars (1982), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany (1982), Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford (1988),Visiting Scholar of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard (1990), Fellow of the National Humanities Centre in North Carolina (1997); Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2003); Folklore Fellow International by the Finnish Academy of the Sciences in Helsinki (1993); and President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA).
Sadly, the late scholar was never given a national award, not even a lowly Commander of the Order of the Niger. I do truly hope that, going forward, our authorities will make it a duty allocate some of the national awards to Diaspora Nigerians who have made major contributions in different fields of endeavour. In a benighted world that sees our country as nothing than a land of scoundrels, such Diaspora Nigerians are our true ambassadors.
Tributes have continued to pour in from abroad and at home. Canadian-British political scientist Michael Vickers, who taught in Ife in the 1960s, wrote a poetic eulogy to the late scholar: “Pure Gold. Precious and permanent to the pride of Nigeria. Rest well, our heart/soul brother. You are the foundation upon which Great Nigeria grows and burgeons. You bring much to the High Table of the Great Ones. The Ancestors rejoice to have you amongst their number. There is much to do.” Poet Niyi Osundare, lamented that a “great tree has fallen in our forest of letters. Isidore Okpewho has joined the ancestors”. He eulogises him as a scholar who “astonishes us all with his versatility as historian, anthropologist, musicologist, and the psycho-analyst of race relations and racial selfhood”.
Because they have neither money nor power academics are sometimes the most arrogant and prickly of egos you can ever come across — narrow-minded, petty and ‘tribalistic’. Henry Kissinger remarked that “their politics are so vicious because the stakes are so little”. By all accounts, Okpewho, for many who knew him, was a world removed from the pack. Osundare, who knew him as a friend and academic says of him: “Generous, inspiring teacher, perceptive writer, scholar of no mean repute, you enrich us all with your combination of intellect and integrity, acute seriousness and lightness of being, seamless sense of humour and sizzling vivacity, a consistently compassionate temperament and humane disposition. You have called Life by its rightful name.”
Isidore Okpewho led the life of a self-effacing scholar; a quiet sentinel whose name did not ring a bell outside a small circle of intellectuals and literary connoisseurs. But he was, in reality, a giant among men; a colossus in the field of scholarship, whose legacy will continue to enrich Nigerian and African culture. His work will endure.
He was among the truly great. Reminds me of Stephen Spender’s immortal lines: “I think continually of those who were truly great; Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history; Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns….Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the sun; And left the vivid air signed with their honour”. We pray the Good Lord to comfort the loved ones he has left behind. In the words of the Psalmist, “In peace itself, I will sleep and I will rest”. Or, in that sweet inimitable tongue of the ancient Romans that was so beloved by him: “In pace in idipsum dormiam, et requiescam”.
Obadiah Mailafia