| Reviving the dead
...Friends, colleagues, relive experiences with late Ezenwa-Ohaeto
By CHIKA ABANOBI
Saturday, November 21, 2009
It made not only a colourful but also a memorable occasion
when friends, colleagues and well-wishers gathered at the
Postgraduate Auditorium of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka,
on October 20 for a formal presentation of the book - African
Literature and Development in the Twenty-First Century, a
collector’s item on proceedings from the first Professor
Ezenwa Ohaeto International Memorial Conference.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto, a celebrated poet, essayist, art critic, public
affairs analyst, winner of many international literary awards
and co-winner of 2005 Nigeria Liquefied Gas Prize for Literature
(poetry), together with Gabriel Okara, if you will recall,
succumbed to death after a protracted battle with cancer.
But since then, friends and colleagues in the literary world,
at home and abroad, have been organising seminars, symposia
and international conferences such as give birth to the book
launched on October 20, to keep his memory alive.
The book launch which took place a month before the 8th graduation
and degree award ceremony of the university, was organized
by the Faculty of Arts of the university under the deanship
of Rev. Father Professor Josephat Oguejiofor.
They 486-page book jointly edited by Joy Eyisi, a Professor
of English and the current Head of Department, English Language
and Literature, Ike Odimegwu, a senior lecturer in the Department
of Philosophy of the same university and Ngozi Ezenwa-Ohaeto,
wife of the late Ezenwa-Ohaeto and a lecturer in the Department
of English Language and Literature, Nnamdi Azikiwe University,
is divided into 45 chapters encapsulated in six major sections
of Literature and African Development; Ezenwa-Ohaeto in African
Literature; Language and African Literature; Literature and
Gender; Culture, Film and Music and Poems and Short Stories.
In a moving tribute published in the first three pages of
the book, Ngozi Ezenwa-Ohaeto described her husband as “a
practical African family man” who “diligently
and effectively merged his academic writings with his marital
roles.”
“Ezenwa-Ohaeto lives in the heart of his friends and
colleagues all over the globe, but particularly as evidenced
in this very collection, in the hearts of his colleagues in
the Faculty of Arts, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka and in
the hearts of so many other colleagues outside the University,”
she further noted. “Ezenwa really lives on.”
Indeed, he does, not only in the collection but also in the
minds of his friends and colleagues as evidenced by some words
and experiences they shared with Saturday Sun.
“Before I came in here he has died,” Oguejiofor
says. “But I knew him through his books and that’s
the best way you can know an academic. I remember reading
one of his books, but unfortunately, I didn’t finish
that book, that is the book he wrote on Chinua Achebe, a biography.
Achebe is somebody that I admire and the moment I saw the
book in the US, I bought it and started reading. So, by the
time I knew about him here (at UNIZIK), I said, ‘ah,
is that the person that wrote that book?’
“He is an internationally known scholar, and, for me,
that’s one thing we lack. We are still very local, in
parenthesis. We have not been known as much as we can be known,
beyond Nigeria, I mean. And this is somebody who was really
flowering especially in Germany.
Actually, Ezenwa-Ohaeto first came to Germany on DAAD visiting
fellowship in 1992, beginning at the Gutenberg University
in Mainz and continuing in Bayreuth. In 1994, Ezenwa-Ohaeto
was first awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship which
he could resume again in 1997 and 1998. 1999/2000 he held
one of the newly established visiting professorships, jointly
funded by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Ministry
of Cooperation; this position was located in the Humbodlt
University in Berlin. In 2003, Ezenwa-Ohaeto won his most
prestigious academic award, the Wilhelm von Bessel Research
Award of the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation. To date, Ezenwa-Ohaeto
has been the only African scholar to be honoured with a Humboldt-Foundation
Research Award.
The Faculty’s decision to honour Ezenwa by launching
the book, Oguejiofor said: “What informed it was the
status of our late professor who unfortunately was not alive
to climb more hurdles and reach more heights. His death was
untimely and the colleagues who knew him and with whom he
worked had decided, in their sorrow, and also in their attempts
to mark the good life that he lived, to make a point of the
their loss and to show also that this is somebody of no mean
stature, a person who was on the verge of flowering into the
world of academics and all that.”
“I don’t know how to say it, but when we got the
information that he was in a hospital, we thought it was a
joke,” Eyisi who said he taught her “Introduction
to Fiction” while a student of the university, illumined.
“We continued on regular visitation to the hospital.
What we thought was a joke started manifesting in what was
so difficult for us to interpret. All of a sudden, it went
into something else so much so that the hospital in Nigeria
could not continue and then he was transferred to the United
States of America where the treatment continued. He was diagnosed
of cancer but all the same, everything about that Department
of English could not bear. Ah, it was a big, big vacuum he
left behind.
“Ezenwa Ohaeto is a model. I think the youth should
be directed to the personality of Ezenwa Ohaeto so as to know
that there is joy in hard work. You do not get up any day
and become internationally acclaimed, and become somebody
or find your name in the Guinness Book of Records. He taught
us on the need to work hard no matter your area of life –
carpenter or mason. We thank God for the gift of Ezenwa Ohaeto.
It is a consolation to the family he left behind, to the wife
in particular, who, incidentally, is one of the editors of
the book. And, it will also be a milestone in the annals of
the university and the rest of the universities in Nigeria.
More importantly, Nnamdi Azikiwe University recognizes hard
work.
We are celebrating excellence, hard work, dedication, commitment
and honesty. I think these are the qualities we need in Nigeria
to move the country forward. I think Ezenwa Ohaeto exhibited
such qualities. And, therefore, celebrating him posthumously
is something that is worth it.”
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