By Anthony C. Oha,
I have never met Professor Isidore Okpewho personally except through his writings and through phone calls. I recall speaking to him when I was researching on his novels in my graduate days at the University of Benin in the late 1990s. He sounded modest and was very much interested in helping me do great researches then. I observed that he has great passion for African orature and was advocating that African writing must represent African oral literature style and forms. He sent me so many materials on his works to the extent that he asked me when I was going to round off with my postdoctoral research on him because he forgot I was on my Masters then. On one occasion, he requested that I should venture into oral literature because he loved my passion in his literary stylistics. He told me that African oral literature is a conscious embodiment of stylistics more than Western writings.
In the course of venturing into critical African Stylistics, the unique writing styles of Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Isidore Okpewho have been unavoidable. More so, while researching on the onomastic contours of African literature, Okpewho becomes more glaring as an unavoidable writer who embodies the totality of Africanness in his creativities. Prof. Surrinder Singh of the Institute of African Studies at JNU in New Delhi has opined that some African writers have no style beyond the productions of Chinua Achebe. He claimed that “every African writing is an imitation of Chinua Achebe’s writing style.”(Singh, 2013) One wonders the much he knows about African writing to summarize it in such miniature manner. No doubt, Achebe has had glaring influence on most African writers but it would be wrong to call the totality of African writing as offshoots of Achebe’s literary stylistics. On reading the works of Elechi Amadi, Flora Nwapa, John Munonye among others, you will almost be reading Achebeic prose in their works but, Okpewho is unique in his literary productions. He writes carefully and stylistically to capture true African oral renditions.
Isidore Opkewho’s The Victims captures urban realities in a post-independence Nigeria. The characters in the novel, unlike those of Achebe, lived in a cosmopolitan enclave where the true effects of postcolonial negativities are brought to bear. We read about conflicts, psychological torture and extreme odds of humanity in societies where love is lost and brotherhood is sacrificed on the altar of greed and self-aggrandizement. Africans are by nature polygamous and to some very great extent it worked for our ancestors. Okpewho reveals in the novel that what we once cherished has become taboos to us in the new dispensation left for us by the Europeans. In the novel, the ugly nature of the postcolonial Africans is unveiled in totality. While Achebe is busy correcting the wrong impressions of Africa by the Europeans, Okpewho is more inclined towards revealing unique African style of narration by African contours of orature in his writings.
Throughout his years of scholarship, Okpewho believed like Achebe, that “Africans did not hear of culture for the first time from the Europeans.” He also opined that writing is not strange to Africans. Africans had Nsibidi and other forms of writings before the advent of colonialists. Thus, we see in Okpewho’s writings “that conscious efforts at realizing African orature in the written form.” (Oha, 2007). The peak of his experimentation with African orature in writing comes with his war novel, The Last Duty. Unlike the usual chapterization structure of the earlier African novels, he chooses to allow each of his characters to speak so that the readers will have the choice of appreciating each person’s experiences in the war drama. Reading Eddie Iroh’s Toads of War and Forty Eight Guns for the General and most other war narratives, the writers are busy narrating the events without allowing the characters reveal their sorrowful experiences in the war. Okpewho applied conscious use of graphological tools in capturing the narratives from the world of women as represented by Aku, the world of the oppressed, the wicked and greedy and even the world of the child where the language of the child Oghenovo is captured in totality as the reader sees the child in the language of the child: innocent, rambling, repetitive and distorted. No African writer has been able to achieve this linguistic feat in African writing. No wonder then the novel won the African Writers’ Prize.
On reading Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, one may quickly realize the overpowering influence of Okpewho’s application of orature in the style of the narration. One can easily see the characters telling their tales of woe in the Biafran war. We read the characters’ experiences more than the general feelings of the war. We move from the micro in order to understand the macro realities. I would say that the new African writers are embracing uniqueness in writing revolutions as presented by Okpewho in his oral literary researches. Professor Okpewho believed that “African literature must be seen as a form of literature revealing the totality of African writing in style, theme and content.” I miss him because Africans have lost an irreplaceable big library.
Professor of Literary Onomastics, Centre for Graduate Studies, Noida International University, Uttar Pradesh, India
