By Niyi Osundare
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Kofi Awoonor
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Eni re dara ile A
splendid man has joined the earth
Gbee gbee, ofere gbee Carry him,
carry him, good wind, carry him
Kofi loo, o digba Kofi has
gone, adieu
Gbee gbee gbeee Carry him,
carry him, good wind, carry him
Ofere gbeeeeeeee Carry
him, carry him, good wind, carry him
Kofi Awoonor was not just a prominent
African poet; he was one of those pioneers of the art that showed succeeding
generations how to do it.
At a time when his contemporaries were trying to
out-Eliot TS Eliot and match Ezra pound for pound in a hot imitation of
Euro-Modernism, he took a decision to look inwards, to his African roots, and
he reclaimed our voices with the beauty and power of the traditional oral verse
of the Ewe: its deeply elegiac tonality, its rich allusive idioms, its
essentially humanistic preoccupation.
In a classic case of what anthropologist
call participant observation, he was a Western-educated Ewe man who lived among
Ewe poets, broke bread with them, asked them for some of their creative
secrets, studied them, then gave their predominantly oral verses the wing and
wonder of the written medium.
And he did all this without stealing the fire
from the forge of the traditional poets; without striving to override his
indigenous benefactors. As the Yoruba would say, Kofi m’o woo we, o ba’gba je
(Kofi knew how to wash his hands; so he ate with the elders). He served
faithfully at the temple of indigenous wisdom; the gods rewarded him with
laakaye (wisdom, insight, profundity).
This loric wisdom, this tellurian
capability illuminated all his thinking, all his writing: his prose fiction
(This Earth, My Brother); his literary/cultural criticism (The Breast of the
Earth); and, of course, his numerous poems. No high school student of my generation
would forget ‘Song of Sorrow’ in a hurry (‘Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus. .
. .’ ).
That is an Ewe-poem-in-English whose delicate simplicity and affective
magnetism bring happy intimations of the lines of JP Clark and the wistful
lamentations of Okot p’Bitek. Bless Ulli Beier and Gerald Moore who made these
poems available to us in a compact Penguin edition. Yes, they did, and
transformed the landscape of written modern African poetry for ever.
The debt African poetry owes Kofi
Awoonor is huge and many-sided. Kofi Anyidoho (who was lucky to have been a
hunter in the same cultural/linguistic forest as Kofi Awoonor) would bear me
out.
So would Atukwei Okai, Kwadzo Opoku-Agyemang, Femi Osofisan, Tanure
Ojaide, Odia Ofeimun (of the ‘New Broom’ sensibility), Obiora Udechukwu, Jack
Mapanje, Akeem Lasisi, Ademola Dasylva, Remi Raji, and yes, Niyi Osundare.
Awoonor opened our eyes to the infinite but long ignored (and often long
denied) possibilities of oral literature, and its positive, liberating indigeneity.
He showed the world that African Guardians of the Word sang and danced before
Homer was born; they sang and performed their lyric before the advent of the
earthy tales of Chaucer. Awoonor taught us to honour our tongue the way we do
our pen.
A poet who enlightened creative
sensibility with a healthy dose of socio-political sensitivity, Awoonor
combined the liberation of Africa’s literary idiom with the liberation of
Africa’s politics. A proud and committed pan-Africanist, he spent most of his
time and energy as Ghana’s Ambassador to the United Nations as Chairman of the
Organization’s Anti-Apartheid Committee where he rallied world opinion against
that racist scourge and contributed significantly to the bolstering of world
opinion which eventually sent the Apartheid monster back to hell where it truly
belonged.
We will never forget the violence that
took this gem away from us, the authors of that violence, and the urgent need
for a juster, safer, saner world free of the current bestialities and the
monstrous mayhems that are their tragic offspring.
We will miss Kofi Awoonor’s large
heart, the melody of his mind, the sizzle of his songs, his boldly
interrogative impulse, the thunder of his laughter, his sheer joie de
vivre, that ‘blue-black’ beauty of his proudly Ghanaian face. . . . .
A mighty tree has fallen
The birds have scattered with the wind
Behold their songs like flying seeds
In the wondering sky
—Niyi Osundare, New Orleans, Sept.
28, 2013.
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