Tragedy In Context: Dubem Okafor
Toyin Falola
Dubem Okafor : In Memoriam
By
Chimalum Nwankwo
Professor of English
North Carolina A&T State University
Greensboro, NC USA
It is sad that those who have neither met nor known in any serious way Professor Dubem Okafor make comments about his life and death. Brilliant scholar-poet, gifted, and generous in heart,his most enduring legacy is MALI(Multi-ethnic Literacy Insitute ) in Allentown,Pennsylvania, which oversees the lives of about 70 children from various ethnicities and background.
The living always modify or falsify perspectives to justify what they think of the dead. But, that is understandable especially when the dead lived a life so complex and ordinarily incomprehensible to most people. And then, of course, to die like Dubem Okafor died creates even further complications, offering more baffling speculative takes and intensity of gaze than a normal death would have invited.
Dr. Dubem Okafor was my friend and school mate at the University of Nigeria. He graduated one year before me from the famous post-Biafran war University of Nigeria , Nsukka, known for its great concentration of talented students. These were largely students trapped by the Biafra civil war and therefore entering the University at points when they should have almost been graduating. Those students were also lucky despite the infrastructural decrepitude caused by the war ; some of the greatest scholars and teachers of the time were there to shepherd the ebullient post-war campus, especially the Department of English. There were there ; MJC Echeruo, Donatus Nwoga, Emmanuel Obiechina, Romanus Egudu, Juliet Okonkwo, Helen Chukwuma, Nnabuchi Orji and a plenitude of young rising stars who were University Junior Fellows or Teaching Assistants. One could not have wished for anything better than being a student in those hands and environment. It was a strange crucible of delightful work and inspiration. The best students in the Department were generally driven by the great desire to be like those scholars and teachers ; for in our ambitious eyes, each was a ball encasing ideal, idol, mentor, guide, and beacon of our ride into the rainbowed heavens of the future.
As under-graduates, we cliqued arrogantly into two groups, simply future writers and others. The "future writers" coincidentally, were always in the best brackets of performance. Chukwuma Azuonye,Dubem Okafor,Ogonna Agu and so on. This was not a very auspicious thing but we could not see it then. We cultivated an early haughty confidence and self-assurance which nearly derailed most of us before we could earn any garland or laurels. Graduating, first class or second class upper was like the visa into the starry skies. But our encounter with the Western world was a "not-so-fast!" injunction that we had to learn to adjust.
We had thought that understanding the Western tradition and consciousness was the only ferry across their seemingly placid lakes of genteel culture and reason. We did not see through the mirage of political and ideological deception,affectation and pretense, the drama of phoney propriety, and the quicksands of pathological racist condescension. It was only a matter of time for us to begin to understand the laborious finesse for negotiating the assorted subtleties demanded by cultural imperialism and a thinly veiled paternalism.
Dubem, like some of us, barely survived an M.A degree from England. He, again like some of us, also barely survived the Ph.D. in the USA. Despite his numerous books, creative and scholarly, he was denied a full professorship at Kutztown University where he taught for many years. The vicissitudes attendant on the trails of his various paper chases exacerbated a drinking habit picked up as a young man who enjoyed life excessively, living with his unpredictable maternal uncle, the celebrated late poet, Christopher Okigbo. The tragic death of Okigbo did not help his state of mind neither did the state of the Nigerian nation both of which he captured so beautifully in angry grandiloquence in Dance of Death. His second book of essays, Cycle of Doom, affirmed his uncanny understanding of human destiny as well as he defined the trajectory of his individual destiny in one of his poetry books, Garlands of Anguish.
For Dubem, anguish came from multiple sources. His Nigerian marriages were the unfortunate casualties of his tempestuous temperament. That temperament was that of a perfectionist, a terrible irony. He sought beauty everywhere. He sought perfection in his reading and definition of the world. He wanted you, his friends, his wife and children, to reflect his own brilliance in their conducts. He hoped that he could lead by example. Alas, he could not. His greatest pain came from his failed Nigerian marriages, especially the first marriage which he regretted up till our last conversation, two days before his sad death. He knew he was wrong with the wives but never knew how to use the spirit leash in all of us. His last wife, a Jamaican, came with a promise of renewal, but that hope we now know could not last too.
Exile first killed my friend, Dubem. Encourage Nigerians abroad to stay in touch with home always. Dubem Okafor was my friend alive, and remains my friend in death. Disoriented,his fortunes or misfortune as an overseas academic prepared the crypt for his death. The debacle from a third marriage staged the burial. There are complex tearful dramas behind this sketch that will remain private. Irresponsible internet speculations and wild media speculations about a man who lost compact with his chi should be more cautious and sympathetic,attracting more prayers than insensitive condemnation. All religions and spiritual or mystical ways appreciate the wisdom in one old simple common injunction : judge not !
I was at the funeral. His little daughter snuggled up to me when I sat with some of the bereaved family. After addressing me by my nickname, "Spirit", she brought out her cell phone and started dialing. Knowing I was looking at her, she, in most painful innocence, looked up into my eyes and informed me : "I am calling my daddy". A new flood of tears dimmed my eyes.
Chimalum Nwankwo
Professor of English
North Carolina A&T State University
Greensboro, NC USA
--
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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Mario Fenyo
Unfortunately I did not attend the funeral. I was not invited, for there was not anyone left who might have known my name.
I can only reinforce all the positive emotions expressed by Professor Nwankwo, even though i cannot claim to have been a lifelong friend. I spent six weeks in Dubem's company on a daily, perhaps even hourly basis. I know he was an eminent scholar, who reacted to his surroundings passionately. He was a poet, with several languages as his tools, who observed the world around him with passion and compassion. When my colleagues in Missouri were too busy to talk to me, he always found the time.
True, he had a tragic flaw, maybe more than one. Maybe it was indeed life in exile, as an expatriate that did him in, that broke his strong back of a wrestler. I regret infinitely to have missed my chance of having yet another conversation, another talk, even if it might have been last.
Mario
Dr. Mario D. Fenyo
President
Association of Third World Studies
c/o Department of History and Government
Bowie State University
Bowie, MD 20715
USA
________________________________
Dubem Okafor : In Memoriam
By
Chimalum Nwankwo
Professor of English
Greensboro, NC USA
Chimalum Nwankwo
Professor of English
Greensboro, NC USA
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Anunoby, Ogugua
Thank you Chimalum for this clarification and tribute to a great academic.
There is still the larger point of possible lessons that may be learned from the tragic life of Dubem Okafor. While it is still not clear why he did what he did, the rest of us must learn from this tragedy, to let go when it is over. It has been said that the worst treachery is to not tell oneself the truth.
If the mind is sound/not sick, a learned man/woman should know to not love the moon or desire what has been gone and lost. Literature is life. Literature is instructive. A true person of letters would be expected to know that if something is not working and cannot be fixed, it is time to move on without it. They should know that there is no more to say or do after all has been said and done.
Thank you again.
oa
From:
usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Toyin Falola
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 4:11 AM
To: USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tragedy In Context: Dubem Okafor
Dubem Okafor : In Memoriam
--
Ikhide
Let me be clear: Professor Chimalum Nwankwo's piece was offensive, dismissive as it was of those who chose to express their grief and angst about Professor Dubem Okafor’s situation in ways he did not like. How typical, literally every biography of a Nigerian public person is a hurriedly compiled hagiography. We are perhaps more invested in viewing a person's life as the true biography. Nobody ever takes the time to document in writing the real lived life. The written is usually a tissue of lies. Compare and contrast these silly hagiographies with the obituaries written of say Norman Mailer and you will get what I mean. There is not much written that is readable about the personal life of Wole Soyinka. His friends merely shrug at his frailties and romanticize them. When the great man dies, out will come reams of bad prose and atrocious poetry all in disgusting praise of the man. When Obasanjo dies, imagine the nonsense that will be written about that thug. In this patriarchy from hell, women and children are mere firewood to light up puny balls and mutant giant egos.
O Chimalum! Ah, the arrogance, the condescension, the narcissism seep out the words still. Heaven help us. The last of those who see themselves as the great Nigerian romantic poets chafe at accountability. How typical: Three doomed women and presumably several children are an impatient footnote to The Man's life. No lessons learnt here, no sincere reflection on what this means for the rest of us still here. No, just an imperial wave of the hand. Hear Professor Nwankwo: "Women and children, shut up", he thunders. Yes sir, we cower in fear at the awesome power of empty words. Hurrah for fake thunder.
In the land that cradles my placenta, we do not speak ill of the dead, really we do not. It is unnecessary. The lived life is the living mirror of all our judgments and actions, to use yet another cliche, warts and all. We see you, son, daughter, father, mother, falling drunk. Why, you were one of us, why you were us. There is nothing much to say, except to sing your praises for a life lived, well, imperfectly.
The written word is the new praise-singer; praise songs have become hagiographies, and in the absence of the true book of the lived life, hagiographies seal the troubled chambers of our friends. The truth lives in us. Because our friend was us. May the women and children who lived through this tornado find the peace that was denied them. May she who paid the ultimate price live her life joyfully elsewhere. No great poets serenade her journey, no historian traces the arc of her blood, fleeing criminal dysfunction. In her next life, powerful poets will shield her frailties from us. For Dubem Okafor was us. Hurrah for fake thunder.
- Ikhide
Tony Agbali
Hmmm...a true man of letters, eh! That is the mistake that most folks make regarding violence. Violence is not just the staple of the poor, illiterates, and uneducated. The capability to engage in violence is not hindered by intellection, as emotions expressed as conscupicience can cloud the mind and unfortunately eclipse right judgement. The act of violence is framed by judgments we make, the will, and the ability to carry out such actions under ripe conditions.
Anyone is capable of expressing violent acts under certain situations and triggers based upon certain conditions and diverse factors acting either singly or overwhelmingly. Such factors can be shaped by their psychological, spiritual, cultural dispositions, as well as such things temper, upbringing, and access to lethal instruments.
The kind of violence that the late Dubem Okafor exhibited, seemed to be one of a tired soul, who monumentally and acutely intelligent seemingly feeling taken for granted had reached his soulful end. Rather, than deal with betrayal and loneliness, not willing to be a soulless person in a working/walking body, it seems he reached a cowardly- even an irrational decision. If Prof. Chimalum Nwankwo highlight can be taken as real the series of losses Dubem Okafor experienced killed him, and exile presumably nailed his coffin.
There is a valuable point in that. Exile has killed many people I know even though that they are living organically. Many has become automatons, feeling unvalued, and culturally assaulted, but they have invested so much that the price of return is just not worth it, so dangling in spaces, they have become zombies, in some sense just living and devoid of the real joys of living- one that the almighty dollar cannot provide.
The kind of self-worth and relevance that defines the being in the land where achievements matter, and those who have paid their price can wash their hands and eat with the elders.
But with exile, being neither here nor there, and time and space wandering in changes, the sour ambivalence of being and its soreness can truly kill- and never have been killed ever before they die.
Dubem Okafor, may be walking sane but in fact, he was a beaten person, who did not want probably to experience the counter change again defining him a losser a further time. It seems having experienced umpteen losses, unable to bear another impending, he had become dulled to the ultimate loss of his wife and his life through his own controling agency. He, rather than someone else wanted to put an end to it- he wanted no part with suspence he wanted finality- the teleology that is induced death, an end to his anticipated suffering.
Truly, there is a sense of heroic cowardice to that, but in another sense, though sounding naive, there is a dramatic dynamism to his scripting the prologue of his and wife's life, within a literary mode that still creates that lingering suspense that defines the final plot, within the inability toward fathoming the reason-the why. Somehow, I wonder, if knowing the story of his wife, Cheryl, and his past ordeal, did not play a part in the way Dubem Okafor, plotted their final end! Garland of Villainy!
Sadly, probably for those who should have known, certain triggers existed that they missed! Now, we can only guess. needed professional help. That was the time that those who probably knew him, and noticing some signals and symptoms should have become alerted.
While, Professor Nwankwo's perspective offers a particular viewpoint, there are still gaps and much more than is contained in his piece. African immigrants, and specifically Nigerians, have increasingly being resorting to fatal spousal abuses that is yet to be fully explained.
There is even a discernible pattern that majority of the perpetuators, within the Nigerian incidences derive from a common geographic origin (an observation by Chika Onyeani of the African Sun Times newspaper). Whether this is coincidental, a factor of the high immigrants' demographic incidence/density from such regions in the U.S, or even historic instances of collective trauma (a point that I think Prof. Nwankwo vaguely alluded to in the Dubem case), is yet to be deciphered.
It might also not be the case that it is a singular factor, but rather a combination of factors. But at this point, we cannot say for sure.
c--- On Tue, 9/14/10, Anunoby, Ogugua <Anun...@lincolnu.edu> wrote: |
Ikhide
From: Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Tragedy In Context: Dubem Okafor
Pius Adesanmi
|
http://saharareporters.com/column/elder-commanda-and-quality-welcome Elder Commanda and the Quality of a Welcome By Pius Adesanmi April 27, 2011. South Africa’s Freedom Day. My good friend, Her Excellency Ms Mohau Pheko, South Africa’s High Commissioner to Canada, invites me to a modest ceremony to mark the day. Nothing ostentatious. No fanfare. Short speeches by select invitees, flag raising, singing Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, poetry recitation, and a short freedom walk. The sort of austere investment in the nuance and deeper symbolism of national occasions that one always wishes our friends in Abuja, who spend billions celebrating such rituals, would learn from. The High Commissioner asks me to read from my poetry at the event. I accept the invitation. The skies of Ottawa decide to shed tears in homage to Nelson Mandela. The rain ensures that we cannot do the freedom walk part of the ceremony. We converge in the reception wing of the High Commissioner’s residence for the speeches and poetry recitation part of the proceedings. “The Gift of an Error”, a poem from my unpublished collection, ruffles quietly in my pocket, awaiting my podium moment as the sole bard invited for the occasion. Deploying a popular creation motif in Yoruba mythology, I had written that poem years back in Johannesburg in celebration of South Africa’s post-apartheid self-fashioning as the rainbow nation. My poet-persona croons in the last verse of the poem: Ah, Obatala! Grant me the gift of your error That my verse may escape the tyranny of uniformity Grant me the gift of your error That I may rhyme some, free others Grant me the gift of your error That my art may sing the beauty of difference Grant me the gift of your error That my art may be rainbow
But before my moment comes the moment of ritual observance. The South Africans, perhaps in recognition of the transnational dimensions of their ideology of the rainbow, settle for a Native American (First Nations in Canada) welcoming and blessing ceremony. The freedom of Zulus Xhosas, Boers, Indians, Coloureds, and the many hues of Azania is going to be blessed in the Americas by the true owners of the American soil. And the man the South Africans invite to perform this most solemn ritual is story. Elder Commanda is history puslsatingly alive and in motion. Elder Commanda is legend. Elder Commanda is much more than this Facebook biography says he is: “Elder William Commanda from Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, Maniwaki, Quebec, was born on November 11, 1913 under the bright light of the Morning Star, so his mother named him Ojigkwanong; thus the larger universe figured in his personal story from the very beginning. Today, he is seen by many as the symbol of light emerging from the darkness of the first World War, illuminating a path to a new world with his vision for a Circle of All Nations, A Culture of Peace. He is a respected spokesman and spiritual leader at many conferences, participates in United Nations peace and spiritual vigils, and his work is acknowledged nationally and internationally. Fully trilingual, he shares his words and prayers in Algonquin, and translates them into English and French. Central to Elder Commanda’s teachings are the concepts of equality, balance, respect and responsibility for Mother Earth, for all life forms and for people of all racial and cultural backgrounds, and he works ceaselessly, alone and entirely without an organization, staff, structure, formal or financial support to animate the Circle of All Nations. A most senior representative of the Algonquins of the Ottawa River Watershed, he is the great, great grandson of the legendry Pakinawatik, the Algonquin chief who in the mid eighteen hundreds, led his people from their lands at Oka on the Lake of Two Mountains to their traditional hunting and trapping grounds at the confluence of the Desert and Gatineau. He is the carrier of three sacred Wampum Belts of historic and spiritual importance: the ancient Seven Fires Prophecy Belt about choice; the 1700s Welcoming Belt about sharing the grand natural resources and values of the original peoples with the newcomers; and the Jay Treaty Border Crossing Belt which recognized Turtle Island as a coherent entity. His ancestors inscribed their legends, prophecies and agreements in these carefully crafted items over many centuries. He is seen by many as the carrier of the Seven Fires Prophecy at the time of the unfolding of its final message, and the messages of all these ancient artifacts are as deeply relevant today, as they were in the past. He was acclaimed chief of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg for over nineteen years, though he himself never participated in the elections. He also worked as a guide, trapper and woodsman for much of his life. He is a birch bark canoe maker and craftsman of international renown, and there is a special display dedicated to his work at the Canadian Canoe Museum of Peterborough. He built a canoe for Queen Margrethe of Denmark, and he helped Pierre Trudeau repair his famous birch bark canoe. At the age of 90, he shared his canoe making skills and philosophy in Valerie Pouyanne’s documentary, Good Enough for Two. He has promoted environmental stewardship and respect for Mother Earth passionately for many decades. He conducted pipe ceremonies for the Pre-Rio Earth Summit Conference hosted by President Mitterand of France in 1991, and his prayers lie behind Agenda 21. He participated in the United Nations first Indigenous Cry of the Earth conference. He served as spiritual guide to the 1995 seven and a half month Sunbow Five Walk from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific, to raise awareness of the growing environmental crisis; received the Bill Mason River Conservation Award in 2004; hosted workshops on water stewardship in 2004 and 2006, and 2009; is honorary chair of the Ottawa Heritage River Designation Committee; and offers interventions on current environmental issues such as the identification of the American Eel as a Species at Risk, the building of a mega dump on Danford Lake and the Navigable Waters Act. He is the recipient of numerous awards and acknowledgements of his works and talent: the Wolf Project and Harmony Awards for his efforts to foster racial harmony and peace building through the creation of a Circle of All Nations (one very well received example of this commitment is the annual international gathering he hosts at his home during the first weekend of August – the 2001 Gathering is presented in the Circle of All Nations documentary); a Justice Award from the University of Ottawa and a Peace Award from Friends for Peace. He promotes restorative justice, forgiveness and his outreach to prisoners is captured in Lucie Ouimet’s National Film Board Documentary, Encounter with an Algonquin Seer. Recently, his efforts were acknowledged in Ottawa with two special recognitions: in 2005, with an Honorary Doctorate Degree from the University of Ottawa, shortly after his book, Learning from a Kindergarten Dropout, was published; and in 2006, with the Key to the City of Ottawa, a singular honour for an Aborignal person from a reserve in Quebec. This was presented on Victoria Island, where the tireless ninety five year old continues working on his vision for a National Indigenous Centre, for the restoration and development of the Sacred Chaudière Site as a special national historic centre, and as a think tank for environmental stewardship and peace building of national and global relevance. Two other books, Learning from a Kindergarten Dropout Book Two, and Passionate Waters–Butterfly Kisses include further reflections on his work and ideology. In December 2008, he was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada, for his leadership as an elder who has promoted intercultural understanding and has raised awareness of the traditions and legacies of Canada’s Aboriginal people. Elder Commanda says he is deeply honoured to witness this recognition of the relevance of Indigenous Wisdom to this country at this time. In November 2009, the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards Foundation announced his selection as 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. In January, 2010 Willis College announced the Dr. William Commanda Scholarship.” This is the great Native Canadian Elder in whose solemn presence we now gather to mark South Africa’s freedom day. In his elaborate introduction of Elder Commanda, the emcee ensures that we do not forget the man’s friendship with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. The emcee makes sure that we remember that Elder Commanda represents for Native Canadians what Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama represent for their respective peoples. The room gets smaller as Elder Commanda’s world figure status raced off the emcee’s tongue. Elder Commanda takes the podium with all his ninety-eight years of history and graciousness. Before solemnizing the room with a ritual beckoning to his ancestors, he gives a short speech, part biographical, part spiritual, about this world; about his earth; about his people; about where and how the rain began to beat them; about love; about forgiveness. He spoke and spoke and spoke. That room, filled with South Africans, white Canadians, and this Nigerian, is silent, eerily silent. Everyone is swallowing his words, deep in thought. I do not follow Elder Commanda’s speech beyond his very opening sentence. I cannot get beyond this man’s first sentence. That sentence traps me in its awesome power and I surrender myself to a revelry of analysis. From the podium, he takes one sweeping look at us, his audience, and declares with all the power of his love for humanity: “you are welcome to our land”. The student of history in me kicks in. The scholar in me kicks in. The quiet listener to nuance and meaning in me kicks in. I look around casually to see if anyone in the room hears Elder Commanda the way I hear him. Welcome to our land, he says. Not welcome to Canada. Hmmm. I have been in North America since 1998. In that time, I have studied in Canada, gone on to teach in the United States for four years before returning to Canada in 2006. I have received many a welcome to Canada, welcome to the US, from airport immigration officials and Canadian and American friends. But this singular “welcome to our land”, uttered by Elder Commanda at the beginning of the blessing ceremony, acquires an immediate halo of authenticity, shorn of the whiff of imperium that always comes with welcomes uttered by Europeans who stole this land. Thirteen years after my feet first kissed the earth of the Americas, I get my first real, official, and genuine welcome from a shon of the shoil, the real owner of the land, singularly authorized to utter that welcome. My mind wanders to another historic moment of enunciation of a welcome powered by authenticity: The gate of reeds is flung open There is silence But only a moment’s silence- A silence of assessment The tall black king steps forward, He towers over the thin bearded white man, Then grabbing his lean white hand Manages to whisper “Mtu Mweupe Karibu” White man you are welcome The gate of polished reed closes behind them And the West is let in.
“White man you are welcome.” That’s Malawian poet, David Rubadiri, capturing history in one sentence in his famous poem, “Stanley Meets Mutesa”. And here we are in the Americas, being “let in” officially by Elder Commanda, a genuine owner of that patch of earth. Only this time, we shall not take the stool from the owner of the house and ask him to sit on the floor. As Elder Commanda speaks about forgiveness and how he used love to transcend hatred, I think of Wole Soyinka’s discussion of Senghor’s forgiveness of the slaving sins and colonial transgressions of France in his book, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. How are the Elder Commandas of this world able to transcend structures and life-worlds that insist on an endless repetition of oppression and insults? A few weeks after Elder Commanda’s message of forgiveness and love in Ottawa, the Americans capture and kill their arch-enemy, Osama Bin Laden, in an operation they were stupid enough to baptise Geronimo! Endless repetition of oppression and insults. Endless infliction of silly violence on the other’s history and heros. It just so happens that nobody in the Pentagon thought it okay to call the battle of Abbottabad operation Abraham Lincoln! How about: “Abe Lincoln EKIA” for a change? Love. Forgiveness. Transcending difference. The themes float in the room as I mount the podium to read my poem after Elder Commanda’s awe-inspiring speech. Then I think of the differences and faultlines that the nationalities in that room have overcome or are overcoming in the permanently unfinished business of nationhood: South Africans and Canadians with their bloody tales of racial and other differences. These South Africans and Canadians say in unison with Elder Commanda that forgiveness is the first condition of nationhood. And I stand in the same room with my Nigeria of equally fractious and violent differences. Over there in Nigeria, tribe and tongue do not just differ, they kill. Is forgiveness also the antidote to the deadly invidiousness of our national condition in Nigeria? Could it be that forgiveness comes easier to South Africans and Canadians because no state or political elite is sufficiently arrogant to tell the people that statehood and nationhood are sacrosanct no-go areas that can neither be discussed nor re-negotiated? Could it be that forgiveness comes easy when there is no silly talk of a “corporate existence” cast in the stone of status quo, beyond dialogue? These thoughts crowd my mind but I’ve got a poem to read on the podium just sanctified by Elder Commanda. |
laolu akande
AND for effect, dear colleagues-read the report and photos below about the issue Ikhide raised. I am in total agreement, and I am copying all Jonathan's people that I now.
This is SIMPLY unacceptable, nobody should have to live this way. WHAT?!!!
Nigerian High Commissioner Battered Me - Wife NIGERIAN HIGN COMMISSIONER TO KENYA AND THE SEYCHELLES, CHIEF DR CHIJIOKE WILCOX.
THE wife of the Nigerian High Commissioner has written the Police Commissioner Mathew Iteere asking him to arrest the diplomat for assaulting her. Mrs Tess Iyi Wigwe accuses her husband Chief Dr Chijioke Wilcox Wigwe of causing her serious bodily harm.
Wigwe is the High Commissioner to Kenya and the Seychelles. He is also the permanent representative of Nigeria to the United Nations Environmental Programme and the UN Habitat in Nairobi.
In a short biography Wigwe is described as a devoted lover of music of all kinds and genre ranging from Classical to New Age. "He enjoys singing and dancing, is an avid reader, writer of short poems, an art and opera lover with other interests including bird and aircraft- watching".
Yesterday Wigwe denied battering his wife. He expressed shock that the police had been asked to arrest him. "I am shocked about her actions. They have not notified me of any plot against me. I have just arrived from a foreign trip," he told the Star.
A letter from lawyer Judy Thongori to Iteere dated Monday (May 23) says Tess sustained injuries on the face, neck, fingers and spine after a quarrel which resulted in the beating on May 11. In an exclusive interview with the Star yesterday, Tess said she was rescued by her 20-year-old son and 23-year-old daughter who rushed her to hospital while bleeding profusely.
The diplomat’s wife said she was admitted to the Aga Khan Hospital, Nairobi, on May 11, operated on and discharged on Sunday, May 15. "I am still living in the ambassador’s residence. I still feel a lot of pain from the injuries despite the ongoing medications,” she said, adding that she had been advised by her doctors to be careful as the injuries to her lower back might lead to paralysis.
 Tess, herself a lawyer with dual British and Nigerian citizenships, said she had suffered previous beatings by her husband during their long marriage. The couple has five children — four boys and a girl aged between 32 and 20 years. They have five grandchildren.
Tess said she had in 1999 left her husband due to his womanising and frequent beatings and went to live in the UK where she got a job. She claimed that he had two traditional marriages with two women during their separation.
Tess said he pleaded with her to join him when he got his posting to Nairobi in 2008. "I thought he had changed his ways and l was prevailed upon by the community to join him," she told the Star. Wigwe reported to his new station in May 2008 but Tess only joined him months later because she had to get a leave of absence from her employer in the UK. Tess said he beat up her in October that year when she questioned him about bringing strange women to their matrimonial home.
She said she kept the matter quiet but the relationship has become so bad that they have reached a point where he communicates with her by writing and leaving her notes. "This time, he left a note about his dinner. I told him his dinner was ready and asked him not to be asking for dinner to be prepared if he was not going to eat it. He grabbed me by the hand and when l tried to pull away, he hurled me against the wall before he started punching me," she said.
Tess said she has opted to come out and explain her situation to show that domestic violence cuts across cultures, education and social standing. "I cannot keep quiet. I have kept quiet long enough," Tess said.
 From today Wigwe is expected to play host to a four-day Nollywood roadshow and fair organised by the Nigerian Export Promotion Council, the Nigerian Guild of Actors and the Nigerian High Commission which is expected to culminate in a gala dinner at the Safari Park Hotel on Sunday night.
Yesterday lawyer Thongori who is acting on behalf of Tess said they would demand that Wigwe's diplomatic immunity be lifted so that he could be prosecuted. “Though Dr Chijioke Wilcox Wigwe is a diplomat, we are of the considered view that any diplomatic immunity that he enjoys is subject to him upholding and respecting the fundamental rights of others as enshrined in the Constitution,” Thongori said in her letter to Iteere citing the rights which include freedom from torture, freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment.
Thongori told the Commissioner that her client wants her husband prosecuted. “We have instructions to demand the immediate prosecution of the husband in accordance with the law,” lawyer Thongori says in the letter.
No arrest can be made at the High Commission residence or offices of the embassy as they are considered the territory of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
The Nairobi Star. --- On Fri, 5/27/11, Ikhide <xok...@yahoo.com> wrote: |
Anunoby, Ogugua
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ikhide [xok...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, May 27, 2011 6:51 AM
To: Ed...@yahoogroups.com; USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - "Chief" Dr. Chijioke Wilcox should resign immediately
OLADMEJI ABORISADE
Thhank you,
Oladimeji Aborisade
Olaabo...@msn.com
From: Anun...@lincolnu.edu
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com; Ed...@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 23:38:16 -0500
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - "Chief" Dr. Chijioke Wilcox should resign immediately