Professor Isidore Okpewho: How Difficult It Is to Say farewell? by Ajirioghene J. Oreh
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
How Difficult It Is to Say Farewell?
by
Ajirioghene J. Oreh
I woke up on Monday 5th September, 2016 with an audacity of hope. Looking forward to a new day, a new week, and expecting everything good will come. The day had not gone far when the news came that the doyen of African oral literature and the most eminent scholar of oral literature in the world just passed away. Ah! Hopes were dashed. I was looking forward to the day I will encounter him physically. Looking forward to that great day I will pay my obeisance to him, and take a photograph with him I will forever cherished. In fact, I was planning how to do a birthday tribute for him when he would have clocked seventy-five on November this year. All plans are ruined. No thanks to death!
It was on the genial Dr. Senayon Olaoluwa’s Facebook wall that I saw the shocking news that Professor Isidore Okpewho has passed on into the wonderful Elysium of haloed literary ancestors. The shock was too great. My hands were shaking. I shuddered with cold. My heart fluttered. I had ``to drop my phone on my reading table, put away my eyeglass, and wiped the tears already flowing freely from my eyes. Professor Isidore Okpewho passed away? When? Where? How? These were the questions on my lip, and those who had been privileged to have read him, and encountered him physically. It was unbelievable! Amidst the excruciating pain and grief, I took up my phone and, I went online to confirm if the news making round was without a doubt true. There it was bold headlines of his passing away at the age of seventy-four! I shouted in my room ‘Death where is thy sting?!’ Death denied me the great opportunity to encounter the monumental oral literature scholar of all times and seasons. Overwhelmed with shock, I let out another cry, a piercing one that attracted my mother to my room, not again! Yes, not again. We are yet to come to terms with the joining of the literary ancestors of the captain of creative writing in Africa, Captain (Dr.) Elechi Amadi, (MFR), the iconic author of the Concubine (1966), here is another death, another blow, a devastating blow. Indeed, this is too much, too much to handle. Professor Isidore Okpewho passed away at a time the emerging creative writers and literary critics need the guidance of the elder statesmen and veterans in Nigerian literary firmament.
Professor Isidore Okpewho was a world intellectual heavyweight. Professor Okpewho belong to the class of highly respected Urhobo scholars that has Professors Onigu Otite, Omafume Friday Onoge (blessed memory), Peter Palmer Ekeh, Bruce Onobrakpeya, David T. Okpako, Andrew Onokerhoraye, Simon Umukoro, G.G. Darah, Tanure Ojaide, Samuel Erivwo, Michael Nabofa, Samuel Iboje, Albert Aweto, Amos Utuama, and of course the academic matriarch, Professor (Mrs.) Rose Aziza. In Professor Isidore Okpewho, hyperbole, extravagant exaggeration of facts becomes an understatement. He was a literary man well-known in the two literary traditions, oral and written. Professor Okpewho was a literary conglomerate. A critical survey of the development in the teaching of African oral literature and folklore will show that his research works and publications shaped the curriculum and the pedagogy of the course, African oral literature. Some of his canonical critical texts are African Oral Literature (1992), The Epic in Africa: Towards a poetics of Oral Performance (1979), Myth in Africa: A Study of its aesthetic and cultural relevance (1983), The Oral Performance in Africa (1990, edited), African oral literature: Background, Character and Continuity (1992), and Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony and Identity (1998). These critical texts and other scholarly publications established him the leading scholar of oral literature in the world.
Thus, by virtue of his pioneering and influential contribution to oral literature, Professor Okpewho can be compared to Professor Adeboye Babalola, the author of the Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (1966), Professor Oyineda Ogunba whose PhD dissertation completed in 1968 is titled “Ritual Drama of the Ijebu People: A Study in indigenous Festivals, Donatus Nwoga and Romanus Egudu for their peerless Poetic Heritage: Igbo Traditional Verse (1971), Dandatti Abdulkadir whose very insightful study “The Poetry, Life and Opinions of Sa’adu Zungur” according to Africa’s revolutionary Folklorist, Professor G.G. Darah of the Delta State University, Abraka is among studies that “redefined the scope and theoretical quality of oral literature research in the Hausa-Fulani cultural areas of Northern Nigeria”. This writing is printed as chapter seventeen of G.G. Darah’s edited Radical essays on Nigerian literature published by Malthouse Press Limited in 2008, Wole Soyinka for his Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), ‘Professor’ Wande Abimbola, the celebrated author of Ifa: An Exposition` of Ifa literary Corpus and Ifa Divination Poetry published in 1970 and 1977 respectively. Professor Ropo Sekoni, who has to his credit Folk Poetics: A Sociosemiotic Study of Yoruba Trickster and Professor G.G. Darah, author of Battles of Songs: Udje Tradition of the Urhobo (2005) and Udje Song-Poetry Tradition of the Urhobo people and Oral Literature in Africa (2010).
In looking at the international scholar, Professor Isidore Okpewho and Nigerian oral literature, one has reasons to beat chest that all is well, that studies is blossoming. Professor Godini G. Darah in his enlightening essay “Teaching African Oral literature: A Nigerian perspective” published in African Literature Today, number 29, 2011, focuses on the “trends and phases of teaching and research, the scholars who influenced them and some the books and publications that resulted from their efforts”. Darah says the late Professor Okpewho was the major influence in the teaching, research and fieldworks by scholars, teachers and students of oral literature and folklore from the mid-1970s, especially in the English Department of the University of Ibadan (UI), Ibadan. UI is the homestead of the discourse of oral literature. According to the renowned folklorist, Professor Okpewho “made it mandatory for the students in the oral literature course to undertake fieldwork to obtain material for their final year honours essays”. The late eminent scholar did not just halt there; remarkable was “Okpewho’s practice of citing the works of his students in this teaching and publications”. Yes, it is true; in some of his writings I read while working on this short tribute, I encountered citations of his students’ fieldworks.
With the turn of the millennium, the prospects of oral literature and folklore have improved enormously. Students are now eager and enthusiastic about the course. At Abraka, Professor G.G. Darah is the academic Uloho (Iroko) tree under whose radical plumage scholars, teachers and students of the course gathers for edification. Some of Darah’s oral literary offsprings at Abraka are Alex Roy-Omoni (who taught me ELS 116, Introduction to Oral literature), Moses Darah, Peter E. Omoko, Josephine Ngini, Henry Unuajowhofia, Sheikha Ovie-Jack Tuoyo, and others. Like Professor Okpewho, G.G. Darah is fond of citing his students’ works. Professors Ademola Dasylva and Olutoyin Jegede are the commanders in chief of the course at UI. Professor Segun Adekoya is the expert at the renowned Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. Dr. Felicia Ohwovoriole is the most prolific at the famous University of Lagos. At RCCG’s Redeemers University, Mowe near Lagos, erudite Dr. Mark Osama Ighile is the leading scholar. At other tertiary institutions, there are specialists of the course.
With the founding of the Nigerian Oral Literature Association (NOLA) on 6 December, 2010 in Effurun, Delta State, the teaching of oral literature and studies on Nigerian folklore were boosted. The body which is an active member of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) established in 1995, has a journal called Nigerian Journal of Oral Literatures. According to Professor Segun Adekoya, the editor in the opening paragraph of his “Prefactory Note” to the first number, published August 2013 by Bookraft Limited, Ibadan, says “its objectives are the appraisal, collection, criticism, development, dissemination, documentation, preservation, promotion and creative deployment of oral literatures of all ethnic nationalities in Nigeria”. NOLA still under the founding presidency of Professor G.G. Darah holds annual conferences.
Professor Isidore Okpewho was a foremost poet and a prominent novelist. He was an extraordinary translator, an excellent editor, a famed critic, and an adroit recorder of oral materials and data. He had to his credit anthologies of poems, and essays. Some of his prized and unforgettable novels are The Last Duty which won the highly coveted African Arts prize for literature in 1972, The Victims (1970), The Tides (1993) which got him the reputed Commonwealth Writers prize for Africa, and the radical Call Me By My Rightful Name published in 1993 by the American African World Press. Still on the matter of his creative excellence, Dr. (Mrs.) Enajite E. Ojaruega, a specialist of Modern African Fictions in her very useful essay “Urhobo Literature in English: A Survey” printed in Aridon: The International Journal of Urhobo Studies, number 1, 2014 as chapter five, classified Isidore Okpewho into the “older generation” of Urhobo creative writers who write English. Other “older generation” of Urhobo writers are J.P. Clark, whose mother is Urhobo, Tanure Ojaide, Anthony Biakolo, Ben Okri (the author of the Famished Road (1991), and Neville Ukoli whose The Twins of the Rain Forest (1968) and Softly, Softly and two folk tales (1981) are not just a palm library for younger readers alone. Inheres inn their works are abundant of folklore for intellectual inquiry. He was the author of Heritage of African Poetry: An anthology of Oral and written poetry (1985), and Casebook on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (2003). For his peerless and without equal academic contribution and creativity, the Nigerian government bestowed on him the highly regarded Nigerian National Order of Merit Award (NNOMA). Professor Isidore Okpewho who hailed from Abraka in Delta State left things for us to be proud about. By virtue of his seminal works on the oral literary tradition, Professor Okpewho put Nigeria, nay Africa on the global intellectual map.
The late respected scholar mentored generation of scholars, some of the distinguished writers and critics that emerged in the mid-1970s are his students. Professor Isidore Okpewho served a two-term presidency of ISOLA (2002-2006), was a professor, and Head of English at the University of Ibadan, and was a member of numerous editorial advisory boards of journals. Before his death, he was professor of Africana studies, English, and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton. That his passing away is attracting magnitude of lamentation and mourning worldwide is that Professor Isidore Okpewho’s books are of great assistance to scholars, teachers and students of literature, folklore, anthropology, sociology, theatre, ethnomusicology, etc. I am looking forward to Delta State government under His Excellency, Senator (Dr.) Ifeanyi Arthur Okowa to do the needful by establishing a centre in honour of Professor Isidore Okpewho in Abraka for appraisal, collection, criticism, development, dissemination, documentation, preservation, promotion and creative deployment of oral literatures of all ethnic nationalities in Delta State. This is the only way for the state to memorialised this illustrious and distinguished Deltan. I am still caught in cold here. Professor Isidore Okpewho, the celebrated epic scholar who established the fact that both epic and myth exist in Africa to the chagrin of Professor Ruth Fennigan and others, how difficult it is to say my farewell?
Adieu, the Grand Commander of Oral Literature in the World.
Comrade Oreh is studying English and Literary Studies at the Delta State University, Abraka