PHOTO | FILE Kofi Awoonor. The 78-year-old Ghanaian who was killed during the Westgate Mall siege was a renowned poet. NATION MEDIA GROUP
In Summary
We will remember Kofi Awoonor for his songs of hope, but what will the terrorists who killed the eminent Ghanaian poet at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi be remembered for? Nothing.
His first book of poetry, In Rediscovery (1964), is a celebration of African heritage that colonialism sought to erase. Ironically, Bila Sababu mouths anti-imperialist slogans but are oblivious to works by a poet like Kofi Awoonor, who doesn’t brook imperialism in any form.
Like most African writers, Awoonor has drunk from the chalice of exile. He fled Ghana after the fall of the government of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, having been very close to the first Ghanaian president.
By Evan Mwangi
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With their guns and grenades, the Al-Shabaab were out to destroy everything in their path in an orgy of violence, but poetry will resurrect Kofi
We will remember Kofi Awoonor for his songs of hope, but what will the terrorists who killed the eminent Ghanaian poet at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi be remembered for? Nothing.
When Bila Sababu (or whatever that terrorist organisation is called) struck, it left in its trail images of what it is like to be completely inhuman and self-destructing.
But what emerged soon after is the kind of resilience that, as a poet and beautiful voice of humanity, Kofi Awonoor sang about all his life. The terrorists will die. But Awonoor, whom Nigerian critic Mary Kolawole calls “a prophet of conscience”, will never fade from our hearts.
Like many African poets, Kofi Awoonor has not been studied as deeply as he deserves.
But when walking across an American street holding one of his books, I was moved to note that complete strangers recognised his name. All said they hadn’t known him before the Westgate Mall attack.
FAILED MISSION
The terrorists thus failed in their mission. They thought they were destroying everything in their path in a spectacular orgy of violence, but poetry will resurrect Kofi Awoonor in uncanny ways and give Kenyans strength and unity they never had before.
It is because of his allusive style that Awoonor will continue to thrive in his poetry, which depicted the perpetual return of the good in us whenever we succumb to physical death. Like in initiation processes of his ethnic Ewe group of southern Ghana, death and resurrection are central to Awoonor’s poetry.
He sang of wholeness of the soul; the terrorists thundered with a twisted wish for self-mutilation. Some of his best verse mourns friends and relatives, even depicting the futility of resisting death. To him, death is just another stage in a cycle.
He sang of “Africa” as “once a memory and a song/now a place felt/in the marrow/ of absent bone.” We’ll continue to feel his spirit, knowing he has gone to return in a more awesome form.
The celebrated poet, diplomat, academic, and cultural icon was in Nairobi for the Storymoja Hay Festival, an annual meeting for writers of different backgrounds.
Accompanied by his son, the poet had come to support young writers, inject a dose of hope in our writing, and celebrate the Pan-African sprit that guides black writing across the world.
“We were honoured to be graced by his appearance at Storymoja Hay Festival,” said Muthoni Garland, the festival convener. “We were deeply humbled by his desire to impart knowledge to the young festival audience.”
“Professor Awoonor was one of Africa’s greatest voices and poets and will forever remain a beacon of knowledge and strength and hope,” she added.
KWAME PAYS TRIBUTE TO KOFI
Another celebrated poet, Kwame Dawes, said in tribute to the fallen writer: “Kofi Awoonor’s death is a sad, sad moment here in Nairobi. We have lost one of the greatest African poets and diplomats. I’ve lost my uncle.”
Kofi Awoonor’s forthcoming book, Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems (2014), captures the undying hope for humanity’s capacity to overcome the evil that threatens us daily.
Kofi Awoonor was born George Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor-Williams on March 13, 1935 in Wheta in the Volta region of Ghana (then Gold Coast, a British colony). To embrace his African heritage, he dropped “George” and “Williams” along the way. To his fans, he was
Kofi Awoonor or just “Prof”.
His grandmother was a dirge-singer, a development registered in Kofi Awoonor’s poetry, the best of which is modelled on Ewe oral poetry. This is a poetry that does not believe in the end of life for good people; they resurrect in different forms to continue their good work.
He attended local schools before joining the University of Ghana at Legon, from where he graduated in 1959. He started writing poetry at the age of 14, transcribing the dirges of his Ewe people.
But it is while at university that he honed his writing skills to produce mature verse that meditated on mortality. As the editor of the literary journal Okyeame and the associated editor of Transition in the early 1960s, Kofi Awonoor helped many a young writer blossom. At the time of his death, he had mentored globally recognised writers.
His scholarly monograph The Breast of the Earth (1976) recognises the role of oral traditions in the composition of modern African literature. A perfect model for analysis of African literature, it samples work in Xhosa, Ewe, Hausa, and Swahili.
AFRICAN HERITAGE
In its third chapter, The Breast of the Earth presents an argument about the abuse of Islam (which Bila Sababu, claims to profess) in destroying African cultures.
His first book of poetry, In Rediscovery (1964), is a celebration of African heritage that colonialism sought to erase. Ironically, Bila Sababu mouths anti-imperialist slogans but are oblivious to works by a poet like Kofi Awoonor, who doesn’t brook imperialism in any form.
Kofi Awoonor has been critical of American policies. In an essay in The African Predicament: Collected Essay (2006), Awoonor notes the paradox that is America. “America is, perhaps, the most hated and most loved country in the world,” he writes in an essay titled ‘American Attitudes and Lifestyle.’
“The anti-Americanism that is found in the third world is based largely on ignorance and on the fact that American official response to the plight of these countries has remained relatively apathetic and some instances blatantly meddlesome,” he adds in his characteristic clarity.
He has also written eloquently about the unequal power relations between the West and the rest of us in speeches contained in his Africa: The Marginalised Continent. Did he deserve to die at the hands of thugs claiming to fight against the kind of marginalisation that he so strongly denounces?
Since his first book came out in the 1960s, Kofi Awonoor has combined his university teaching and diplomatic postings with steady artistic composition. He published Night of My Blood in 1971. It is about the alienation of the educated African from self and society. The return of that African to his or her community is painful, but it must happen.
In one of the poems in a collection popular in Kenyan schools, Awoonor used the “weaverbird” that destroy the tree that hosts it as a metaphor for colonialism’s destructive nature.
Abetted by some corrupt individuals in government and ordinary people who believe in senseless violence, terrorism has become the new weaverbird. Like Awoonor’s thankless bird, they defile sacred places with their droppings.
How can terrorists move heavy weapons into the country without the help of what Awoonor would call self-destructing weaverbirds?
His This Earth, My Brother... (1971) is an experimental novel that complexly narrates the experiences of Ghana as a new nation. It explores the themes of alienation and corruption, but it is suggests a hopeful resolution to the African predicament, despite the depressing developments it depicts.
“The novel is an epic projection of the past to explicate the present and appeal for caution to chart a more positive course for Ghana, Africa and the world in general,” notes Mary Kolawole in analysis of a novel that on the surface appears pessimistic.
Like most African writers, Awoonor has drunk from the chalice of exile. He fled Ghana after the fall of the government of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, having been very close to the first Ghanaian president.
EDUCATION BACKGROUND
It is in this period that he studied for his MA at the University of London, graduating in 1968. He graduated with a PhD in literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1972.
He returned to Ghana in 1975 and was detained for two years for allegedly helping a coup plotter escape from the country. His experiences in prison are captured in the collection of poetry, The House by the Sea (1978).
An agile dancer even in his late 70s, Kofi Awoonor presents coordinated body movements as metaphors for African Ubuntu (humanism) in Comes the Voyager at Last, a novel he published in 1992.
It explores Marcus Garvey’s idea of diaspora black people sold into slavery in the past returning to their ancestral continent to reconnect with their roots.
His other works include Come Back, Ghana (1972), Ride Me, Memory (1973), Until the Morning After (1987), The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992), and Herding the Lost Lamb (2002).
Kofi Awoonor was a statesman, having served as the ambassador of Ghana to Brazil (1985) and Cuba (1989). From 1990 to 1994, he served as his country’s Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the United Nations.
While at the UN, he was particularly critical of the body’s use of Western notions of freedom as applicable to all cultures.
“Freedom is a value-laden concept that finds expression in different shapes and forms from society to society,” he once told a UN panel on human rights, adding that it was “insensitive” to use criteria from societies that were already seen as oppressive to others.
The poet was serving the world to make it a better place, and life always won over death in his poetry. He wrote in one pithy poem titled ‘Poem’: “Life/death/prison/life/dying/living/living/living”. The use of repetition and the continuous underlines the perpetual triumph of life over death.
Despite his passing, Kofi Awonoor continues living, living, living.
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