He arrived in 1932 wearing 
a buliet scar on his 
throat; his grandfather 
had died of a bullet 
wound in a war on be 
half of his town, Ojoto. 
The legend of Christopher was that he was a 
reincarnation of his grandfather, Ikejiofor; 
and well he might be for he was small and 
wiry like his grandfather, had a shrill voice 
like him, was as stubborn and obstinate and 
almost as invariably right as he and as undaunted 
by challenges. His parents named 
him Ifekandu - meaning 'greater than life'; 
they baptised him Christopher, the name he 
wore to his grave. 
Christopher 
Okigbo 
A Toast of 
that he 
s h o u l d 
write not nec- 
PIUS OKIGBO essarily to commu- 
He showed his gut early by learning 
to cry unremittingly even without 
provocation, to cry (or better 
still to shriek) even more so when 
provoked, to master the alphabet on 
his own before he was taught to 
read and write, to drive five ton 
school lorry (of course, without permission) 
before he had any driving 
lesson and for which, of course, he 
was appropriately punished by the 
school Headmaster; to play the trumpet, 
to play the piano without being 
able to read a word of music, to read for a 
University degree in the Classics without 
any previous foundation whatever at school 
in Latin or Greek, to write verses better in 
Greek than in English, to be engaged in a 
University as Assistant librarian without any 
training in librarianship. These and more 
marked Christopher out as a boy of many 
gifts and talents and someone to be watched 
and guided to greater heights to find his 
mettle in the appropriate calling. 
After graduating from University, he 
did all manner of jobs as occasion 
demanded and as his temperament 
changed: sometime cigarette salesman for 
the Nigerian Tobacco Company, sometime 
tutor in English and Latin in a secondary 
school atFiditi (in Oyo State), political activist 
on the near anarchist side of the divide, 
civil servant, failed businessman, resident 
representative of a major publishing house 
(for which this very building was hired as his 
official residence), librarian, publisher in his 
own right, and soldier. In his free time, he 
was a chess enthusiast, an outstanding cricketer, 
a prolific and recondite raconteur, a part 
nicate but toexpress himself. 
The reading aloud of the poetry of Allen 
Ginsburg, Fellingetti, Duncan, Brother 
Antoninus and the crowd of the Beat Generation 
was just coming unto the scene in 
America. For Christopher, the poet's task 
was to present his thoughts in significant 
form, to address reason through sense. He 
therefore wrote a poetry that read better accompanied 
by the music of either DeBussy 
or Duke Ellington as the mood dictated. Yet, 
he demanded of himself and his peers the 
highest rigour of thought and language. A 
purist, he would refine and refine and refine 
his poems until the final product showed the 
highest economy of words and phrase often 
embedded in a private vocabulary of his own 
and almost unintelligible to the reader. It did 
not matter that the reader would mistake his 
local -idiom for some abstruse mythological 
reference taken from his vast arsenal of Greek 
or Latin literature. 
c[hristophe 
page of hi 
r plunge 
s life o 
d int 
f onl 
o th 
y te 
e creativ 
n or so
e 
o
er 
Chri 
u
greates 
f
s
s 
mind 
ther 
an
s wa 
d
e 
I 
t
. 
frien 
wa 
W 
to 
s m
o
s
e 
a 
y 
ha 
bot 
d 
brothe 
I 
tota 
d 
eve 
h 
them 
share 
l communio 
r had 
r fo 
, but 
d
r
; 
h 
th 
i
e 
becaus 
t was 
ha 
e sam 
n
d 
o 
othe 
no 
f
e
e 
soul 
joy 
t 
betwee 
becaus 
r broth 
s
s 
an 
and
d
n
e
- 
years and wrote as if he knew he had laughter in reading and re-reading the Greek 
no tomorrow; in that time, he created a work 
marked not by volume but only by the hightime 
jazz musician and, most uniquely of all, 
a poet. No job was beneath him, no task too 
daunting, no challenge too intimidating for a 
soul that was free of cant and humbug and for 
a mind that could only be described as humble 
almost to the point of acute intellectual 
arrogance. 
More at home in Latin and Greek than in 
English literature, he read all that came his 
way, rejected much of what he read and built 
his own aesthetics and poetic grammar by his 
own effort. He was immersed in the current 
philosophic rave of the time: he devoured the 
existentialism of Martin Heidegger and Jean 
Paul Satre but rejected its nihilism and inaction. 
He was fascinated by the Dadaist movement 
of the twenties but rejected as infantile 
its manifesto as presented by Crosby except 
for the precept that the artist should strive for 
what the movement 
called pure poetry, 
namely, 
est rank and quality for outstanding excellence. 
Almost prophetic, his vision and his 
sounds were certainly rooted in the social 
culture of the time; and since the malaise of 
which he wrote and against which he warned 
has now come home full blown to roost, his 
poems ring today with astonishing freshness. 
Although he had abounding zest of life, 
Christopher could, at any time, withdraw 
from life to concentrate his mind and thought 
singularly on the work before him. He could, 
and often did, as occasion demanded, retreat 
into himself for two three days with little 
food but armed only with a pen and paper to 
scribble all day and all night long until the 
last drop of verse in him had oozed out onto 
the pages of the note paper. 
He had the most abiding respect for two of his 
contemporaries with whom he thought he 
formed a trinity: Chinua Achebe in novel and 
Wole Soyinka in drama with himself in poetry. 
Their galaxy had also very 
distinguished satellites close by: 
John Pepper Clark, Gabriel Okara 
in the literary and Demas Nwoko 
etc in the visual arts. He had, however, 
placed himself above the pale 
of competit on in his chosen field. How else 
can one explain his refusal to be nominated 
for the competition for the Langston Hughes 
award for African poetry in which, in spite of 
himself, he won the first prize, or his paradoxical 
behaviour in agreeing to travel to 
Kampala, Uganda, for a conference of writers 
at the expense of the organisers only to 
mount the rostrum and refuse to read his 
poetry to non poets. 
Chris rejected the label of African writer; he 
was not a Nigerian or an African poet; he was 
simply a poet, whose tastes and sensibilities 
would make him a poet in any colour or 
climate or vegetation. That twenty-seven 
years after his death, with no new work 
coming or likely to come from him, he is still 
read avidly more abroad than at home and 
revered everywhere is, perhaps, the greatest 
tribute that can be paid any artist of note this 
side of eternity. It is this permanent lustre 
that makes Christopher Okigbo the poet's 
poet. 
Chris was in his life time and in his death the 
and Latin classics in the original: Vergil, 
Tacitus, Cicero, Homer etc., or the English 
33
Okigbo's last residence, Cambridge House, Ibadan, as it is today 
masters - Mallarme, Joyce, Elliot, Pound, 
small letter Cummings, Rimbaud, not to talk 
of the standard University English classroom 
classics of the middle and later period. For I, 
too, had read Latin and Greek in my own 
earlier training, adventured towards a degree 
in English literature only to give it up two 
thirds of the way to finally take a degree in 
modern history. Is it any wonder then that I 
should have the rare privilege to have introduced 
him to the literature of the American 
exiles: Hemmingway, Dos Passos, Elliot, 
Pound, Crosby, Cowley, among the more 
well known.
t\J51~*tJ I /l/< \ 
Endowe 
an 
frai 
d
l 
intellec 
physiqu 
d with
t 
a 
whic 
e 
curiou 
and
h 
penetratin 
ofte 
s char 
n transfixe 
m buil 
g wi 
t on
d
t 
tholog 
touc 
the sam 
h hi 
y an 
e
m 
agai 
an 
d traum 
d
n 
tha 
or
t 
tha 
hi 
a o
s
t 
lif 
h 
f th
e
e 
coul 
e 
woul 
society 
d
d 
jus 
eve 
coul 
t g
r
o 
remai 
abou 
d no
n
t
t 
dom 
thes 
tha 
tice
t i 
,
e 
equity 
. 
value 
W
s th
e hav 
e tru 
,
s 
integrit 
aliv 
e
e 
a 
testamen 
duty 
e i
y
n
, 
and 
ou 
in hi 
r
t
, 
younge 
t 
mos 
s
o 
honour 
hi
t o 
s greatness 
r
f 
one 
all 
, to
, free 
kee 
s fo
p
r
-
. 
writing inanities while the life experience his friends, Christopher soon learrut that to 
get on with his work he had to forget their 
faces and their names soon after themomentary 
pleasure or thrill was over. He could 
therefore, at once, in simultaneous cycles as 
his moods took him, be both exceedingly 
warm and exceedingly cold. His friends stood 
by him to the last; his foes denounced him as 
emotionally a grasshopper. 
He successfully wooed and, after a whirlwind 
courtship that would have racked the 
nerves of any young woman, married Sefi 
Judith Attah, the devoted mother of our adorable 
daughter. Obiageli. For Sefi was perhaps 
the only girl he met and knew who 
understood his quixotic personality. And in 
return, he showered her with the most passionate 
and enduring love. 
Christopher has been tried (by Ali 
Mazrui) for exhibiting and reveal 
ing a personal commitment to the 
eradication of the social evils of his times. So 
be it. Some of us are nothing if not snobs 
writing for snobs; some of us are merely 
aesthetes who would step over the murk 
around us and live as if nothing was wrong. 
Chris lived intensely, felt intensely and expressed 
himself intensely. Only someone 
with the most abstruse form of taxidermy 
could have 1 ived through the Eastern Nigeria 
of 1966-70 and pretend that the psycho paaround 
him betrayed the most desperate craving. 
Let no one dare to condemn him for we, 
the members of his immediate family, know 
what it is to lose a revered one having in the 
same war lost one favourite uncle, two adorable 
undergraduate nephews and a favourite 
brother in Chris. Chris was immersed in the 
life of his time - for more than any other artist 
of his generation he communed with the so 
called common man of his time - the market 
trader, the street hawker, the buka restaurateur, 
the foot soldier, the taxi driver. He did 
not look down on them and he did not treat 
them as his inferiors. They were men like 
him. For he was as easily at home with the 
nobles and the governors as he was with the 
taxi drivers with whom he could go to eat and 
drink as coequals without condescension. 
The battered Nigerian psyche of 
today, the anomie and the 
catalepsis we see, hear and smell 
all around us, the lingering living 
death that casts its pall over us, the 
anguish and the torment of body 
and soul that cry out all the time 
from the wizened faces of infants 
- these are today's sources of 
Christopher Okigbo's poetic vision 
of thirty years ago. Of such 
stuff was this extraordinary genius 
made that his fame far outshone 
that of any one of the members of 
his vastly distinguished family that 
had at one and the same time a 
world class forest pathologist, an 
economist, a lawyer, an agronomist 
as well as the poet laureate 
himself. He was indeed a meteor, 
and like a meteor he flashed 
through the sky for a short speck of 
thirty-five years, which is indeed merely a 
dot in infinite time, and dug a hole in the 
ground for himself. 
He
h 
wa 
e die 
s bor 
d o
n
f 
wearin 
bullet wound 
g the mar 
s sustaine 
k of war
d
; 
at a war he fought on behalf of his 
new country, Biafra. He died at the hands of 
his soJcalled countrymen, at Opi junction, at 
the outskirts of the University he had helped 
to build and nurture; he died at the tender age 
of thirty-five, in the defence of his most 
cherished values: honour, valour, truth, jus- 
Towards this goal, I am authorised to announce 
that the OKIGBO famHy is creating 
a Trust to establish and administer, with 
effect from the coming anniversary of his 
death, in October, scholarships and prizes in 
Classics and Poetry in the two Universities 
that gave Christopher Okigbo his foundation 
and his freedom: the University of Ibadan 
and the University of Nigeria. Even in this 
we have been anticipated first by Wole 
Soyinka, one of the most loyal of his friends, 
and now by Chief Berkhout. To both of them 
I offer my salutations. 
I now give you the toast of CHRISTOPHER 
OKIGBO the poet, born 1932, died 1967, 
lived at Cambridge House, UAC Crescent, 
Onireke, Ibadan.GR 8 JULY 1994 
34