Christopher Okigbo, a major voice in the second generation of 
Nigerian poets, wrote for just a period of ten years within 
which he made a significant contribution to African poetry in 
English expression. A casualty of the Nigerian Civil War, he left 
only one book of poetry entitled Labyrinths, an important 
historical testament, for the world to remember him by. 
he volume, a 
poeticization of his 
personal experience, 
of the chaotic 
history of Nigeria 
from the attainment 
of political independence 
in 1960 
to the outbreak of 
the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), and of the 
collective experience of Africans in and out 
of colonialism, is conceived as 'a fable of 
man's perennial quest for fulfilment.' The 
quest is multidimensional. It is at once artistic, 
cultural, economic, religio-metaphysical, 
romantic, and socio-political. The poetic 
idiom for its expression is primarily mythical 
and secondarily paradoxical. The poet's preoccupation, 
the central theme of all literature, 
is the vegetation myth which dovetails 
with the myth of eternal return. 
Cyclic in design, the journey motif projects 
the poet-protagonist, an Everyman figure, as 
a seeker after elusive truth. Every soul is a 
pilgrim in the world and suffers the anguish 
of existence which issues out of the threepronged 
alienation from the godhead, from 
society and from oneself. Metaphor for the 
solitude of being litter the pages of Labyrinths. 
Okigbo explores both external and 
internal dimensions of separation, which invariably 
results in loss of personal integrity 
and cultural unity. The confusion being experienced 
in Africa is only of degree, not of 
kind, different from the burden of separation 
with which all humanity is afflicted. For a 
split personality for whom all things have 
fallen apart on all fronts and who consequently 
suffers the disease of unease, the 
only possible choice is the quest for oneness, 
the integration of self and essence. The return 
of the prodigal to mother Idoto is a necessity. 
Okigbo images existential unease in The 
Passage as standing on one leg, telling 'the 
tangled-wood-tale' (p.4). The passage itself 
is an apt metaphor for the life-death continuum, 
a bewildering journey through the 
besetting wood of an incomprehensible world. 
It is, for the poet, neither cyclic nor linear, 
neither Occidental nor Oriental, but essentially 
labyrinthine. The labyrinth metaphor 
captures the complexity and disorder of contemporary 
experience not only in Africa but 
in the whole world. Okigbo gives expression 
to an all-embracing vision of fallen humanity 
striving perpetually to gather up its dismembered 
parts and recover its lost essence. 
Poetry is conceived by Okigbo as ritual, or, 
as a sacred duty that demands total commitment. 
It speaks a cultic language that can be 
understood only by the initiate. This conception 
of poetry partly accounts for the arcane 
nature of his poetry. Even the poetry of life is 
comprehended by only a tiny percentage of 
humanity! The poems themselves are conceived 
as sacrificial offerings to the poet's 
goddess or Muse in more or less the same 
manner that man is presented in Christianity 
as a living sacrifice to God. Okigbo disclosed 
that the 'new laid egg' and the 'white hen at 
midterm' in 'Lustra' were actually new poems 
that he had just written in his official 
capacity as the priest of Idoto. He is truly a 
visionary poet: a poet-prophet. Enhancing 
the ritual character of his poetry is the use of 
repetition and variation. One recurrent image 
or personage takes on diverse identities. 
Mother Idoto, for example, appears variously 
as a 'water-maid', as a 'white goddess', 
as a 'lioness', and as a 'white queen'. 
Negritudinists should note that, as used by 
the poet, 'white' means 'light'. In constructing 
his monument of words, the poet plays 
excessively with forms, especially geometric 
forms. His Labyrinths leaves traces of a 
movement in the direction of archi-writing. 
Okigbo overcomes the anxiety of influence 
that hampers the art of many African 
pastoralists and freely echoes other writers - 
Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, Gabriel Okara, Wole Soyinka, 
W.R. Greg, EzraPound.... The list isendless. 
He is a Modernist poet through and through. 
the Relevance 
of a Vision 
35
His Limits, he declared, 'was influenced by 
everything and everybody.... It is surprising 
how many lines of the Limits I am not sure 
are mine and yet do not know whose lines 
they were originally. But does it matter?'1 It 
would matter only to narcissists and hypocritical 
purists. The extensive borrowings no 
doubt detract enormously from the quality of 
the poet's originality, but they reinforce 
Eliot's stated position that literary creativity 
is an operation that involves both tradition 
and the individual talent. Literary echoes 
strengthen Okigbo's rhetorical power and 
show that he feeds from the same fountain 
that nourishes masters of the art. His Labyrinths 
can claim its own wherever poetry is 
discussed. 
Conceived as 'logistics', poetry for Okigbo 
is a serious business which requires a lot of 
discipline, careful planning, mathematical 
precision, rigorous training, constant selfcriticism, 
and hard imaginative thinking. A 
person who cannot perceive similarities where 
there are none or put riotous entities in good 
order cannot be a competent poet. The subject 
of Labyrinths is the making of poetry. A 
record of the growth of Okigbo's poetic 
sensibility from the inchoate stage of a neophyte 
('the young bird at the passage') (p.4) 
through that of 'a shrub among the poplars' 
(p.24), the talkative 'weaverbird' of Siren 
Limits, to the mature stage of the 'towncrier' 
with an 'iron bell' (p.67), it enumerates 
the different phases of the journey into creativity, 
the inevitable accidents or failures had 
('the errors of the rendering', pp. 8-9), the 
atonements or sacrifices made, and the brief 
ecstasy-laden epiphany of fulfilment, which 
is the true reward for every creative artist. 
A poets' poet, Okigbo presses Labyrinths 
into the service of defining the nature of 
poetry and of teaching the techniques and the 
process of verse-making. It is no surprise, 
therefore, that he influences tremendously 
the imagination and craft of many a thirdgeneration 
Nigerian poet, yet one searches in 
vain for a first book of poetry among the 
works of the generation that is comparable in 
beauty of expression, tightness of structure 
and largeness of vision to Okigbo's Labyrinths. 
His is the lyrical type of poetry that 
perpetually strains to appropriate music, 
which perhaps explains its preponderance of 
auditory images and musical terms. Truly, 
poets are failed musicians! Okigbo's poetry 
reads like a convoluted and enthralling musical 
score composed not for analysts who 
would destroy its beauty but for good listeners 
with supersensitive ears. It is replete with 
images of colour, light, smell, and touch 
which combine with those of sound to send 
the mind into a trance-like state where the 
poet-persona loses a sense of self and becomes 
simply an unconscious medium pouring 
forth imperishable truths. Beguiled and 
bewitched, the hearer forgets his controls, 
falls into a love swoon and is tenderly raped. 
The critical reception of Okigbo's poetry has 
been paradoxical: a mixture of condemnation 
and praise. The technical strategies that 
are most celebrated in the poetry, for example, 
the sacrifice of limpidity of meaning and 
style in an attempt to perfect form and achieve 
a rare lyricism, are ironically the most vilified. 
However recondite the poetry may appear 
to detractors, it is not bereft of human 
interest or meaning. In Christopher Okigbo: 
Creative Rhetoric Sunday O. Anozie remarks 
the sustained tension between aesthetic 
and human concerns in Labyrinths. 
The authors of Toward the Decolonization of 
African Literature are rather too hasty in 
inveighing against the Ibadan-Nsukka school 
of Nigerian poetry to which Okigbo belongs. 
Their criticism of African poetry exhibits a 
lot of misprision. Contrary to their interpretation,
2 the thundering of cannons in palm 
groves does not constitute an act of desecration, 
for it functions like music to spur on the 
spirits of the dead and elevate those of their 
celebrating descendants to the point of possession 
for the desired re-union. Okigbo's 
satirical parody of Catholic rituals and Christian 
proselytization in Africa is likewise misunderstood. 
The critics even war against 'the 
heavy use of alliterations and assonances 
within a line'. As Wole Soyinka rightly observes, 
their prescription is bound to effect 
the death of poetry.3 Okot p'Bitek's complaint 
that generally critics do not understand 
Song ofLawino and Song ofOcol, an important 
work for which Chinweizu, Jemie and 
Madubuike have nothing but praise, debunks 
the argument of the troika that 'Poetry is not 
a puzzle.' The danger inherent in a poem that 
puts on the mask of simplicity is that its 
surface transparency can hinder a literalist 
imagination from discerning the profundities 
that lie buried in it. The language of 
poetry is metaphorical and thus cannot but be 
difficult. Linguistic abstruseness in poetry is 
a matter of degree. On the whole, Chinweizu 
and Company seem to be farther removed 
than Okigbo and other members of the Ibadan- 
Nsukka school of Nigerian poetry from the 
African oral poetic traditions. To resurrect 
poetry in English in Nigeria and prevent it 
from further sliding into prose, there is no 
better model to follow than the best of the 
school. Fortunately, Niyi Osundare, another 
leading voice in Nigeria for a new poetics 
that is grounded in clarity of expression and 
thought, has realised the danger in unmasking 
verse and making it transparent and is 
gradually moving towards an increased subtlety 
of tone. He now not only sates the 
pleasure of paradox, he explores in depth the 
seeming of art, revels in ambiguity, and contorts 
his syntax. His wordplay and other 
rhetorical devices get more intricate and more 
demanding. One can only hope that his ardent 
followers will recognise the change in 
the revolutionary process of returning words 
to their poetic and rhetorical sources and 
borrow a leaf from his fine example. 
In The Trial of Christopher Okigbo," Ali A. 
Mazrui tries and convicts the poet for supporting 
Biafra and for privileging ethnic politics 
over his primary commitment to art and 
all humanity. Ironically, it is precisely in the 
Postscript, Path of Thunder, where the poet 
opts for revolutionary violence that he truly 
comes home, both stylistically and thematically. 
He casts off his plastic universalist 
mask and speaks in a personal voice that is 
readily accessible to the Nigerian reading 
public. The section is rid of all obtrusive 
classical and foreign allusions and is suffused 
instead with local imagery. Some of 
the lines are local apophthegms, indigenous 
idiomatic expressions and proverbs rephrased. 
Okigbo, who started his writing 
career denouncing 'platform poetry' and racially 
determined art in favour of aesthetic 
criteria and universal literary standards, becomes 
a war propagandist and uses poetry as 
a popular medium for expressing pressing 
socio-political issues. The same Okigbo who 
said 'I don' t read my poetry to non-poets'5 
becomes a 'town-crier'. Finding poetry inadequate 
in resolving the national question, he 
dropped his pen, picked up his gun, and died 
fighting what he believed was a just cause. 
He prefigures his own death and pleads in a 
trenchant tone: 
O mother mother Earth, unbind me; 
let this be 
my last testament; let this be 
The ram's hidden wish to the sword's 
secret prayer to the scabbard - (p.71) 
Ali Mazrui's conclusion that 'Africa cannot 
afford too many Okigbos' whose poems are 
'untranslatable' - as though some poems 
were translatable - and who make more music 
than meaning6 evinces a thorough misunderstanding 
of the essence and proper function 
of verse. The myth made of the turgidity 
of his poetry probably trips Okigbo into 
making the following retort which tends to 
lend credence to the fallacy that much of 
Labyrinths is pleasurable bunkum: I don't 
think I have ever set out to communicate a 
36
meaning. It is enough that I try to communicate experience 
which I consider significant.7 The simple axiom is 
that there is no form without content. 
It is in delineating the economic, political and social 
character of the new African nations that Okigbo's 
vision is perhaps most relevant. It is possible to read the 
whole of Labyrinths as one long threnody on the African 
tragedy. The mourners with 'SILENT FACES at 
crossroads' (p.5) can be assimilated to Africans, especially 
Black Africans, who lament the destruction of 
their land by foreigners and the resultant psychic disorientation 
and socio-cultural fragmentation. The dispossessed 
and powerless people who are portrayed as a 
'long black/column of ants' mourn the death of their 
mother: their world (p.5). The threnody is resumed by 
the Silent Sisters in their 'swan song' of diverse melodies: 
'We carry in our worlds that flourish/Our worlds 
that have failed....' (p.41). 
Some anthropologists and ethnologists argue that the 
destruction of African culture is not complete. Okigbo 
seems to agree with Janheinz Jann who posits in Muntu: 
An Outline of Neo-African Culture* that what is going 
on in Africa is not the wholesale abandonment of the 
indigenous way of life for the foreign but a process of 
cultural integration, for 
The Sunbird sings again 
Where the caress does not reach, 
of Guernica, 
On whose canvas of blood, 
The slits of his tongue 
cling to glue... (p.35) 
If the Sunbird, like the mythical phoenix, resurrects and 
sings again, then, the cancelling out of the indigenous 
world view is not complete. 
'Fragments out of the Deluge' laments the European 
imperialist exploitation of the human and material resources 
of Africa and the colonial conquest. The colonisation 
of the continent is imaged as a deluge that 
erodes the very foundation of African societies, for the 
'gods lie in state', abandoned and unsung (p.34). The 
poet represents the possessors of power who rape Africa 
and violate her gods and goddesses as predatory eagles 
in whose talons young birds wobble and utter the cry of 
death. The use of animal images to express the poet's 
vision of Social Darwinism signifies that Western civilization 
or industrial capitalism is cannibalistic and its 
purveyors are savages. 
The attainment of Independence by African countries 
does not change their dependency status. The suffering 
of the people continues unabated. The dream of Independence 
fades, another 'big white elephant...'(p.26) 
'Lament of the Drums', a song of exile, depicts the 
parlous state into which Nigeria has fallen. It thematizes 
the rape of democrat v by the military and their opportunistic 
civilian collaborators, the perversion of justice, 
the underdevelopment of the country through the wanton 
waste of her human and material resources, and the 
overall degeneration of the land. The elegy ends with: 
The wailing is for the Great River: 
Her pot-bellied watchers 
Despoil her... (p.50) 
The river, of course, is the Niger from which the country 
derives its name. The ellipsis indicates that the destruction 
of the land shall be a continuous process. As aptly 
predicted by the poet, the Nigerian Armed Forces that 
are supposed to protect the land lay siege to it, fall upon 
its fat like robbers, and strip the people of their laughter. 
Okigbo brings back the image of the predatory eagles in 
'Elegy for Alto' to express the idea of a second conquest, 
but this time around the usurpation comes from within: 
THE EAGLES have come again, 
The eagles rain down on us - 
POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of 
howitzers, of detonators, (p. 71). 
The neo-colonial African politician - civilian or military 
- continues with the structures of exploitation and privilege 
erected by the white conquerors in the colonial 
period. Although Okigbo hailed and praised the architects 
of the first military putsch in Nigeria, the Majors' 
coup-of January 15, 1966, he recognised the danger in 
the Armed Forces perceiving themselves as politicians 
and warned the self-acclaimed saviours against the 
temptation to loot the nation's treasury and thereby 
commit the mistakes of civilian politicians. He intones: 
Alas! the elephant has fallen - 
Hurrah for thunder - 
But already the hunters are talking about pumpkins: 
If they share the meat let them remember thunder. 
The eye that looks down will surely see the nose; 
The finger that fits should be used to pick the nose. 
Today - for tomorrow, today becomes yesterday: 
How many million promises can ever fill a basket... 
(p.67) 
It is fruitless counting the number of military coups - 
botched or successful - that have been reported in 
Nigeria. The same facile explanation of saving the 
people from themselves and from evils of 
maladministration and economic mismanagement and 
returning the country onto the path of true democracy is 
proffered by the coup plotters. It is sad to note that the 
promise has so far remained unfulfilled. The intervention 
of the military in the politics of the nation is a total 
disaster. The most urgent task that confronts the Nigerian 
people is how to deliver their country from the 
death-clutch of its greedy Armed Forces. 
The joy that attends the poet's homecoming, like the 
ephemeral euphoria at Independence, is deceptive and 
ironic. Correctly apprehended, it is the joy of freedom 
37
Scene from Nigerian Civil War front at Owaza on Ozuakwu Koad, July, 1969. 
from being. The poet's homecoming is celebrated in 
terms that suggest the Worship of Death: 
Death herself, 
the chief celebrant, 
in a cloud of incense, 
paring her finger nails... 
At her feet rolled their heads like cut fruits; 
She bathed her knees in the blood of attendants; 
her smock in entrails of ministrants... (p.55) 
The images remind us of the pogrom in which thousands 
of Igbo people lost their lives in the Northern part 
of the country and the waste of lives during the Civil 
War. Nigeria is portrayed as mother-earth that consumes 
her own children but, unlike earth-mother, the 
country continually fails to profit from the promise of 
procreation and regeneration and, therefore, remains a 
waste land. The picture of a hecatomb and horror is 
relatively the same for most post-Independence states 
of Africa. Carnage, a regular feature in modern African 
history, continues to rage in Algeria, Liberia, Rwanda 
and Somalia. The continent bleeds and bleeds again 
from self-inflicted wounds, as if to prove the veracity of 
Yambo Ouologuem's thesis that she is bound to violence. 
Her poetry is an unbroken paean to Moloch. The 
poet's homecoming reminds us of Thomas Carlyle's 
Worship of Sorrow. The current political debacle in 
Nigeria is a re-enactment in its horrendous detail of the 
tragic events that led the country to the path of war in the 
late sixties. The detention of M. K. O. Abiola, the 
acclaimed winner of the June 12 1993 presidential 
election, is analogous to the imprisonment of Obafemi 
Awolowo on treasonable felony charges. 'Both parts of 
Silences', Okigbo wrote in the Introduction to Labyrinths, 
'were inspired by the events of the day. Lament 
of the Silent Sister, by the Western Nigeria Crisis of 
1962, and the death of Patrice Lumumba; Lament of the 
Drums by the imprisonment of Obafemi Awolowo, and 
the tragic death of his eldest son.' (p. xii) 
It is not an exaggeration to assert that Nigeria's season 
of anomy started barely two years after her attainment of 
political Independence. Despite the long period of doom, 
there is still not even a shadow in the horizon of the 
possibility of relief for the suffering of the people. The 
flowers of the nation, the minorities, and the multitudes 
of pariahs - all aliens in their own land, like'the drums' 
(the ancestors) - 'sense/ With dog-nose a Babylonian 
capture' (p.46) and shriek in the agony of despair as they 
lament daily their predicament and watch their supposed 
protectors usurp their being, make a mockery of 
their sacrifice, and stifle their seeds to death. They either 
embrace revolutionary violence, as Okigbo did, or continue 
to moan in despair, or go into exile. It is thus clear 
that the-dream of freedom is still a tantalising mirage as 
Nigeria persists in treading the path of thunder: 
BEYOND the iron path careering along the same 
beaten track - 
38
. 
THE GLIMPSE of a dream lies smouldering in a 
cave, 
together with the mortally wounded birds. 
Earth, unbind me; let me the prodigal; (p.72) 
The poet-pilgrim's journey, like the trajectory of the 
ouroborus (the tail-chewing creation snake), ends where 
it began. Homecoming is represented as another perilous 
journey into exile. Its orgasmic twitch is indistinguishable 
from anguish, for its pleasure is painful. 
Labyrinths ends with this vision of cyclic paradox, or 
the myth of the eternal return: 
AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore 
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching; 
The new star appears, foreshadows its going 
Before a going and coming that goes on forever... 
(p.72) 
An abiku* country, Nigeria yearns for release from the 
tragic cycle of fate. Thematically, therefore, Okigbo's 
Labyrinths shall continue to be of immediate cultural, 
economic and political relevance to posterity for as long 
as the paradox of existence symbolised by mother Idoto, 
the principle of birth and death and growth and decay, 
proves insoluble for mankind in general and for Africans, 
especially Nigerians, in particular. Structurally 
and stylistically, the work shall stand as a monumental 
challenge to fledgling poets and serve as a reminder of 
Mrs. Obi Okigbo - Dati with daughter Sophia Dati 
the character of Modernist poetics and of the nature and 
process of verse production to the present and coming 
ages. GR 
ENDNOTES 
1 'Transition Conference Questionnaire', Transition, II, 5 (July- 
August 1962), 12. 
2 Chinweizu, et al. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, 
Vol. 1 (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1980), 192. 
3 Wole Soyinka, 'Aesthetic Illusions: Prescriptions for the Suicide of 
Poetry,' Art, Dialogue and Outrage (Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1988), 
pp. 86-109. 
4 Ali Mazrui, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (London: Heinemann, 
1971), p. 176. 
5 Bloke Modisane. "The Literary Scramble for Africa', West Africa 
(30 June 1962), p. 176. 
6 Ali Mazrui, 'Meaning Versus Imagery in African Poetry,' Presence 
Africaine, no. 66 (2nd quarterly 1968), p. 57. 
7 Cited by Annemarie Heywood, "The Ritual and the Plot: The Critic 
and Okigbo's Labyrinths', Research in African Literatures, vol. 9, no. 
I, (Spring 1978), 51-52. 
8 Janhetnz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture, trans. 
Majorie Grene (London: Faber and Faber, 1959). 
9 A wanderer child that dies early in life and returns several times to 
plague its mother. It is a metaphor for cyclic progression. All national 
corporations and institutions in Nigeria, including the government 
itself, behave like abiku. 
AN OLD STAR 
departs, leaves us 
here on the shore 
Gazing heavenward 
for a new star 
approaching; The 
new star appears, 
foreshadows 
its going 
Before a going and 
coming that goes 
on forever... 
39