Pa Gabriel Okara (1918–2019): An African Literary Colossus on Ancestral Journey

Summary

‘Na wetin happen?’, ‘Person die?’, ‘Take am easy oo, you hear?’ Each of these consolatory reactions in pidgin was laced with ‘sorry’. They were actually some of the traditional strings of sympathies that were meant to console me the day Prof. Ernest Emenyonu broke the news that Gabriel Imomotimi Gbaingbain Okara had started the journey to join his forefathers. As at the time of the call I was on a busy street in Port Harcourt, these strings of consolations were apparently triggered by my involuntary exclamation that loudly suggested pain and regret for losing a loved one. These sympathizers were fellow Nigerians within earshot. Though most of them never bothered to inquire whose death it was, they were instinctively responding to the Nigerian traditional ethos at the slightest indication that someone lost someone. In other words, the ‘sorry’ is not the exclusive condolence ritual of close relatives, it can come from strangers who are just meeting you for the first time in the south-eastern part of Nigeria. My involuntary exclamation that day was natural since only a few weeks earlier I had accompanied Prof. Emenyonu on a visit to Okara's residence at Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa, his home State, while he was still alive. I could still almost touch the warm reception his daughter Timi Schiller gave us on that memorable day. But now when I think of the above drama (quite amusing, I suppose), which I would not mind entitling ‘Sorry,’ I am compelled to wonder aloud: What an interesting intellectual site it will be for researchers as to the various dramatic ways people instinctively react to death news!

Indeed, it is a reality that we lost another of Africa's literary legends when I was, incidentally at the time of his death, studying his collection of articles: As I See It. One of the remarkable things I had noted in my study of these stories, extracted from the Sunday Tide of the then Rivers State Newspapers Corporation, is that each comes with a certain degree of humour capable of concealing the author's message. In each, Okara tells Nigerians and Africans, in a soothing manner, of their precarious socio-political predicaments without necessarily tickling that corner of their psyche where fear and hopelessness reside.