Born in 1935 in Wheta, Ghana, his works often derived originsfrom his Ewe heritage. He was deeply influenced by African oral literature and sought to preserve the cultural legacy of his people through his writings. His most notable works include Night of My Blood and The House by the Sea which explored various themes associated with the shared African struggles during the decolonisation period.
Your days were no longer short in the university, it was mostly business as usual, but you had your own charms. Like how, when I took lectures at the old campus, I looked forward to you so that I would listen to the khudba and pray the Friday prayers. I loved the silence when the Imam’s voice travelled through the audience. I loved seeing the elderly women, who were regulars at the mosque, dress in their best attires and sit to pray. I loved it when the ladan said “a tsaya, a shiga sahu, a rufe salula, babban dan yatsa a kan layi, rufe salula malam”. I loved the imam’s voice. I always imagined how his lips moved, and his tongue rolled when he recited the Qur’an.
You see yourself putting others before you, shrinking yourself so that you do not take up too much space, so that society does not label you a misfit. You keep going back to the man who has made your skin a gallery of bruises, and whose love you can no longer find in you no matter how hard you look. You tell yourself each day that it is for the kids, for the social security and respect that comes with being married. You look in the mirror sometimes, unable to recognize the you who now cares what society thinks.
Despite the inhuman conditions in which Nigerians now live daily, they have largely remained calm and unable to raise their voices against the conundrum threatening their existence. Paradoxically, people who have been driven to the brim of patience have chosen to remain resolute in their silence, they prefer to mourn each day away hoping a miracle might happen to them.
We laughed. We joked. We lamented. We remembered books and plots and characters. We talked about the creativity that is needed to write a voice driven novel. We talked about A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the distinct voices of the characters. And when we reached Kabuga junction, we hugged and parted. I crossed the road, and took the shortcut through Kofar Kabuga, the old Kofar Kabuga, with its few heaps of sand that survived the wear and tear of time, and a goat, resting on its ancient back.
After ages of avoiding the shore, I went back again. This time however, I vowed not to wait. I got a ship. The sailor had wanted me on it all along, but when the time to sail came, I left the shore. The ship was good, but I wanted better. What is wrong with waiting for a little while more when you have been waiting all your life?
You realized later that life was giving you a poetry lesson. Teaching you that just because the first line came out right didn't mean the rest of the poem would. Sometimes the metaphors would refuse to come through. The imagery, no matter how hard you tried to paint it, would just not appear right. You would look everywhere for the perfect punchline to end the poem, but you would not find one. Life was telling you that just because you thought you were good with words did not mean that they would always come to you whenever you needed them. And sometimes, you just couldn’t write a poem, just like you could not write your life into poetry.
There is a rawness and a tangibility to this struggle, asserting itself like a shawl over the spirit and engendering a gradual fading away of the substantial, particular (in)carnation we occupy. Essentially, we become apologists in an oppression we neither deserve nor comprehend but in which we are too lost to realize the extent of our performance in the disservice.
