Gone but not forgotten. In death, Professor Isidore Okpewho, the giant of African oral literature and one of Nigeria’s foremost scholars, continues to be celebrated.

Recently at the prestigious University of Yale in Connecticut, USA academic protégés of the departed guru, who passed away on September 4, 2016, gathered together as part of the annual conference of the African Literature Association (ALA) for a special roundtable to honour Okpewho.

The special ALA session celebrated Okpewho’s compelling scholarship and award-winning creative writing.

Present at the event convened by Prof. Adeleke Adeowo were students of the award-winning writer including Kunle George of Brown University; Marame Gueye of East Carolina University; Chiji Chiji Akọma of Villanova University, and Nduka Otiono.

Regrettably missing due to unavoidable circumstance was Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, Okpewho's colleague and collaborator at the University of Binghamton, currently of Cornell University.

It was, indeed, a memorable encounter enlivened by passionate interventions from Prof. Smith, Prof. Afam Ebeogu, and Prof. Teju Olaniyan, among others in the audience.

Okpewho was the prolific author of about 14 remarkable books, dozens of seminal articles, some poetry, and a ground-breaking booklet, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Scholar”.

He also wrote a War-time hit novel based on the Nigerian Civil War, The Last Duty.

Meanwhile, sister of the late Okpewho narrated to News Express, how Prof. Okpewho was almost killed in the days leading to the Nigerian Civil War, when Igbos were being targeted by forces sympathetic to the Federal Government.

Mrs. Winifred Kanwulia Dafe (nee Okpewho) said: “My brother was on a flight returning from one of his academic trips from London in 1966 just before the war broke out. At that time, talks of Biafra’s secession from Nigeria had reached a boiling point and Igbo people were being killed indiscriminately in the north and by misguided federal loyalists in different non-Igbo parts of the country.

“He was discussing with someone whom he got acquainted with in the plane and they were conversing in Igbo. Our mother was Igbo from Asaba and we grew up there. But our dad was Urhobo from Abraka in Delta State. Unbeknownst to my brother and his acquaintant there were some soldiers behind them.

“Immediately they disembarked from the plane, one of the soldiers accosted them and they were taken to different unknown destinations. Finding himself in a room with the soldiers, Okpewho was accused of speaking Igbo and the soldiers threatened to deal with him for being Igbo. He explained to them that he was actually an Urhobo who grew up in the Igbo land.”

It became a drama of some sorts when the soldiers asked Okpewho to speak Urhobo.

“He told them that he couldn’t speak much Urhobo having not lived there for lengthy periods. He managed some few Urhobo sentences and mentioned his actual village and quarters in Abraka, Urhobo land. After some debate among themselves, the stern gun-wielding soldiers reluctantly gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him leave. Isidore wasn’t sure whether his friend with whom he spoke Igbo on the flight returned alive after being whisked away by the soldiers as he never saw or heard from him again,” Mrs. Dafe said.

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