Scholar and Novelist Isidore Okpewho passes on at 74
By Nduka Otiono
Africa’s foremost scholar of Oral Literature and award-winning
novelist, Isidore Okpewho, has passed on at 74. He was a prolific
author, co-author and editor of about 14 books, dozens of articles and a
seminal booklet, A Portrait of the Artist as a Scholar. Prof. Okpewho
died peacefully at a hospital in Binghamton, a town in Upstate New York
where he had lived and taught since 1991. His teaching career spanned
University of New York at Buffalo (1974-76), University of Ibadan
(1976-90), Harvard University (1990-91), and State University of New
York at Binghamton.
According to family sources, the Distinguished
Professor at State University of New York, Binghamton, passed away on
Sunday, September 4, 2016, surrounded by family members. Although he
battled illness recently, the scholar and humanist had demonstrated
exceptional capacity to deal with his challenging health conditions.
Indeed, only two years ago, his last book to which he had long committed
his intellectual resources, Blood on the Tides: The Ozidi Saga and Oral
Epic Narratology, was published by University of Rochester Press.
Born on November 9, 1941 in Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria, Okpewho grew up
in Asaba, his maternal hometown, where he attended St Patrick’s
College, Asaba. He proceeded to the University College, Ibadan, for his
university education. He graduated with a First Class Honours in
Classics, and moved on to launch a glorious career: first in publishing
at Longman Publishers, and then as an academic after obtaining his PhD
from the University of Denver, USA. He crowned his certification with a
D.Litt from University of London.
With his two earliest seminal
academic monographs, The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral
Performance (1979) and Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and
Cultural Relevance (1983), Okpewho quickly established his reputation as
a first-rate scholar and a pioneer of Oral Literature in Africa. For
his distinctive and prolific output he was honoured with a string of
international academic and non-academic awards that included the
Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), in Humanities for the year
2010.
As a writer has rightly noted, “Recognition for Professor
Okpewho's work has come with some of the most prestigious fellowships in
the humanities: from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars (1982), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1982), Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1988), the W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute at Harvard (1990), National Humanities Center in
North Carolina (1997), and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
(2003). He was also elected Folklore Fellow International by the Finnish
Academy of the Sciences in Helsinki (1993).” Prof. Okpewho also served
as President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of
Africa (ISOLA).
For his creative writing work, Okpewho won the 1976
African Arts Prize for Literature and 1993 Commonwealth Writers' Prize
Best Book Africa. His four novels, The Victims, The Last Duty, Tides,
and Call me by my Rightful Name are widely studied in Africa and other
parts of the world, with some of them translated into major world
languages.
“We will miss his charming presence, warm-heartedness,
and wise guidance,” said a member of the family last night in
Binghamton, New York, adding: “But we are consoled by the great life he
lived, the many lives he touched beyond the nuclear family, and the
remarkable intellectual legacy he left behind.”
He is survived by
his wife, Mrs. Obiageli Okpewho; his children: Ediru, Ugo, Afigo, and
Onome, as well as members of his extended family. Funeral