USA Africa Dialogue Series - Professor Isidore Okpewho, NNOM, FNAL Dies at 74: R.I.P.

From: Francis Irele <abiolairele@gmail.com>
 
 

To say that Okpewho's death while still in his early seventies is a terrible loss to the academic and cultural community in Nigeria, to African scholarship and to the world of letters generally, is to make a statement that barely indicates the wealth of his endowments and extent of his achievement. His fiction assumed a mythic resonance that seems to have drawn its quality from his sustained acquaintance with the imaginative heritage of the world, with specific reference to our own continent. There is a  brilliance to his academic writing that is especially affecting; he wrote with the same sense of the allure of words that also informed his fiction. His scholarship rested on a solid foundation of learning, which gave to his work a remarkable depth and authority. It will be long before we can hope to produce another scholar of this calibre. In the meantime, let the memory of Isidore Okpewho remain with us as a valuable inspiration to those of us who have been his contemporaries and to the generations coming behind.  

And as a final prayer from one Catholic for another: Requiem aeternam donna ei Domine. 

F. Abiola Irele

  

On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 1:08 PM, Nigerian Academy of Letters <nigerianacademyofletters@gmail.com> wrote:

Professor Isidore Okpewho, NNOM, FNAL Dies at 74

 

The President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL), Professor Olu Obafemi, fsonta, fesan, NAL, regrets to announce the transition to glory of a distinguished Overseas Fellow of NAL, Professor Isidore Okpewho, NNOM, FNAL. A foremost African literary scholar and theorist who defined for us the aesthetic and theoretical canon of Oral Literature and mythology, Prof. Okpewho died peacefully at a hospital in Binghamton, New York on September 4, 2016.

 

The deceased, a distinguished Professor at State University of New York, Binghamton, prolific author, award-winning novelist, and one of Africa’s greatest literary scholars was an outstanding novelist who explored the psychological dimensions of the trauma of the Nigerian civil war in his novel The Last Duty. He has mended the African roof well in his classical studies and humanist intellectual offering. His works and his memory will live on in very vibrant ways.

Our thoughts are with his family, friends, colleagues, and Fellows and Members of NAL.

 

May his gentle soul rest in peace. Amen.

  

Secretary, NAL