No More Song of Sorrow (A Tribute for Kofi Awoonor)

It has left us drenched, at the sandy shore, without a boatman to the rescue! Saturday, Nairobi’s dark day, a day originally meant for literary festivity at the feet of the ancestor, Kofi, at Storymoja Hay Festival, has turned o be a day of deprivation. It has deprived humanity and the world of the humanists, […]

It has left us drenched, at the sandy shore, without a boatman to the rescue! Saturday, Nairobi’s dark day, a day originally meant for literary festivity at the feet of the ancestor, Kofi, at Storymoja Hay Festival, has turned o be a day of deprivation. It has deprived humanity and the world of the humanists, of one of its notable pathfinders, literary motivators, and glow-worms, Kofi Awoonor, who was cut down along with 68 equally innocent others.
Kofi Awoonor’s many dirges over the failure of Africa’s becoming in prose, poetry, and the foremost literary experiment of poetic prose/prose poetry and intra-text with fiction, verse and drama, remains the critical challenge to the universe of African letters and politics. We must all rise in a singular voice in denunciation of the cowardly life- destroyers and in defence of the humanity which Awoonor laboured for all through his life. This compulsive battle against the mindless forces of terror, misnamed faith defenders, is the only way we can immortalize this great patriarch and inimitable creator of soul-piercing words of vision; this great thought-smith with a power of clairvoyance, presaging, and uncanny foretelling of the story of our future from yesterday—Kofi Awoonor—etcher and weaver of numerous stories, including Poetry ( Rediscovery and Other Poems 1964, which carries his most popular poem, Song of Sorrow; Night of my Blood, 1971, This Earth, My Brother, 1971; Ride Me, memory, 1973; The House by the Sea, 1978, which reflects on his prison experiences; Until the Morning After;  Collected Poems, 1987; The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook, 1992; Herding the Lost Lamb, 2002.
 From his literary scholarship and political engagements, Kofi Awoonor has advanced organic and political studies on the destiny, renaissance and redemption of Ghana and the African continent in The Breast of the Earth, 1975; The Ghana Revolution; A Political Account from a personal Perspective , 1984; Ghana : A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times, 1990 and The African Predicament, 2006. This earth, My Brother…An Allegorical Tale,2006 and Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa, 1992, taking as a caustic lampoon and derision of pseudo-revolutionaries are his two works of fiction. 
Laughter shall return to our streets and the twin problem of war and hunger, Africa’s biggest menace shall come to end. Death, as inevitable as it is,
When it comes
To the door with his own
Inimitable calling card
Shall find a homestead
Resurrected with laughter and dance
Since 1984, when this A Dirge, a song of lamentation over a tragedy that befalls a group of hunters, who departed with great expectations but returned with disappointed , was published and  this recent poem, Awoonor has upped our hopes and dreams from the lamentation on the dysfunctional leadership of African power wielders which provoke mournful songs and sorrowful dirges to the celebration of a positive, regenerated future. And thus, from Awoonor’s visionary landscape in verse, ours is no longer songs of sorrow but songs of redemption of our beleaguered continent.
As we celebrate the life at the most seamy moment of  the departure of one of Africa’s most resourceful, creatively profound and best known poets, (George) Kofi Awoonor (Williams) it is important to delineate some of the most resonant aspects of his contribution to the Humanities through poetry, prose, prose-poetry, drama and polemical writing. First is the depth of his recourse to the ewe orature and folktales as a source, aesthetic framework and ideological inspiration of his poetry. He has himself been the first to identify the limitation of his early work (I dare say his entire corpus) drawing from the resources of his ethnic oral traditional performance of the Ewe. He stated that his creative product had been an ‘effort  to move the oral poetry from which ‘ he has ‘learnt so much into perhaps a higher literary plane , even if it lost so much in the process’. Yet, it has been acknowledged by other renowned African poets that the influence of orature has rendered his poetry one of the most lucidly profound and linguistically accessible poetry of his generation—which include Okigbo, who was editor of the Ghana-based frontline literary magazine, Transition when Awoonor was Assistant Editor, Wole Soyinka who also edited that journal after his incarceration term during the Nigerian Civil War, J.P.Clark, kwesi Brew and later, Kofi Anyidoho and Atukwei Okai. Of his first collection, Rediscovery and Other Poems, published by Ulli  Beier in Mbari Publications in 1964, Derek Wright observed that Awoonor’s work ‘both drew on a personal family heirloom and opened up a channel up into a broader African heritage.’ Ezekiel Mphahlele, a foremost South African writer and critic, in his introduction to Awoonor’s collection, Night of My Blood (1971), found his verse as representing ‘the truest poetry of Africa’ (which though) ‘packed with ideas, his gentle diction carries us there with its emotional drive.’
 As I have also hinted above, Kofi Awoonor’s is perhaps the first African writer to establish, in a most innovative and experimental fare, the intra-textuality of the critical genres of poetry, prose and drama in a single creative enterprise titled ‘This Earth, My Brother (1971), a fictive allegory of contemporary Ghanaian and African society as a postcolonial society in the throes of socio-economic decadence.
Besides being an accomplished poet and a constant presence in numerous international for a on African literature where he has constantly expounded on the essence of reconstructing African oral traditions to reflect and refract the socio-economic and political travails of Africa, Awoonor has been a writer as politician who has engaged both public intellection on the political landscape of Africa and also featured actively in the politics of his country through serving as political votive of Pan-Africanism under the great Kwame Nkrumah as well as being a diplomat and ambassador for his country in Cuba, Brazil and the United Nations. He had also had to suffer for his political beliefs and had been jailed on the charge of harbouring and supporting an alleged subversive felon—an experience which produced the volume of poetry titled The House by the Sea (1978).
It is thus with a heavy heart  that I join all weaverbirds in celebrating and singing the song immortality for our departed star, author, poet, public intellectual, dramatist diplomat and politician and a humane citizen of the Globe, the poet of poets, Kofi Awoonor.