To die in Nairobi: tribute to Kofi Awoonor

Its echoes – when 78-years old Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor was, on 21 September, 2013, killed by multi-national Al Shabaab Somali Diaspora gun-blazers fighting a Kenya-American war machine – may, on first glance, not be appropriate. Paula Kahumbu, a lecturer at Princeton University, wrote in The Conversation, an Australian medium, that Awoonor had told her […]

Its echoes – when 78-years old Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor was, on 21 September, 2013, killed by multi-national Al Shabaab Somali Diaspora gun-blazers fighting a Kenya-American war machine – may, on first glance, not be appropriate. Paula Kahumbu, a lecturer at Princeton University, wrote in The Conversation, an Australian medium, that Awoonor had told her that ‘’Kenyans need to take responsibility for the destiny of the country’’. He had come with a mission to reverse a situation in which ‘’Kenyans had given up believing in ourselves’’; make them ’’thirst for power and control’’, and see ‘’the importance of using economics as a framework for success’’.  Chinua Achebe had once remarked that  
Awoonor was always focused on Africa’s ‘’purposelessness and self-destruction’’. Awoonor lamented angrily in a poem about failures of Africa’s post-colonial governance thus:
  ‘’I have no sons to fire the gun when I die
  And no daughter to wail when I close my mouth
   I have wandered on the wilderness
   The great wilderness men call life
    The rain has beaten me……
    Alas! A snake has bitten me
    My right arm is broken
     And the tree on which I lean is fallen.’’
He was a man on a freedom mission, hastening to Jaramogi Odinga’s call to war because ‘’it was Not Yet Uhuru (freedom)’’ in Kenya.
Like Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiongo, Awoonor had served prison time for aiding a military coup. As Soyinka wrote The Man Died and Ngugi wrote Detained: A Writer’s Diary, he wrote The House By the Sea, as bitter literary gift to his country for jailing him. Unlike them, Ghana borrowed the Latin American tradition of honouring a celebrated writer/artist with a dignified diplomatic job. He served as Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil (1984-1988); and Permanent Representative to the United Nations with alternate accreditation to Cuba (1990-1994). Chile had sent Pablo Neruda, a known communist, to be her ambassador in London.
If W.E.B. Dubois’ term the ‘’talented tenth’’ can be adorned on Africa’s independence literary first eleven, Kofi Awoonor was one; sharing the road with Camara Laye (Guinea); Leopold Senghor, Birago Diop, Cheik Ahmanu Kane (Senegal); David Rubadiri (Malawi); Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo( Nigeria); Okot p’Bitek (Uganda), Ngugi wa Thiongo (Kenya) and Tayeb Saleh (Sudan). The colonial language they rode on alienated them from their village roots; until unease began to creep in, and later burst out as rebellion, when Ngugi began to write in his Kikuyu mother tongue and Achebe promised Nigerians a work in Igbo. Awoonor turned to melodies in songs, talk, wit and proverbs of his Ewe people. It yielded a poetry which mirrored daily life:
‘’The howling cry through door posts
    carrying boiling pots
     ready for the feasters.’’
In this regard, his death in a high-brow shopping mall in Nairobi chopped off the high legs of his ambassadorial jostling with high class elite by a bullet that levels all human bodies regardless of class. A simple hatred from a simple Diaspora Somali religious wrath saw him in that shop with a simple racist resentment. It was a moment he most probably smiled at, advisedly, as his last poem to Africa. In that flash of thought and resigned panic, he may have recalled these lines by himself:
‘’Kutsiami the benevolent boatman
when I come to the river shore
please ferry me across
I do not have tied in my cloth the
price of your stewardship’’.His tribute to market women all across Africa holding cash in bundles tied around their waist is touching, tender.
I met him in Rome. Madam Mariapia Fanfani, the wife of a former president of Italy, had hauled him all the way from his ambassadorial seat in Brazil to join a group of African writers to talk about literature for fermenting peace. What remains in my memory are two little details. As we waited for a bus ride to a dinner with top Italian businessmen, a thrill seized a man from Sierra Leone unto offering a yell of ecstasy so loud that it shook the hotel. Awoonor promptly named it a ‘’braying’’ as melodious as a donkey at song. No one protested that label. He later asked for some meat to be put on a skeleton of a children’s story I had done. He said he liked it; but added that, like Brazilians, we should learn to see our politics like a game of football; loving our leaders when, once in a while, they score goals.
Born in 1935, Ghana’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah, brought the thrill of charismatic politics into his vibrant, youthful and idealistic twenties. Nkrumah’s subsequent fall and the violence and economic ruin that military rule brought, introduced a bitterness into his life. Travelling to University College London for a Masters degree and a doctorate from Sony Brooks University in New York, he also took solid academic learning to an increasingly bitter literary output.
 His scholarly works were ambitious, notably: The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975); and Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times (1990).
He died in Kenya, a country with a record of hounding into exile Ngugi wa Thiongo, its globally celebrated literary luminary. Jomo Kenyatta, its founding ruler, forced Ngugi to flee for security in Uganda in 1966 for defending Oginga Odinga’s freedom to deliver a critical speech to students. Now teaching in an American university, Ngugi may well see the drop of Kofi Awoonor’s blood on Kenya’s soil as a pan-African libation to a smouldering anger over unfulfilled war for economic justice that Mau Mau warriors waged in the 1950s. That would draw a smile from Kofi as he travels to After-Africa.