In Memory of the Doyen of African Literature
No TL;DR found
Abstract
The recent death of Abiola Irele, the distinguished Nigerian literary scholar, at the age of eighty-one, represents a major loss to the fraternity of African letters, and marks the end of an era in the institution of literary criticism in Africa. More than any other scholar of his generation, Irele brought a forceful intellect, a cosmopolitan outlook, and authoritative voice to the study of African literature in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when it seemed to suffer from a crisis of identity as writers and critics struggled to emerge out of the shadows of colonial English and French studies. Born in Ora, in the Middle Western part of Nigeria in 1936, and educated in a Catholic high school in Lagos, Irele was a child of the late colonial period, and he grew up with a sense of both the long history of British colonialism in West Africa and its inevitable end. He was one of the first generation of graduates at the new University College, Ibadan, where he followed in the footsteps of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, and was a contemporary of J. P. Clark, John Munonye, Christopher Okigbo, and Flora Nwapa. Like Achebe and Soyinka, Irele could claim to be part of the generation that invented African literature in the European tradition. Driven by the fervour of nationalism, Irele’s commitment, like that of other African intellectuals of his generation, was to an idea of Africa liberated from colonial fantasies and post-colonial mythologies. As a student at the University of Lagos, Irele was editor of The Horn, a student journal founded by his classmate, J. P. Clark. The journal was the conduit for the earliest writing by some of the most prominent writers of the period, including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo.