Homage to Friendship: Soyinka’s Tribute to Christopher Okigbo and the Enduring Power of Poetry
Jerry Adesewo
When Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka appeared in a video message, last Thursday, at the commemorative event marking the inclusion of Christopher Okigbo’s manuscripts in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, it was more than a symbolic appearance. It was an act of friendship, memory, and homage — a living bridge between two literary giants bound by history and vision.
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Kongi, as Soyinka is popularly known, reflective but steady, read his own elegiac poem, ‘For Christopher Okigbo’, from the collection: ‘Shuttle in the Crypt’, written in the wake of his friend’s death. His voice carried the weight of personal grief and national loss, but also of undying admiration. In that moment, UNESCO’s recognition was reframed: not just as an institutional honour but as the vindication of a voice silenced by war yet immortalized in verse.
A Brotherhood Beyond Words
Okigbo and Soyinka were part of a post-independence generation of writers who refused to treat literature as a detached pursuit. For them, poetry and drama were urgent interventions in political and social life. Their friendship, as Soyinka’s tribute underscored, was never only intellectual. It was fraternal. They shared a commitment to beauty, truth, and national rebirth.
Okigbo, who fell as a Biafran soldier at the age of 35, left behind a slim but incandescent body of work, most notably Labyrinths. Soyinka, in his tribute, made it clear that Okigbo’s death was not simply a personal wound but a rupture in the cultural fabric of Nigeria. Yet, he framed Okigbo’s legacy as one to be celebrated, not merely mourned: the legacy of a poet who embodied courage, both artistic and existential.
UNESCO and the Duty of Memory
The inclusion of Okigbo’s papers in UNESCO’s global archive signals an acknowledgement that his voice belongs not just to Nigeria or Africa, but to humanity. For Soyinka, this was deeply resonant. Memory, he reminded his audience, is an act of resistance. To remember Okigbo is to resist the erasure of inconvenient truths and to affirm the permanence of ideals larger than individual lives.
At a time when Nigeria wrestles with historical amnesia, the safeguarding of Okigbo’s manuscripts takes on renewed urgency. It asks Nigerians to recall the poets, dreamers, and dissenters who once dared to imagine a different nation, and to measure today’s politics against those unfulfilled visions.
Reading For Christopher Okigbo: Poetry as Witness
The heart of Soyinka’s tribute was his reading of ‘For Christopher Okigbo’, a poem composed in grief yet charged with philosophical clarity. The poem circles the refrain of “kinder” — “kinder that vultures toil / To cleanse torch-bearers for the soil” — as if wrestling with the paradox of death as release.
Here, Soyinka suggests that Okigbo’s early death, tragic as it was, might be “kinder” than a long life disfigured by disillusionment. Better, perhaps, to fall “burnt offering on the heights” than to have one’s vision corroded by compromise.
The poem reads like both a lament and an absolution. It is Soyinka’s way of making peace with a loss too immense to rationalize. By framing Okigbo’s death as a sacrifice, Soyinka elevates him to the realm of myth: not merely a victim of war but a torch-bearer whose fall kindled shrines for future generations.
Friendship as Legacy
What made Soyinka’s reading powerful was its intimacy. This was not the laureate or the public intellectual speaking, but a friend mourning and remembering. Through his words, we glimpsed the vulnerability of a man often seen as untouchable. His tribute illuminated the human side of literary camaraderie: two young men, bound by words and ideals, navigating the turbulence of their time.
In Soyinka’s cadence, one could sense admiration laced with pain. The recognition that Okigbo’s brevity of life did not diminish his fullness of being. Rather, it made his example sharper: to live with courage, to write with conviction, to resist with beauty.
Why It Matters Today
The significance of this homage extends far beyond literature. In a Nigeria still riddled with division, cynicism, and disillusionment, the celebration of Okigbo’s legacy is a reminder of what art can mean to a society in crisis. It reminds us that poetry is not decorative but prophetic, not escapist but essential.
Soyinka’s reflection, by implication, was also a challenge to the present. Can Nigeria honour the memory of those who gave their lives for ideals greater than themselves? Can it reclaim art as a vessel for the national conscience? Or will it continue to betray its brightest minds, leaving their dreams entombed in archives?
A Circle Unbroken
As the commemorative event drew to a close, Soyinka’s central message lingered: friendship, like poetry, is an act of remembrance. Christopher Okigbo may have fallen in battle, but his words remain in perpetual dialogue with the living. His presence survives not only in UNESCO’s archives or in the lines of Labyrinths, but in the continued homage of friends like Soyinka, who keep his torch alight.
‘For Christopher Okigbo’ thus becomes more than a poem. It is testimony to the endurance of memory, the resilience of art, and the binding force of friendship.
In Soyinka’s voice, Okigbo lived again — not as a tragic absence but as a luminous presence. And in that moment, poetry affirmed what politics and war so often deny: that truth, beauty, and friendship can outlast time, silence, and even death.