Saturday, June 8, 2013

FRANCIS SELORMEY




Francis Selormey (1927 - 1983) will probably always be remembered for his excellent novel, The Narrow Path. Selormey, a Ghanaian, was a novelist, teacher, scriptwriter and sports administrator. He attended a Catholic primary school, and then St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast. He went on to study further at the University of Ghana and in Germany before becoming a teacher. He was an excellent Sports administrator. The Narrow Path: An African Childhood, was hailed by pundits as rather semi-autobiographical; a Bildungsroman of a Ghanaian school boy who is "caught between his love for an overly strict father who insists on Christian, Western ways and his own appreciation for other, traditional influences."

Studies:


European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa (Volume 2) by Albert S. Gerard

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO


     
       

Christopher Okigbo (1930–1967) was an early Nigerian poet, now widely acknowledged as the outstanding post-colonial English-language African poet; and one of the major modernist writers of the twentieth
century. He died prematurely during the Nigerian Civil war. As a youth Okigbo felt a special affinity to his maternal grandfather, a priest of Idoto, an Igbo deity personified in the river of the same name that flowed through his village. Later in life, Okigbo came to believe that his grandfather's soul was reincarnated in him, and the "water goddess" figures prominently in his fecund poetry . Okigbo studied at the famous University College in Ibadan, graduating ultimately in Classics. He later helped to found the African Authors Association. He was also West African Representative of Cambridge University Press at Ibadan. . His published books (some posthumously) are  Heavensgate (1962)  Limits (1964) Labyrinths (1971), 
Collected poems (1986), and Crossroads (2008).

Studies:

The trial of Christopher Okigbo by Ali AlʼAmin Mazrui 
Christopher Okigbo: creative rhetoric by Sunday Ogbonna Anozie 
Critical perspectives on Christopher Okigbo 
Critical essays on Christopher Okigbo 
Christopher Okigbo, 1930-67 : thirsting for sunlight by Obi Nwakanma 
Kamau Brathwaite and Christopher Okigbo : art, politics, and the music of ritual by Curwen Best 
Hybridity and Christopher Okigbo's poetry by Christopher W. N Kirunda 
Nationalism in Okigbo's poetry by Dubem Okafor 
Two African Prodigals : Senghor and Okigbo by Jonathan Ngate 

Folk tradition in Okigbo's poetry by Emma Ngumoha