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Isidore
Okpewho
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A foremost scholar of
Oral Literature and award-winning novelist, Isidore Okpewho, has died at 74.
According
to a press release on PREMIUM TIMES:
He
was a prolific author, co-author and editor of about 14 books, dozens of
articles and a seminal booklet, A Portrait of the Artist as a Scholar.
Prof.
Okpewho died peacefully at a hospital in Binghamton, a town in Upstate New York
where he had lived and taught since 1991.
His
teaching career spanned University of New York at Buffalo (1974-76), University
of Ibadan (1976-90), Harvard University (1990-91), and State University of New
York at Binghamton.
According
to Canada-based Nduka Otiono, quoting family sources, the distinguished
Professor at State University of New York, Binghamton, passed away on September
4, 2016, surrounded by family members.
Although
he battled illness recently, the scholar and humanist demonstrated exceptional
capacity in dealing with his challenging health conditions.
Indeed,
only two years ago, his last book to which he had long committed his
intellectual resources, Blood on the
Tides: The Ozidi Saga and Oral
Epic Narratology, was published by University of Rochester Press.
Born
on November 9, 1941 in Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria, Okpewho grew up in Asaba,
his maternal hometown, where he attended St. Patrick’s College, Asaba. He
proceeded to the University College, Ibadan, for his university education. He
graduated with a First Class Honours in Classics, and moved on to launch a
glorious career: first in publishing at Longman Publishers, and then as an
academic after obtaining his PhD from the University of Denver, USA. He crowned
his certification with a D.Litt from University of London.
With
his two earliest seminal academic monographs, The Epic in Africa: Toward a
Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979) and Myth in
Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983), Okpewho
quickly established his reputation as a first-rate scholar and pioneer of Oral
Literature in Africa. For his distinctive and prolific output he was honoured
with a string of international academic and non-academic awards that included the
Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), in Humanities for the year 2010.
As
a writer noted, “Recognition for Professor Okpewho’s work has come with some of
the most prestigious fellowships in the humanities: from the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars (1982), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
(1982), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford
(1988), the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard (1990), National Humanities
Center in North Carolina (1997), and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
(2003). He was also elected Folklore Fellow International by the Finnish
Academy of the Sciences in Helsinki (1993).”
Prof.
Okpewho also served as President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures
of Africa (ISOLA).
For
his creative writing work, Okpewho won the 1976 African Arts Prize for
Literature and 1993 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Africa. His four
novels, The Victims, The Last Duty, Tides, and Call me by my
Rightful Name are widely studied in Africa and other parts of the
world, with some of them translated into major world languages.
“We
will miss his charming presence, warm-heartedness, and wise guidance,” said a
member of the family last night in Binghamton, New York, adding: “But we are
consoled by the great life he lived, the many lives he touched beyond the
nuclear family, and the remarkable intellectual legacy he left behind.”
He
is survived by his wife, Obiageli Okpewho; his children: Ediru, Ugo, Afigo, and
Onome, as well as members of his extended family.
Funeral arrangements will
be announced by the family in the coming days.
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