This is a little bit late, but a post in honour of the late Cyprian Ekwensi, author of Jagua Nana, Burning Grass, and others. He died at age 86.
Here is a 2006 interview that Basil Okafor conducted with him for the Daily Sun.
Illustration credit: Basil Okafor
2 comments:
When Norman Mailer died on November 10, 2007, the news of his passage was on the leading newspapers and major TV channels in America and Britain and I saw him on the CNN, SKY and the BBC. But none of these foreign news media reported the news of the passage of Cyprian Ekwensi who even died earlier in the same month on the 4th and my disappointment has been more pronounced by the ignorance of our own news media who only reported the news of Ekwensi's transition below their headlines and only The Guardian has given us a full report on the life of our own Charles Dickens, Cyprian Ekwensi. I have not even heard or read any statements by his contemporary literary icons like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
I am really disappointed by the intellectual ignorance of the majority of Nigerians online and offline. That is why I do not have much regard for the ignorant posts of Nigerians on Nairaland and other Nigerian forums and blogs.
Abubuwan da nake tunani has posted on the passage of Cyprian Ekwensi and she is only a 30-year-old female graduate student in America. But what are our own Nigerian female writers doing? They have not even written a sentence on Cyprian Ekwensi, the intellectual morons online who were pretending to love African literature by merely name-dropping have no clue.
Only very few of us in the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) have noted this historical passage.
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was famous as the author of "The Nkaed and the Dead" (1948) as our own Cyprian Ekwensi was famous as the author of "Jagua Nana" (1961). Both great authors were prolific writers and were not only accomplised novelists, but also journalists.
Both old geniuses died whilst undergoing surgical operations.
Ekwensi died on 4 November 2007 at the age of 86 at the Niger Foundation in Enugu, where he underwent an operation for an undisclosed ailment.
May Cyprian Ekwensi rest in perfect peace.
Mr. Osinachi,
Thanks so much for your comment. I agree that Cyprian Ekwensi was not given enough attention during his life. Hopefully, this will be rectified in the future.
-T-C
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