AT the close of one’s life on earth, questions are rarely asked about how wealthy one is, since “wealth” is not only a matter of cash. What reasonable people are interested in knowing are the contributions one made to society. Gabriel Imomotimi Okara (1921-2019) is generally considered as one of the founders of modern African literature.

Gabriel Okara

Okara and his contemporaries were faced with the challenge of overcoming the problem involved in expressing African idioms and thoughts in the English language. What later became perfected as “African writing” by writers such as Chinua Achebe and others was an experiment begun by writers like Gabriel Okara.

Okara lived a full life, both in occupational itinerary and general living on planet earth. In 98 years, besides his core calling as a poet and novelist, Okara tried to enlist into the British Royal Air Force during World War II. When he failed to complete his training in the Force he settled for the British Overseas Airways Corporation, BOAC, which later became British Airways.

From 1945, he worked in a publishing company owned by the colonial government of Nigeria as a printer and bookbinder. Between 1964 and 1970 he went into the Eastern Nigerian Government Service as an Information Officer, and from 1971 to 1975 he served the Rivers State Newspaper and Television Corps as the General Manager.

True to the artistic temperament usually associated with writers, Gabriel Okara, through his works, attacked the ills of his days. He was quoted to have said in Contemporary Authors: “I wrote The Voice because of the inconsistencies of our rulers after the British had left Nigeria. In the fight for independence our politicians denounced certain measures and attitudes of the colonial government, only to perpetrate the same ones when they took over.”

A native of Bumoundi in Yenagoa Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, Okara attended Government College, Umuahia from 1935 to 1941. He later studied at Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois, USA where he was awarded a degree in Comparative Journalism in 1960.

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Some of Gabriel Okara’s works include The Voice (a novel, 1964);  The Fisherman’s Invocation (poems, 1978); Little Snake and Little Frog (children’s literature, 1981);  An Adventure to Juju Island (children’s literature, 1992); The Dreamer, His Vision (poems, 2005); and As I See It (poems, 2006); Collected Poems (edited, 2016).

In 1953, he won the Best All-Round Entry in Poetry at the Nigerian Festival of Arts, for The Call of the River Nun. For The Fisherman’s Invocation, he was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1979. In 2005, Okara won the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG, Prize for his poems in The Dreamer, His Vision, and in 2009, he bagged the Pan African Writers’ Association Honorary Membership Award. A great African pioneer has departed to immortality!