Prof. Niyi Osundare
By SaharaReporters, New York
According to Professor Peter A. Schock, “This rank is the highest of the professorships awarded by the University, and is reserved for those who have established a truly distinguished national or international record in scholarship or creative work.” The news was broken today to Osundare in New Orleans by Professor Schock, the Chair of the Department of English of the University. The position was last held by a faculty member in the English Department of the University when Professor Carol Gelderman was named Distinguished Professor in 1993.
Osundare, author of numerous poetry books including, "The Eye of the Earth" which won the 1986 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, "Waiting Laughters", which won the Noma Award, "Moonsongs", "Songs of the Season" and "The Word is an Egg," among others, was born in Ikere-Ekiti in 1947. He gained degrees at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, University of Leeds, UK and York University, Canada - where he was awarded a Ph.D in 1979. He became a professor at the University of Ibadan in 1989 and was Head of the English Department at the University from 1993 to 1997. He joined the University of New Orleans in 1997.
A committed social critic and activist and self-described 'humanist', Osundare's poetry constitutes a permanent engagement with humanistic imaginations of a better world and the social formation in a dialectical, yet, lyrical way. In his poetry collection, "Waiting Laughters" the poet laments the tragedy of his fatherland, Nigeria:
"Every tadpole is a frog-in-waiting
in the wasted waters of my greed en-tided land."
In the same collection, he laments the shameless misrule of the military in Nigeria's history, asking:
"But are these the messiah
who came four seasons ago
with joyful drums and retinues of chanted pledges?
Where now the aura,
where, the anointed covenant of eloquent knights?"
"You cannot keep quiet about the situation in the kind of countries we find ourselves in, in Africa," he was once quoted to have stated. "When you wake up and there is no running water, when you have a massive power outage for days and nights, no food on the table, no hospital for the sick, no peace of mind; when the image of the ruler you see everywhere is that of a dictator with a gun in his hand; and, on the international level, when you live in a world in which your continent is consigned to the margin, a world in which the color of your skin is a constant disadvantage, everywhere you go – then there is no other way than to write about this, in an attempt to change the situation for the better."
Despite having to move to, and stay in, the United States since 1997 for family reasons, Osundare returns to Nigeria regularly and intervenes consistently in debates about building a truly democratic and egalitarian society. In one of his poems, in spite his disappointment with the realities of the Nigerian condition, he articulates his belief in the possibility of a better country in the future. Sings the pilgrim poet:
"My country is a prayer
Waiting
For a distant amen."
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