“You should know this, Ogaga did not wait to be barred from the US. He left before the madness”…
WS flanked by Senator Sani and Ogaga Ifowodo
IT was the opening day of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) annual conference, 2025. I hadn’t attended an ANA conference for over two decades, having been abroad most of the time, and I was delighted to be back among the tribe. Prof Soyinka, our own very W. S. and the world’s first black Nobel laureate, was the special guest of honour.
The crowd of writers and cultural enthusiasts followed him as he viewed the art exhibition in the foyer of the ANA secretariat, and as he commissioned completed phases of the Mamman Vatsa Writers Village, which includes a hotel. Vatsa was the soldier and writer and former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory who gifted a vast parcel of land to ANA before his childhood friend and bestman, the dictator General Babangida, had him murdered for a phantom coup. Soyinka, Achebe and J P Clark had pleaded in vain for his life.
Commissioning done, Soyinka was being seen off to his car by ANA patron Senator Shehu Sani, ANA president Prof Usman Oladipo Akanbi, and former president Prof Femi Osofisan. And still, the crowd surged around him, pressing even more. I wanted to greet and then announce to him that the release of my new book of poems, WHY DOES GOD NEED A GUN? was imminent. But the crowd! Daunted at first, I fought my way to his left ear and whispered, “Good aft’noon, Prof. It’s Ogaga Ifowodo. I . . . ”
Ah, Ogaga! Where have you been?” He grabbed my hand, put an arm around my shoulder and, surprisingly, said all the raised cameras could shoot away. The one question he had been asked in the hall when called up stage for a photo with the newly inducted Fellows of the Association of Nigerian Authors, was about the decision of “the White Idi Amin” (as he describes the current president of the United States) to revoke his visa and bar him from entering the so-called land of the brave and the free.
He returned to the subject. “You should know this, Ogaga did not wait to be barred from the US. He left before the madness” . . . or words to that effect. “Are you in Abuja now?” Just recently relocated there, sir. I’m still a JJC (Johnny just come) and very much the proverbial hen in a new town, standing on one leg only until she has fully surveyed the terrain. I’ll write to give a proper update, sir.”
“Yes, do so.”
Finally, he was escorted to the door of the vehicle waiting to take him to his next appointment. He is 91 years old, and somehow manages still to not only maintain his astonishing prolificity (something even Achebe had marvelled at several decades before) but also to traverse the world with nearly the same enthusiasm of yore. There’s world enough waiting to welcome him outside Herr Trumpf’s own country!