The great Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi passed away on June 29, 2016 at the age of 82 years. He gained international literary acclaim in the mid-1960s with his debut novel, The Concubine, which like his later works, capture African village life, customs, beliefs and religious practices as they are set in pre-colonial times.
Born on May 12, 1934 in Aluu, Rivers State, Amadi, novelist, playwright and essayist attended Government College, Umuahia (1948–1952), where he was schoolmate of the poet JP Clark and famed novelist Chinua Achebe. He proceeded to the School of Surveying, Oyo where he studied survey between 1953 and 1954. He worked for a year and went on to the University College, Ibadan where he studied Mathematics and Physics (1955-1959). Amadi worked as a teacher and later joined the Nigerian Army in 1963, where he rose to Captain. He quit the army three years after and took a teaching job in Port Harcourt, hoping to find more time to write. This paid off as The Concubine was published in 1966.
When the Nigerian Civil War broke out in 1967, Amadi like many other Nigerian writers of his time (Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and Achebe) was regarded as rubbing the authorities the wrong way. He was arrested and imprisoned twice not by the federal government like the other writers, but by the Biafran government. Believing in a united Nigeria, Amadi escaped from Biafra and rejoined the federal army in 1968 and served with the Third Marine Commando. At war’s end in 1970 he worked for the Rivers State government and turned to writing in his spare time. His next novel, The Great Ponds, seems to be a metaphor for the civil war. Its plot centres round a deadly struggle of rural villages over ponds that are considered supernatural. Amadi wrote a diary of his civil war experiences, Sunset in Biafra (1973). He wrote no more novels until 1979 when The Slave appeared. His last novel, Enstrangement (1986), the first to be set in Port Harcourt instead of a rustic village, captures the consequences of the civil war.
The struggle for survival in a fragile and often fatalistic world in Amadi’s novels is also dramatised in his plays. Isiburu (1973), which enjoyed a run at the National Theatre Lagos, is a verse drama about a champion wrestler, who is ultimately defeated by the supernatural power of his enemy. Pepper Soup and The Road to Ibadan were published in a single volume in 1977 and depict the struggles in a supernatural world. The Dancer of Johannesburg, also published in 1977, focuses on the fight against Apartheid.
Amadi held various government positions including commissioner for education, lands and housing, and that of information. He was head of the department of literature in the Rivers State College of Education. He had earlier served as the dean of the faculty of arts. On January 5, 2009 Amadi, who was a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Education, was kidnapped from his home in Aluu, near Port Harcourt. He was however released the next day.
Unfortunately, compared with African writers who deal with similar themes, Amadi was little appreciated by critics. Some say this may be because he did not subscribe to the dominant schools of thought in African literary studies. He saw literature as primarily art, not a tool for ideological ends. “I like to think of myself as a painter or composer using words in place of pictures and musical symbols,” he wrote in an essay published in Contemporary Novelist in 1991. “I consider commitment in fiction a prostitution of literature. The novelist should depict life as he sees it without consciously attempting to persuade the reader to take a particular viewpoint. Propaganda should be left to journalists.” Amadi will be sourly missed by admirers of African literature not only in Nigeria and Africa, but around the world. We pray God Almighty to grant his family and the literary community the fortitude to bear this irreparable loss.
