Nigerian poet, one of Africa's most important modernist writers. Christopher Okigbo wrote in English. He died in the civil war in Nigeria, fighting for the independence of Biafra. Okigbo's difficult but suggestive and prophetic poems show the influence of modernist European and American poetry, African tribal mythology, and Nigerian music and rhythms. "Prophetic, menacing, terrorist, violent, protesting – his poetry was all of these," S.O. Anozie said in Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric (1972).

Thundering drums and cannons
in palm grove
the spirit is in ascent

I have visited,
on palm beam imprinted
my pentagon –

I have visited, the prodigal

I palm grove
long drums amd cannons
the spirit in the ascent
('Sacrifice' by Christopher Okigbo, in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 178)

Christopher Okigbo was born in Ojoto, a village in eastern Nigeria, which at that time was still Britain's colony. He was the fourth of the five children of James Okigbo, a primary-school teacher, and Anna Onugwualuobi, daughter of Ikejiofor, priest of the Ajani shrine of Ire, Ojoto. James was a Roman Catholic convert, who taught in many new mission schools. Anna achieve great success in trading clothes and jewelry; she died in 1935, and James married Elizabeth, Okigbo's step-mother.

His early education Okigbo received at Umulobia Catholic School. Okigbo was a good student, who was particularly interested in math, literature, and Latin. He also excelled in school sports, such as football and cricket. Moreover, in his teen years he taught himself to play the piano and jazz clarinet. In 1945 he went for his secondary education to Umuahia Government College. Like many other major Nigerian writers, such as Wole Soyinka, Elechi Amadi, John Pepper Clark, and Cole Omotso, he also entered the newly-founded University College of Ibadan. Okigbo first planned to study medicine, but changed his major to Greek and Latin, graduating in 1956. He edited the University Weekly and translated Greek and Latin verse – Virgil was his favorite Latin poet, whose Aeneid he tried to translate. From the university days on he was a close friend of Chinua Achebe. In 1967 he founded with Achebe a publishing company, the Citadell Press, at Enugu.

Okigbo tried first to start a career at the Nigerian Tobacco Company and the United African Company, but he never turned his fascination with big business into a money making enterprise. Between 1957 and 1958 he served as private secretary to the Federal Minister of Information in Lagos. On his first visit to the United States, Okigbo was involved in negotiations which led to the establishment of the Nigerian Mission in the United Nations in New York. However, Okigbo had little patience with bureaucracy, and he failed to secure a position in the Foreign Service. "Chris always struck one to be in the wrong place in those years," one of his colleagues recalled. "He had an amazing energy, a brilliant and acute mind and a real capacity to generate laughter." Before taking a job as the West Africa representantive for Cambridge University Press in 1961, Okigbo was employed as a teacher at Fiditi Grammar School, near Ibadan, and then – without qualification in Librarianship – as Assistant Librarian at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he participated in the founding of the African Authors Association.

Wherever he went, Okigbo used to introduce himself by proclaiming, "I am Okigbo." In Ibadan, he became a central figure of the Mbari Club. This diverse and cosmopolitan city, largest in West Africa, was a haven for scholars, intellectuals, political exiles, artists, writers and bohemians in the 1960s. "Ibadan was a huge village and lived at the leisurely pace of the village; avoided the speed and neuroses of the city," wrote Nkem Nwankwo in his book Shadow of the Masquerade (1994). "That meant that life was easy and everything – especially sexual gratification – was available with minimum effort, at minimum cost." The great love of Okigbo's life was Judith Safinat Attah, an Igbira princess, the daughter of one of the most powerful monarchs in Northern Nigeria. They eventually married in a private seremony in Ibadan in 1963, but he did not give up his Bohemian ways, and turned her back to Yola in the North of Nigeria, if she came to see him without informing beforehand. To a friend Okigbo confessed, that he could not imagine living in the same house with a woman as his wife. When his daughter was born in 1964, Okigbo wrote the poem, 'Dance of the Painted Maidens' in celebration of her birth.

Bright
with the armpit dazzle of a lioness,
she answers,
wearing white light about her;
and the waves escort her,
my lioness,
crowned with moonlight.
(in 'Water Maid,' The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, 1998, p. 177)

Okigbo published his first poems in the student literary journal Horn, which was edited by J.P. Clark. As a poet Okigbo made his breakthrough in 1962. His works came out in the literary magazine Black Orpheus. Many of the poems in Heavensgate (1962) dealt with his religious life. At the time of writing the book, he  listened to composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

'Lament of the Silent Sisters,' the only poem he completed in 1962, appeared in the Ugandan Kampala based cultural magazine Transition. It was inspired by the assassination of the Congolese politician and anticolonial leader Patrice Lumumba in January 1961. 'Lament of the Flutes' (1960) also appeared in Poems from Black Africa (1963), edited by Langston Hughes, who met Okigbo at the 1962 African Writers Conference in Makerere.

Okigbo's early poems reflected the divided cultural heritage of his country, although first influences from Virgil, Ovid, Eliot, and Pound seem to be stronger than the oral literature of the Igbo. Okigbo knew Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' by heart, as well as Shelley's 'Ozymandias'. Heavensgate marked his return to the African part of his heritage and self-renewal through the goddess of the earth: "Before you, mother Idoto, naked I stand / before your watery presence a prodigal / leaning on an oilbean / lost in your legend". Well aware that he had a very small audience for his verse, Okigbo declared at the Makerere Writers' Conference, that he did not write for ordinary people, but for poets only.

The 1960s was a period of great political upheavals in Nigeria. The country became an independent republic in 1963 and four years later the eastern Ibo tribal region attempted to secede as the independent nation of Biafra. Although Okigbo followed keenly the social and political events in his country, his early poems moved on a personal and mythical level.

While Wole Soyinka was in detention at the Queen's Barracks at Iyagankun in 1965, Okigbo visited him regularly. Soyinka recalled that Okigbo "would bring his latest verses in typescript, scribbled over in his neat, tiny handwriting, and read them aloud to me . . . Armed with a hamper of food and drinks we might even have lunch of dinner together." Between September and October in 1966, Okigbo took part in an undergroung gun-running operation from Europe to Eastern Nigeria. By chance, when the arms-bearing plane crashed in Cameroon, Okigbo was not on board; he returned on a separate flight.

Path of Thunder (1968) showed a new direction – its attack on bloodthirsty politicians ("POLITICIANS are back in giant hidden steps of howitzers, / of detonators") and neocolonial exploitation ("THE ROBBERS descend on us to strip us our laughter, of our / thunder") was also in tune with the rise of radical movements of the decade. Okigbo won in 1966 the poetry prize at the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, but he refused the prize because he did not believe that art should not be judged on racial basis. At the outbreak of the civil war Okigbo was working for an Italian business organization called Wartrade. 

Okigbo joined in July 1967 the Biafran army as a major, refusing more secure posts behind the lines. He was killed at the age of 35 in action near Nsukka in August, in one of the first battles of the civil war. In his book of memoir The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War (1980) Major General Alexander Madiebo tells that Okigbo "died trying to lob a grenade into a ferret armoured car." His obituary, published in the Transition, stated: "Christopher Okigbo is dead, killed by Nigeria." For  his gallantry in the war, Okigbo was posthumously decorated with the Distinguished Service Order of the Republic of Biafra.

The poems Okigbo wished to preserve were published by Heinemann as Labyrinths in 1971, with Path of Thunder, added. Okigbo left behind a wife and daughter, for whom he dedicated Labyriths. Forebodingly he had written in 'Elegy for Alto:' "O mother mother Earth, unbind me; let this be / my last testament, let this be / The ram's hidden wish to the sword the sword's / secret prayer to the scabbard –."

It is known that before his death, Okigbo was working on a book, Pointed Arches, of which he wrote in a letter to a friend: "Pointed Arches in neither fiction nor criticism nor autobiography. It is an attempt to describe the growth of the poetic impulse in me, an account of certain significant facts in my experience of life and letters that conspired to sharpen my imagination." The manuscript, if it ever existed, has not been found. The tragic hero Chris Oriko in Achebe's novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987) was modelled after Okigbo. Achebe and Dubem Okafor edited a volume of poems, Don't Let Him Die (1978), which commemorated the life and poetry of Okigbo.

Okigbo used often repetition, the rhythm is songlike, and the words flow melodiously, as if the poet were listening and interpreting distant sounds. In an interview he said that he stopped writing music when he began writing poetry seriously. Once he accompanied Wole Soyinka on the piano in his first public appearance as a singer, playing 'Amabola'. He also accompanied Fransisca Pereira. Nothing has survived of his written music. Okigbo occasionally portrayed himself as a singer-musician, who speaks with the ancient, pre-literate language of drums: "I have fed out of the drum / I have drunk out of the cymbal..." Recurring images are dance ("dance of death", "iron dance of mortars"), thunder ("thunder of tanks", "the thunder among the clouds"), and the sound of drums ("the drums of curfew", "lament of the drums"). In 'Overture' (1961) Okigbo was a "watchman for the watchword / at heavensgate" and in 'Hurrah for Thunder' a "town-crier, together with my iron bell" (from Paths of Thunder, 1968). With T.S. Eliot he shared a vision of a spiritual quest, which takes the poet to the realm of ancient myths and to his spiritual self. From the four elements Okigbo chose water, the dwelling place of Idoto: "Under my feet float the waters: / tide blows them under."

For further reading: The Chosen Tongue by G. Moore (1969); Whispers From a Continent by W. Cartey (1969); The Trial of Christopher Okigbo by Ali A. Mazrui (1971); Christopher Okigbo: Creative Rhetoric by Sunday O. Anozie (1972); The Breast of the Earth by K. Awoonor (1975); Don't Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo, ed. Chinua Achebe and Dubem Okafor (1978); 'Okigbo, Christopher (Ifeanyichukwu)  (1932-August 1967),' in World Authors 1970-1975, edited by John Wakeman (1980); Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo, edited by Donatus Nwoga (1984); Dance of Death: Nigerian History and Christopher Okigbo's Poetry by Dubem Okafor (1998); 'Christopher Ifeanyichukwu Okigbo (1932-1967)' by Nalini Iyer, in Postcolonial African Writers, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); A Concordance to the Poems of Christopher Okigbo, edited by Michael J.C. Echeruo (2008); Kamau Brathwaite and Christopher Okigbo: Art, Politics, and the Music of Ritual by Curwen Best (2009); Christopher Okigbo 1930-67: Thirsting for Sunlight by Obi Nwakanma (2010); Hybridity and Christopher Okigbo's Poetry by Christopher W.N. Kirunda (2010); 'Christopher Okigbo,' in Writing Identity in the Age of Post-colonialism: Figurations of Home and Homelessness in African Poetry by Bridget Edman (2010); WHAT IS POETRY?: Critical Essays on: Ezra Pound, Chinua Achebe, Roy Campbell, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Langston Hughes, Christopher Okigbo, Dennis Brutus, Archilochus by Obiwu (2022)

Selected works:

• Heavensgate, 1962 (Mbari Publications)
• Limits, 1964 (first published in Transition, July-August 1962, Mbari Publications)
• Silences, 1965
• Path of Thunder, 1968 (in the literary magazine Black Orpheus)
• Labyrinths with Path of Thunder, 1971
• Collected Poems, 1986 (with a preface by Paul Theroux, introduction by Adewale Maja-Pearce)
• Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder, 2008
  
• Labyrinths, 2010 (introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
  
• Moonglow and Other Poems, 2017 (illustrated; foreword by Chinua Achebe)