Context β Okara, his moment and his Collected Poems
Who Okara is, when he wrote, and why his position in literary history matters.
The poet: Gabriel Imomotimi Okara was born in 1921 in Bumoundi, in what is now Bayelsa State in the Niger Delta of southern Nigeria. He was Ijaw β a people whose homeland is the rivers and creeks of the Delta β and water, drums and the river return as signature images across his work. Educated in Nigeria, he worked as a bookbinder, an information officer and a journalist before establishing himself as a writer. He died in 2019, aged 97.
Why Okara matters historically: Okara is one of the first generation of Anglophone African poets β the same generation as Chinua Achebe (whose Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958), Wole Soyinka and, in francophone Africa, LΓ©opold Senghor. African poetry in English in the late 1950s and 1960s was not yet a tradition; Okara is one of the writers who made it one. Some critics call him the 'father of Nigerian poetry'. To write about him is to write about a foundational moment.
The defining political background: Nigeria became independent from Britain in 1960. Less than a decade later it descended into a civil war β the Biafran War (1967-1970) β in which the eastern, largely Igbo region of Biafra attempted to secede. The war killed an estimated one to three million people, many through famine. Okara aligned with Biafra: he was part of a literary mission that travelled abroad to argue Biafra's case. The war scars his later poetry directly and his earlier work retrospectively.
The novel that frames the poems: Okara's experimental novel The Voice (1964) attempts to write English with the syntax and idiom of Ijaw β a literal translation of African speech into the coloniser's language. The poems share the project: an English that carries an African resonance. You do not need to have read the novel, but knowing it exists explains a lot.
The book on your syllabus: The Cambridge selection is taken from Gabriel Okara, Collected Poems (University of Nebraska Press / African Poetry Book Fund, 2016), which brings together a lifetime's work: early lyric poems from the 1950s and 1960s, Biafran-War poems, and later poetry. The signature poems β 'Piano and Drums', 'Once Upon a Time', 'You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed', 'The Mystic Drum', 'Were I to Choose', 'The Snowflakes Sail Gently Down', 'The Call of the River Nun' β recur in every selection and are the safest anchors for closed-book revision.
Why context is a lens, not a lecture:
| Context | How it illuminates the poems |
|---|---|
| First-generation Anglophone African poet | Okara is making a tradition, not joining one β the act of writing African experience in English is itself the argument |
| Nigerian independence (1960) | Many poems hover between the old colonial order and a new, uncertain national self |
| Biafran War (1967-70) | Loss, grief and political violence shadow Okara's work; the lyric voice is also a survivor's voice |
| Ijaw cultural inheritance | Drums, rivers, water and ancestral presence are not exotic decoration β they are a worldview |
| Achebe's defence of African English | Writing in English on African terms is a deliberate choice, not a default; Okara's poetry IS that choice in practice |
- Ijaw, Nigerian; born 1921, died 2019 β one of the FIRST generation of Anglophone African poets.
- Independence (1960) and the Biafran War (1967-70) are the political shadow; Okara sided with Biafra.
- His novel The Voice (1964) translates Ijaw syntax into English β the poems share the project.
- Cambridge selection comes from Collected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
- Treat context as a lens on lines, not a stand-alone history paragraph.