Tanure Ojaide

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1948

academic, professor of Africana studies, Nigerian writer

Worked in Charlotte
Worked at University of North Carolina at Charlotte

poet, university teacher, literary critic, professor, writer

In the libraries

Open Library God's Medicine Men & Other Stories · 2000 View library record ↗ Open Library I Want to Dance and Other Poems · 2003 View library record ↗ Open Library Invoking the Warrior Spirit · 1998 View library record ↗ Open Library Poetic imagination in Black Africa · 1996 View library record ↗ Open Library Poetry, performance, and art · 2003 View library record ↗ Open Library The New African Poetry · 1999 View library record ↗

Read Tanure Ojaide

Invoking the Warrior Spirit 1998 Find a copy The New African Poetry 1999 Find a copy I Want to Dance and Other Poems 2003 Find a copy Poetry, performance, and art 2003 Find a copy God's Medicine Men & Other Stories 2000 Find a copy Poetic imagination in Black Africa 1996 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

It is an exhilarating experience to be recognised by your own country and be among the best and brightest. I feel happy and lucky to have won the award. It is a humbling experience, which imposes some responsibilities on one, too. If you are nurtured by your country and recognised with its highest award, you have to give your very best to the country. To whom much is given, much is expected. The saying can’t be truer than for the winner of the Nigerian National Order of Merit.

As an African, I must take history seriously. If your people’s lives have been disrupted by others who not only enslaved but also colonized and still exploit them, you must struggle to make history redeem itself. I am fascinated by memory of the past and what it has given rise to today, and how the future is being fashioned by our current actions. The choice of nine movements is cultural. Among the Urhobo, nine is a special number that features in rituals to signify unending. Here, history is not what Fukuyama conceives as ending, but an unending phenomenon. Among the nine movements are personal, national, international, and human aspects of history.

It is a very long way from Ibada Village (which no longer exists) to Charlotte, North Carolina. I was not even born there, but at Igberhe Village, so-named after the plantain plants that sustained the people. My two hands are both of Okpara, the sub-clan of Agbon. It's said that Okpara is slippery in the dry season, if you take the town for granted!

I was born and raised in my maternal side; hence I begin from my mother's village. I am an Okurunoh man (really Enemarho Village) but I am Ibada-born.