BEN OBUMSELU: A LITERARY LUMINARY DEPARTS
Without Ezra Pound, would there have been the TS Eliot who gave us The Wasteland and without Ben Obumselu, would there have been the Christopher Okigbo who gave us The Labyrinths? The answer to both is definitely no. A little over 20 years ago, Helon Habila and I stumbled into Lagos in a daze. We had just graduated and had arrived Lagos from Jos but we almost didn’t make it. Halfway through our journey, the bus we were travelling in had run into another bus which had been flagged down by policemen at an illegal checkpoint.
No one died, but one of the passengers in front had his feet so mangled it took hours to free it from the wreck that had become the front of our bus.
We got home to my parent’s place in Bariga, had a shower and a hot meal, and then because we were young invincible men we did not even pause to reflect on that incredible moment when our young lives could have been cut short, instead we walked out of the house and headed to Ikeja.
We had a date with a seminal mind in African literature. His name was Professor Ben Obumselu and he was to the poet, Christopher Okigbo, what Ezra Pound was to TS Eliot. Professor Obumselu was then Managing Director of a printing concern in Ikeja and was gracious enough to see us without a prior appointment once we mentioned that we had graduated with degrees in literature and had studied Okigbo under a young lecturer and poet called Obiwu who had mentored us back at Unijos.
Acknowledging Obumselu’s impact on his career, Christopher Okigbo wrote in the acknowledgment section of his poetry collection, Labyrinths “…and to Benedict Obumselu for criticisms that continue to guide me along the paths of greater clarity.”
We spent a delightful afternoon with Professor Obumselu in his expansive office during which his deep voice declaimed poetry before ranging across genres but of all he said that afternoon, the very thing that has remained with me all these years is his thesis that all good literature rests on two legs – the ugly and the beautiful.
The ugly referring to all that is bad, despicable, dishonorable and uncouth in characterisation, plotting, and writing. The beautiful was the counter and referred to the sublime.
He was dressed in a white shirt and had on a grey suit. He was a man with strong features, a strong voice that you heard once and never forgot as well as a prodigious memory for poetry and words.
He also had the refined manners of a renaissance man which made him come across clearly as a classicist but without the slightest hint of condescension.
We asked questions, our words tumbling out and falling over themselves in our awe at standing so close and before greatness.
I would see him over and over many years later. Sometimes I would wave and he would wave back but I never had another opportunity to sit and listen to him talk poetry and literature.
Obi Nwakanma in his definitive Okigbo biography, Christopher Okigbo - Thirsting for Sunlight described Ben Obumselu as one of a trio that included Oscar R. Darthorne and John Ramsaran, who began to “establish the early theoretical framework for the systematic study of African literature at the university of Ibadan.
Their pioneering work in the English Department led to the development of a curriculum based on the works of the emergent writers in Ibadan.”
Obumselu, according to C. Don Adinuba in his piece for The Guardian As Obumselu, the intellectual icon, departs, was described by J.C. Echeruo as “the greatest African literary scholar of his generation.”
That praise is by no means flattery because C. Don Adinuba goes ahead to posit, as a way of firmly situating Obumselu’s place in the academia that Obumselu “was yet to graduate (with a first degree in English at the University of Ibadan) when he was offered admission at Oxford for the Doctor of Philosophy degree (Ph.D.) without reading for a Masters.
It was based on strong recommendations of his lecturers at Ibadan.”
That man, that intellectual icon, Benedict Ebele Obumselu, academic, teacher, Biafran and Igbo leader as well as crafter of poets died March 4, 2017. He was aged 85.
Rest in peace, Benedict Obumselu, il miglior fabbro.