Okey Ndibe

Posted: July 31, 2010 - 16:53
Posted by siteadmin

Okey Ndibe  was born in Yola, Nigeria, in 1960. After a career as a magazine editor in Nigeria, he moved to the US to be the founding editor of African Commentary, an award-winning magazine published by the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. A visiting writer-in-residence and assistant professor of English at Connecticut College, Ndibe  has contributed poems to An Anthology of New West African Poets, edited by the Gambian poet, Tijan Sallah.

He has also published essays in a number of North American, British and Nigerian magazines and writes a weekly column for the Guardian, Nigeria’s most respected daily newspaper. Arrows of Rain is his first novel. With it, he says: ‘I felt I was grappling with an important human drama that just happened to be set in Africa... I wrote it while I was out of Nigeria. It would have been a different book if I had written it while in the country more angry, less meditative.’

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Which Gods Must Be Appeased? By Okey Ndibe
Modern Nigeria’s crisis, I suggest, is primarily a crisis of values. In Umuofia, Okonkwo may give vent to unruly deportment, but his community is also equipped with the coercive instrument for...
From “Village” Ethics To A Moral No-Man’s Land By Okey Ndibe
One of the enduring lessons in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is that the ethical interests of the Umuofia community assert themselves, again and again, over the overweening pride and impulsive...
Naturalizing Nigeria: A Strategy For Fighting Corruption By Okey Ndibe
From the outset, Okonkwo, the tragic protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, comes across as extraordinarily strong, a man who is “well known throughout the nine villages and...
A Nation At War With Its People By Okey Ndibe
Nigeria is crashing all around us and tottering towards a failed state. Yet, the custodians and squanderers of the country’s oil wealth in Abuja and elsewhere keep behaving as if they were...
Ngala Eight-Eight By Okey Ndibe
My mother, Elizabeth Ofuchinyelu Ndibe (nee Odikpo), turned 88 years old last Thursday, April 18. The way she chose to mark her latest milestone was altogether in character. First, she took food to...
The Cult of Power By Okey Ndibe
From all accounts, President Goodluck Jonathan and Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State are staring each other down. For months, the Nigerian press and blogosphere speculated that a feud simmered...
Dancing With Ghosts, Ignoring The Dead By Okey Ndibe
Last week, President Goodluck Jonathan took a step in the direction of weighing the offer of amnesty to members of the militant Islamist sect, Boko Haram. Mr. Jonathan set up a committee to examine...
Bona Ezeudu: Using Art To Contain Tragedy By Okey Ndibe
For at least three decades, enthusiasts of Nigeria’s visual arts scene have been familiar with the name Bona Ezeudu. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Ezeudu emerged as a sought-after artist, a member of...
Chinua Achebe: A Legend and Master Storyteller By Okey Ndibe
The death last night of Professor Chinua Achebe meant the dimming of one of the world’s brightest literary stars. Yet Mr. Achebe, whose works included the inimitable Things Fall Apart and four...
Jonathan Is Doing His Job By Okey Ndibe
  Last week, the US government was so miffed by President Goodluck Jonathan’s pardon of several big-name Nigerian convicts – among them former Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha...
Two Weeks, Two Deaths By Okey Ndibe
Death has haunted me two Saturdays in a row. I had just retired to bed on Saturday, March 2 when my home phone rang at 1:30 a.m. Startled from sleep, I dashed for the phone set, reaching it just too...
These Corpses Must Speak Their Names By Okey Ndibe
Collective forgetting – otherwise known as mass amnesia – is one way Nigerians cope with their scandal-marred, misshapen lives. In a country where scandals come at the rate of a dozen a...