Okigbo was born on 16 August 1930, in the town of Ojoto, about ten miles from the city of Onitsha in Anambra State. His father was a teacher in Catholic missionary schools during the heyday of British colonial rule in Nigeria, and Okigbo spent his early years moving from station to station. Despite his father's devout Christianity, Okigbo had an affinity and came to believe later in his life, that in him was reincarnated the soul of his maternal grandfather,[1] a priest of Idoto, an Igbo deity. Idoto is personified in the river of the same name that flows through Okigbo's village, and the "water goddess" figures prominently in his work. Heavensgate (1962) opens with the lines:

Before you, mother Idoto,
naked I stand,[2]
while in "Distances" (1964) he celebrates his final aesthetic and psychic return to his indigenous religious roots:

I am the sole witness to my homecoming.[3]
Another influential figure in Okigbo's early years was his older brother Pius Okigbo, who would later become the renowned economist and first Nigerian Ambassador to the European Economic Commission (EU)


His Education at Umuahia and Ibadan

Okigbo graduated from Government College Umuahia two years after the noted Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, having earned himself a reputation as a voracious reader and a versatile athlete. The following year, he entered the University of Ibadan to study Medicine, but switching to Classics in his second year.. He also earned himself a reputation as a gifted pianist, accompanying Wole Soyinka in his first public appearance as a singer. It is believed that he wrote original music at that time, though none has survived.
His initial literary work and art
After graduating in 1956, he held a succession of jobs throughout the country. He worked at the Nigerian Tobacco Company, United Africa Company, the Fiditi Grammar School (where he taught Latin), and was Assistant Librarian at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, where he helped found the African Authors Association.
In 1958 his life came to a turning point as he sought to know himself better.He began publishing his works in various journals, notably Black Orpheus a literary journal that was bringing together the best works of African and African American writers. While his poetry was in part a powerful expression of African nationalism, he was adamantly opposed to Negritude, which he denounced as a romantic pursuit of the “mystique of blackness” for its own sake. He also rejected the conception of a commonality of experience between Africans and black Americans, even though it contravened the editorial policy of Black Orpheus. For Okigbo, poetry was a highly personal endeavor. Even though he embraced African culture he rejected the literary concept of Negritude, for he thinks he was just a poet.” A poet writes poetry and once a work is published it becomes public property. It’s left to whoever reads it to decide whether it’s African poetry or English.” He therefore said that there was not any such thing as a poet trying to express African-ness as such a thing doesn’t exist. A poet just simply expresses himself. On precisely these grounds he rejected the first prize in African poetry awarded to him at the 1965 Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar.
In 1963 he became West African Representative of Cambridge University Press at Ibadan, a position which enabled hiim to travel frequently to the United Kingdom, where he attracted further attention. At Ibadan, he became an active member of the Mbari literary club.For he was among the many young artists who were looking for a platform to exchange their views and share their various talents. He and Soyinka, were also musicians, performing in jazz clubs. Consequently in 1961 the Mbari Writers and Artists Club was born in Ibadan founded by the German writer and critic Ulli Beier. who invited Okigbo to be one of the original Mbari committee members together with: Georgina Beier, Wole Soyinka, J. P.Clark, Chinua Achebe, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Amos Tutuola, D. O. Fagunwa, Dennis Williams, Demas Nwoko, Uche Okeke, Frances Ademola and Janheinz Jahn, the ethnologist. The Mbari Club incooperated various activities as visual arts exhibitions, theatre, creative workshops and a publishing house.in which Okigbo eventually became an editor. It played a decisive role in the birth of modern African literature,. publishing not only the writings of its members and adherents but those of the South African writers Dennis Brutus and Alex La Guma. For the visual arts, it presented the pioneers, such as the painters Uche Okeke and Yusuf Grillo, the sculptor and painter Demas Nwoko, and the silk-screen artist, Bruce Onobrakpeya. The Mbari Club promoted the creation of a true movement of contemporary African artists, who were poised to generate a new artistic culture reconciling the continent’s cultural traditions and the technical language imposition.
Okigbo published his first poems in the student literary journal Horn, edited by J.P. Clark. though his works also appeared in the more significant literary magazine Black Orpheus. In the same year he also published as a pamphlet, Heavensgate, and a long poem in the Ugandan cultural magazine Transition, published in Kampala.. Okigbo’s early poems reflected the divided cultural heritage of his country, although it had influences from Virgil, Ovid, Eliot, and Pound which seem to be stronger than the oral literature of the Igbo.
He completed, and published the works of his mature years, including Limits (1964), Silences (1962-65), Lament of the Masks (commemorating the centenary of the birth of W. B. Yeats in the form of a Yoruba praise poem, 1964), “Dance of the Painted Maidens” (commemorating the 1964 birth of his daughter, Obiageli or Ibrahimat, whom he regarded as a reincarnation of his mother) and his final highly prophetic sequence, “Path of Thunder” (1965-67), which was published posthumously in 1971 with, Labyrinths, which incorporates the poems from the earlier collections.

In 1966 the Nigerian crisis came to a head. Okigbo, living in Ibadan at the time, relocated to eastern Nigeria to await the outcome of the turn of events which culminated in the secession of the eastern provinces as independent Biafra on 30 May 1967. Living in Enugu, he worked together with Achebe to establish a new publishing house, Citadel Press.

With the secession of Biafra, Okigbo immediately joined the new state's military as a volunteer, field-commissioned major. An accomplished soldier, he was killed in action during a major push by Nigerian troops against Nsukka, the university town where he found his voice as a poet, and which he vowed to defend with his life. Earlier, in July, his hilltop house at Enugu, where several of his unpublished writings (perhaps including the beginnings of a novel) were, was destroyed in a bombing raid by the Nigerian air force. Also destroyed was Pointed Arches, an autobiography in verse which he describes in a letter to his friend and biographer, Sunday Anozie, as an account of the experiences of life and letters which conspired to sharpen his creative imagination.

Several of his unpublished papers are, however, known to have survived the war. Inherited by his daughter, Obiageli, who established the Christopher Okigbo Foundation in 2005 to perpetuate his legacy, the papers were catalogued in January 2006 by Chukwuma Azuonye, Professor of African Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston, who assisted the foundation in nominating them for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Azuonye's preliminary studies of the papers indicate that, apart from new poems in English, including drafts of an Anthem for Biafra, Okigbo's unpublished papers include poems written in Igbo. The Igbo poems are fascinating in that they open up new vistas in the study of Okigbo's poetry, countering the views of some critics, especially the troika (Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike) in their 1980 Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, that he sacrificed his indigenous African sensibility in pursuit of obscurantist Euro-modernism.

"Elegy for Alto", the final poem in Path of Thunder, is today widely read as the poet's "last testament" embodying a prophecy of his own death as a sacrificial lamb for human freedom:

Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal; let this be
the ram’s ultimate prayer to the tether...
AN OLD STAR departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever...

My respect to one of the greatest sons of Ndigbo

GREAT FELLA..A peotic icon

He was Africa's finest poet and would have won the Nobel prize if was given post-humously Continue to RIP great son of Biafra

Achebe paid glowing tributes to him in his memoir, ' there was a country'. Rest on poet...

Zonacom:
Achebe paid glowing tributes to him in his memoir, ' there was a country'.
Rest on poet...

biafra has being produucing greatness since 500bc.

proud nwafor igbo....reppin' in the north! Okigbo, ka chi fooo....

Ifekandu from Ojoto Uno Anambra State.