The dance of death

Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) was one of Africa's foremost poets whose life was cut short by the Biafran civil war. This book represents a definitive re-reading of Okigbo's poetry and a foregrounding of its importance as prophecy and warning to Nigerians (nay, Africans!) and the misrulers of Nigeria against continued national misdirection. Locating the poet squarely with all communalistic traditional African poetics, in which aesthetics and social functionality are coordinate components of art, the author discusses Okigbo as a poet of destiny, whose identification with the people - the "quadrangle" of his geometric characterology - was total.