The burial arrangements for late Ikeogu Oke, earlier announced for February 23 by the family have been shelved, owing to the postponement of the general elections.
The family, through a statement released by John Oke, said that “due to adjustment in the national election timetable, it is no more feasible to hold our friend and brother, Ikeogu’s funeral rites on 23rd February, 2019 as originally scheduled.
“We have started discussions to arrive at a suitable date which will insulate the funeral from further disruption(s) by election activities”.
Oke, who thanked everyone for standing by the family through this trying period, explained that a new date will be announced by the family soon.
Oke died on November 24 at an Abuja hospital where he had been seeking treatment for an undisclosed ailment and is survived by his mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters.
Described as one of Africa’s new generation of poets with a repertoire of poems that will captivate the most critical aesthete, the writer and journalist was 51.
Published in the United States of America, United Kingdom, Nigeria and India since 1988 when he decided to pitch tent with writing, he has also penned opinion articles, poems for children and short stories.
His latest poetry book, The Heresiad, which he said took him 27 years to write, won him the 2017 edition of the Nigeria LNG Ltd sponsored Nigeria Prize for Literature. He received $100,000.
Inspired by Chinua Achebe and Niyi Osundare, IKeogu Oke had before 2017 won recognition for himself across the globe. In 2010, for instance, Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Noble Prize in Literature, selected Salutes without Guns, his second collection of poems, as her book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement. He made up the four Nigerian poets whose works were picked to be featured in The Second Genesis: An Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry only four years after. The others on the list were Wole Soyinka, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu and Obari Gomba.
The literary community, his constituency as it were, all over Africa, Nigeria, and in Abuja, where he made a home, will miss him dearly. They will miss particularly the truth in his words which constantly pinched the wound of the nation’s conscience.
Ikeogu Oke left behind an unpublished novel titled ‘New Jerusalem’, and ‘One Hundred Love Poems’ a new poetry collection. Getting these works, which he said were completed published, will amount to keeping his vision alive even truncated such a boisterous life that was Ikeogu Oke.