SYNW Mourns Renowned Literary Scholar Harry Garuba

SYNW MOURNS RENOWNED LITERARY SCHOLAR HARRY GARUBA

Society of Young Nigerian Writers (SYNW) has sent her condolences to the family and literary associates of the late literary figure and Nigerian academic Prof. Harry Garuba.

The late Prof. Harry Garuba burst on to the literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s and made a name for himself. Prof. Harry Garuba passed away on Friday evening in South Africa, following a long illness. A statement on Saturday by the University of Cape Town where the departed poet had taught for much of his career, announced his death.

Reacting to the death of Prof. Harry Garuba, Wole Adedoyin, the President of SYNW in a statement issued on Saturday, said the literary works of the late don would leave lasting memories of his literary legacy.

“SYNW commiserates with family of the renowned academic and poet, Prof. Harry Garuba, who passed away on Friday 28th February, 2020, urging them to find solace in the good deeds and the good life lived by the departed.

“SYNW also condoles with friends and literary associates of Prof. Harry Garuba, whose outstanding contributions to the tenet of African studies and literature will be sorely missed.

SYNW finally prayed that the almighty God will accept the soul of the departed, and comfort his family.

Born in Akure, southwestern Nigeria, in 1958, at age 17, Garuba gained admission to the department of English at the University of Ibadan. The budding young scholar drew on his academic and intellectual formation at Ibadan to graduate with a BA honours and later with a master’s degree.

From there he obtained his PhD in 1988 and composed a work of scholarship, Mask and Meaning in Black Drama: Africa and the Diaspora, illustrating his groundbreaking thesis on genre and technique in African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American drama with a comparative study of the plays of Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, St Lucian Derek Walcott and the American Amiri Baraka.

From 1981, he taught at Ibadan for more than 15 years before migrating to South Africa in 1998, first teaching English at the University of Zululand and, from 2001, teaching English and African studies at the University of Cape Town.

Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university, offered the creative space within which his talent could flourish. Garuba was still a teenager when his one-act play, Pantomime for Saint Apartheid’s Day, appeared in the Festac Anthology of Nigerian New Writing (1977), compiled on the occasion of the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, which took place in Lagos, Nigeria, from January 15 to February 12 1977.

But that was child’s play compared with what he achieved five years later. In 1982, New Horn Press, the Ibadan-based publishing house built by the late, great Nigerian literary scholar Professor F Abiola Irele, brought out Garuba’s first volume of poetry, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems, when the poet was only 24. It’s a relatively slim book but contains some of the greatest and most original poetry ever written. The first poem in Garuba’s distinguished debut comprises perhaps the most memorable opening lines in modern Nigerian poetry in English since The Passage in Christopher Okigbo’s debut Heavensgate (1962) published by Mbari, another Ibadan-based house, 20 years earlier.