"A Signal Literary Pan-Africanist"

We hail the memory and achievements of a signal literary Pan-Africanist. From my meeting with him at the University of Ife in 1969 I was made aware of his interest in and promotion of Caribbean literature, especially as it related to the issue of ethnic and cultural identity. He requested then that I write a review of Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Islands, and later proposed that I research a study-guide "Notes to Masks," another work by Brathwaite, which is a poetic treatment of the positive learning experience of a Caribbean persona's return to Africa. The product of those annotations was published by the now-defunct Ethiope Publishing Corporation of Benin City in 1977, and was re-issued in 1992 by the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as E. Kamau Brathwaite's Masks: Essays and Annotations. By the start of the twenty-first century, Irele was already a Professor at Harvard in the United States, and general editor of the series Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. In this connection he commissioned me to write on "The Oral Tradition in the African Diaspora" which was published in vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. These contributions are a small but visionary part of his formidable literary legacy. His multilingual skills combined with courtesy and generosity of spirit to gain him a favorable personal reputation among those with whom he collaborated.