Dear Justin: About My Writing

- Part 1

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

A presumably young man recently wrote in one of the comments forums/fora on the Ghanaweb.com website that he was very curious to learn about just how I was able to compose and post articles on Ghana's leading website so prolifically. At the end of his comments, the young man, who went by the name of Justin, wistfully noted that he wished he could conduct an interview with yours truly on the subject of my prolific output, except for that fact that distance had rendered him incapacitated.

Well, I rarely do this, but on this particular occasion, I wrote a terse response to Justin assuring the young man that I shall be addressing his apparently genuine curiosity in due course. In the past, of course, that would have been the extent of my response. For, this is not the very first time that I am being peppered with a flurry of queries vis-a-vis how I go about my writing process - sometimes it can get a tad annoying, especially when the glaring subtext of such enquiries clearly appears to be that since I have a full-time job as a college professor, as well as family obligations, somehow, writing as freqently and publishing as regularly as I do is an all-too-nigh impossible task for one person to undertake.

Well, the fact of the matter is that I have been writing voraciously since fourth grade, mostly nursery rhymes and short stories none of which survives to day. But it was not until my secondary/high school days, in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, at St. Peter's Secondary School (PERSCO), Okwawu-Nkwatia, and briefly at Prempeh College (Amanfuo), Kumasi, that I started doing what could be aptly considered as "serious writing."

By 1979, I was writing and having my poetry broadcast on GBC-2, then nicknamed the English or "Commercial Service" of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. I would be hosted several times by Mr. Godwin Avenorgbor (Big Goddie), then host of a Saturday afternoon entertainment program called "Variety Ahoy!" Mr. Avenorgbor also hosted the "GBC-2 Fan Club." And once, I featured on "Variety Ahoy!" hosted from the world-famous Aburi Botanical Gardens, together with other notable groups of performers bused to the "mountains" by the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.

Among the sterling cast of performers hosted by Mr. Avenorgbor was the student brass band of the famous John Tei Memorial Institute. I was also privileged to meet the burly and elderly, albeit personable, proprietor of the school, the redoubtable and hard-driving Master John Tei himself! And we actually got to sit side-by-side while waiting to be severally featured on the program; he, the school-masterly conductor of the John Tei Memorial Brass Band, and I, a guest poet on Variety Ahoy!

As I vividly recall, Master John Tei and I chatted freely and heartily. The renowned maestro also graciously commended me for my "remarkable prosodic flair" - those were his words - and encouraged me to keep writing, as one day it was certain to pay off with great dividends. I believe it was kind words of encouragement like these that fired me up into becoming the best writer that I possibly could be.

I have also been privileged to have Prof. Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian novelist, as my teacher. I believe we - the global community, I mean - buried Prof. Achebe a year, or so, ago. I could not personally attend his funeral, but I studiously followed every public aspect of it with the click of my computer-tablet's mouse. And I strongly suspect that my spirit was in attendance as well. One thing I learned from Prof. Achebe was "modest self-assurance," the need for any prospective writer to be disciplined and deeply convicted about one's purpose for writing without being obtrusive, in the radical sense of letting one's esthetic craft commend itself to its target audience.

The greatest gift that I received from Prof. Achebe, however, was an encomim that he passed to me, obliquely, through another remarkable Nigerian scholar and educator and a notable specialist of Francophone African Literature, the late Prof. Michael Mbabuike, formerly of the City University of New York's Hostos Community College, Bronx, New York. For whatever reasons, and as clearly indicated above, Prof. Achebe never said this directly to me, but I was to shortly learn from Prof. Mbabuike, shortly after the former left City College in 1989, that Prof. Achebe considered me to be one of the most formidable up-and-coming writers of my generation, and one whose literary output needed to be studiously and sedulously followed.

Personally, I don't believe that I ever quite became the kind of writer that Prof. Achebe evidently had in mind. Nonetheless, it was these kinds of kudos that fired up my imagination and passion to write as much and as well as I could. There are, of course, other mentors and influences, including my own deceased father, that I could recall and write about right now, but for temporal strictures.

Anyway, my dear young man, I hope that I have at least partially sated a bit of your curiosity about my literary production and productivity. We all, by and large, aspire to become significant and useful to others often younger and less experienced than ourselves. That is one of the down payments we are obliged to make for being endowed by Divine Providence with whatever talents or remarkable skills we may be deemed to generously possess.

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