Ogaga Ifowodo, a poet, was one of the few fire brand political activists, working with the Civil Liberties Organization; a human rights activist group which gave the dictatorial regime of successive military governments, especially that of Nigeria's maximum tyrant, General Sani Abacha, the worst fight of their lives.

Trained as a lawyer, the poet, Ogaga, is also one of the most engaging and representative of contemporary Nigerian poets. Based now in the United States of America, where he had finished an MFA degree in Creative Writing; he is now enrolled for a doctoral programme. In this e-chat with MCPHILIPS NWACHUKWU, the activist-poet, Ifowodo, relieves his mind on the events of the past, where he played a significant role, and as well takes us into that world. Excerpts:

YOU trained as a lawyer and veered off to poetry, and became very popular in political activism. What is your story? And how do these three variables interface and influence one another?

Well, that, in short, is the story! But perhaps I should spend a moment to reverse the order slightly and talk a bit about one aspect of the question. On the contrary, I veered off poetry to law, rather than the other way around! You see, I wrote my first poem in my fourth form at the Federal Government College, Warri. I was a boarding student, and one evening at the dinning hall table, a sixth former (our table captain!), Uyi Worghiren (now a practising lawyer in Lagos), had turned to me and asked: "Why don't you write a poem for our House (Independence House) to enter for the Festival of Arts and Culture? Back then, when the plague had not completely overrun our educational system, we had our own mini-FESTAC. To cut to the chase, the poem I wrote jointly won for our House the first prize in the poetry category and I was required to recite it to the entire school in the Assembly Hall, which, going by the student population of slightly over 900 then, must be the largest audience I have yet read to.

Law books

While in the university, I read my law books only when absolutely necessary; I kept greater and happier company with literature, and attended as many ANA conferences as possible from 1987, including the defunct 1989 ICALEL (International Conference on African Literature and the English Language) then hosted by the University of Calabar, with Professor Ernest Emenyonu as the driving force (if I recall properly). I can never tire of recalling how, once, when I had upped and left Benin City to attend a reading of the Committee for the Advancement of New Authors, then hosted by Naiwu Osahon, Chinweizu, Theo Vincent and T. C. Nwosu at Osahon's Come Chop restaurant at Apapa. Odia had told me pointedly that if I ever again left my law studies for such "foolishness" (a favourite word of Odia's), I should not bother to knock on his door as he would not host me. Or when he returned from his editorial board duties at The Guardian one evening to find me lost in the streets of Moscow as I turned the pages of War and Peace for what must have been the third day in a row and he expressed his concern thus: "Young man, I never see you reading a law book in this house. If you don't finish that law degree, you will never write another poem."

Well, I had finished the degree then, it was the call to the bar certificate designated as B.L (Barrister at Law) that he meant: I was staying in his house while fighting the denial of my admission to the Law School at the time; I was later admitted a month to the Bar exams. I should add that I completed two collections between the university, Law school and National Youth Service, choosing wisely (I think) to publish only one of the two. So, clearly, I veered off poetry to law, and now I'm back fully. As to how law, poetry and activism influence one another, I guess it will suffice for me to repeat the cliché that all is grist to the mill of the writer.

It is nice that despite critics' feelings, your new collection, Madiba, won the poetry prize at the just concluded ANA convention in Makurdi. Can you lead us into the world of Madiba?

But just who are these critics? And is theirs merely feelings, or well-thought out criticism? To the best of my knowledge, there have been only two reviews of Madiba in Nigeria, with one of them published after the prize had been announced, and I did not see this claim in either of them. Where have these critics published their learned opinions? But this needn't detain us. Madiba is my attempt to exorcise the sense of failure, of hopelessness and despair that seems to define my generation; a generation grievously marked by the terror of a shooting war and the continuing violence of our governments' undeclared low intensity war against the citizenry; a generation that I describe in one of the poems as "stillborn." It is also my attempt to do something different from Homeland from the point of view of experiments with form, including of course, questions of tone and voice. Above all, I wanted to do something ambitious, to challenge myself in the little matters of writing which, quite frankly, determine the good poem from the bad, as in any writing for that matter.

Why the title, Madiba? At least we know that it is the name of reverence for Nelson Mandela, the pre-eminent figure in the South African struggle to end apartheid. To what extent does Mandela represent your conception of the struggle for democracy in Nigeria and a celebration of the imagination?

There is a little history behind my fascination with South Africa, for as you will recall, the second part of Homeland is almost entirely devoted to South Africa. In fact, the metaphor of a barren, unsustainable homeland is taken from the homelands of apartheid South Africa - those cynical strategies of autonomous and separate governments by which the apartheid regime sought to answer the demand for a democratically elected government. It seemed to me in that acute moment of despair in 1992 when I wrote the title-giving poem that Nigeria was no better than a South African homeland government. Then, as secretary-general of the Student Union at the University of Benin, I took over a secretariat named after Nelson Mandela. Each time I wrote on union stationery, I saw at the head of the sheet, "Nelson Mandela Secretariat." What is more, I belonged to a study group, first called the League of Patriotic Students, but which because it was always the first point of call for a list of students to be rusticated whenever there had been a major protest, had to be renamed the Cultural Awareness Club.

Item on the agenda

At our meetings, "the current situation in Southern Africa" was a permanent item on the agenda, and this I believe further ingrained that country's struggles in my consciousness. And I suppose it was more like taking a trip to one's kin's distant town, not for temporary respite from the maddening situation at home, but for inspiration for the song with which to interrogate that troubling (common) reality. But I suppose the more immediate and conscious reason for the title-poem is my desire to pay tribute to a struggle that the entire black race was necessarily a part of. By so doing, I hoped to give poetic expression to the kind of leadership informed and driven by love and sacrifice that is so foreign to Nigeria. Mandela's imagination - which is the collective imagination and vision of the South African struggle at its best - was nothing if not poetic, and I wanted to see how far I could give it a personal translation into verse.

Is there a kind of organic relationship or discontinuity between Madiba and your previous award-winning collection, Homeland & Other Poems?

Thematically, I believe it is possible to trace such a relationship, given what I have just said. The only discontinuity would be the more conscious attention to craft what I hope is evident in Madiba. I worried more about questions of diction and the speaking voice, versification, line ends, and word choice. Also, I played, and enjoyed playing, a bit more.

Tell us about the recent celebration which PEN Nigeria held for you and other writers in Lagos.

You should be telling me about it - I'm an ocean and thousands of kilometres away! And I'm hearing about it for the first time. When was it? I had no notice of the event, but that is no matter; any occasion for getting writers together for a celebration of the word is in my view, sufficient in itself.

What other new things are you doing in writing, law and activism?

I spent eight continuous years in human rights activism, not counting my university days up to youth service; so when I was going back to school, it was clear to me that activism would have to take a back seat. I felt I had much ground to gain, especially as I was seeking to enter a field in which I had no formal training. Moreover, it is really difficult being an activist abroad when you are in a school and town without a sizable Nigerian presence, more so if you are used to working within an organisation. That said, graduate school in any prestigious university in the US - and I believe wherever education is taken seriously (which is probably everywhere other than Nigeria) - seems to have been designed to milk just about every minute of your waking time. Regarding law, I should hope that I would never have to think of legal practice. Certainly, I would not be pursuing a Ph.D in literature if somehow I could persuade myself that the law office or courtroom is where I belong.

Gani Fawehinmi once told me that he didn't think going to court every morning to bow and reiterate "My Lord" and "My learned friend" were what I was cut out for, but please note that this is no put down of legal practice; Gani himself has not burnt his wig and gown! As you know, Gani believes he has something of the gift of prophetic utterance, and I sincerely hope he's right! If I have to return to law, then that can only mean a failed career as a writer, and I'm sure you do not wish me that! As regards new work, I have completed a long one-poem book in five parts on the Niger-Delta, which I call The Oil Lamp. I intend to publish it with the four-part, far shorter poem, "The Agonist (for Ken Saro-Wiwa & the Ogoni 8)" published in The Massachusetts Review last year. I have also done a third of a fourth collection, and but for the distraction of the Ph.D, would have advanced it to near completion by now. I prefer not to speak about two other works-in-progress since I have dinned about one of them for too long and yet for reasons not entirely of my making, have been unable to get it to where it ought to be by now. The other is an attempt to challenge myself in a genre I'm not known for and I would much rather see how the results look to my own eyes before I dare let out a word about it!