Items

• A poet in arms (guns, sub-machine 9mm, 1007)

  [Full Text]: "The 20th century has been sadly short of poets doubling as men of action; the passion of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound was confined to the literary fringe of revoution, and only the poets of the Irish and Spanish Republics, Patrick Pearse, and Garcia Lorca, seem fit to be considered in the same breath as Goethe and Byron. Last week's Insight story on running illicit arms to Nigeria ("Gun-running via Birminham") has, however, produced a contemporary contender for the role, a distinguished Nigerian poet, Christopher Okigbo. Okigbo, a member of the beleagured Ibo tribe from Eastern Nigeria, planned the deal with a French ex-policeman, Paul Favier to transport 1,007 sub-machine guns to defend the Ibo against the ravages of the Hausa tribesmen from Northern Nigeria. After a short stay in Geneva, where the negotiations with Favier took place, Okigbo flew to Rotterdam shortly before an ancient DC 4 took off on its ill-fated flight. Indeed, he was due to travel with the aircraft, but fortuitously changed his mind at the last moment. When the aircraft crashed in Cameroun just north of the Nigerian border two days later, a suitcase and some books belonging to Okigbo were found among the wreckage. CLASSICAL SCHOLAR. Born in 1932, Okigbo was educated at the Ibadan University where he was a classical scholar. After graduation, he became private secretary to the Nigerian Minister of Research and Information, but two years later he left to teach, and eventually represented the Cambridge University Press in West Africa. His poetry, as yet, shows no signs of political commitment. Although in one of his T. S. Eliot-inspired works the refrain reads: "& the mortor is not yet dry..."; it refers, prosaically, to construction material not weapons of war. But Okigbo has during the last month gathered the raw material for what could, if he writes it, be the first epic poem about an illicit arms deal."
• A popular uprising

  There are several reasons for writing a novel about Haitian revolution of 1791-1803. Unlike the revolutions of the sort Tom Paine called "little more than a change of persons," the Haitian revolution was of indisputable importance: the only successful revolution in history," according to C.L.R. James.