In one of life’s strangest ironies, I find myself bereft of words. Many openings have jumped into my head, and as soon as they come, I find myself incapable of wrapping my thoughts around them. I have tried simple words, simple lines, verses of poetry, and none gives the satisfying ring of authority or verve that, I believe, can give my father, Okechi Amu-Nnadi, the honour that he so richly deserves.

I am writing this two weeks to his interment, finding excuses, reaching for words, having just read Charles Anekwe’s Tribute. Tears in my eyes. Two weeks and I still can’t write an epitaph to my father. People tell me how so much like him I am; he seemed to have extended himself in me, as indeed in all his children, including the little patch of hair we both shared on our chest that my mother always teased us about. And now I find that perhaps it is tough to say goodbye to oneself.

When I first began, the first lines of what may have sounded as a tribute to perhaps the greatest man I know read: My father died the same way he lived. Simply, without affectation. He died sitting down on his favourite chair, in his little room in the house he built many years ago, attended to only by the little girl who seemed to have suspended her own pursuits to live with my father and care for him…

Yet, as inspiring as those words felt, I have found it utterly difficult to fully offer what must be a fitting commentary. I, journalist, writer, poet laureate, speechwriter to the high and mighty (under such exacting circumstances too), lack words to properly put in perspective my impressions on my father, alive and dead. And then I understood: Dying appears an unbecoming tribute to a man whose memory outlived his age: brilliant in his final days as he was the first moments I began to appreciate his many cerebral gifts.

Indeed, my father lived without being entrapped by ostentation, by the love and pursuit of money, fame and their trappings. He was too concerned about giving of himself. The other day Charles said that he gave more of himself to others than he gave to his family. That the sense of loss lies more with the strangers he made his extended family. But I beg to disagree: my father had enough to give everyone. Not material things, because when he retired from service, he went home to our town, Aku, to the only place where he owned a house. He gave learning, principles, courage and forbearance.

In all his years, my father never took a bribe. He never received. He never gave. I remember being a “victim” of his principles. In 1981, having scored 282 in JAMB to study Mass Communication at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, – a school in which he had many influential friends and a department in which a former teacher from Community Secondary School, Nnobi, Anambra State, (Dr. Idemmili) was a senior lecturer, in a town in which he was something of a celebrity (many of his teachers were wives of important lecturers), – I had hoped that he could “press a few buttons” and facilitate my admission.

And why not? Many of my friends were getting admitted with less flattering scores. But my father thought otherwise. Not him the short cuts. He made it clear that he would not speak to anyone on my behalf, because he would not do any such favours to anyone. As he told me, his father did not speak to anyone on his behalf and I should only read harder to get into university the next year. I did. And some of the defining attributes I acquired – or perhaps which became sharpened –, the mental strengths that I was inspired to discover by some of my classmates, that helped me graduate as head of the class and got me my first job without applying; the broadmindedness, the questioning spirit, the hard work, the poetry, I may never have gotten if I had been admitted a year earlier.

I remember growing up with an organ in the house and to the sound of my father playing hymns in the evenings. He played in every church he worshipped and made some evenings something of an opera for his family and visitors. And towards the end of his service, he got for St. Teresa’s College, Nsukka, a piano that he played often. The first grand piano he had unfettered access to, my father loved that equipment, with its deep brown mahogany wood and shining keys, with its rich sound and mellifluous melody.

Yet, I remember his diligent refusal, even though that piano was in our house for many years and could easily have been presumed to be ours, to take it with him when he retired. When, as we left, he closed it for the last time, there was a finality to that gesture, as well as an affirmation of his goodness. He was like a lover who had to let go to attain spiritual upliftment. My father would not leave the Principal’s Quarters with anything more than what he rightly owned. He leaves now as simply as he lived.

Indeed, such was his life. And, I believe, such is his life after. His humility knew no bounds. His sense of propriety was astounding. His beliefs survived every challenge, every vicissitude, every promotion and every loss. When he lost his two vehicles during the war, he never bemoaned his fate. Instead, he believed in God’s capacity to heal and replenish. As he would always tell you: The Lord works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Today, I know how true that is.

I have learnt more about my father in death than I knew about him, living with him, sharing many stories and anecdotes, making him happy, disappointing him, bonding in ways I didn’t quite understand until now. I knew my father was the first university graduate from the Old Nsukka Province, having left Ibadan in 1952 with a degree in Physics & Pure/Applied Mathematics. That I got from outsiders, because he would never speak about his accomplishments, except to teach about the rewards of hard work. I didn’t know that his father, my grandfather, received a monthly allowance from the colonial government just so that his son, Okechi Amu-Nnadi, would go to school, instead of the farm.

To support his education, his father denied himself an ozo title, prized and honoured in Igbo land, so my father would finish his studies. When years later he received his ozo title, the name he chose was Nnachiri, he whom his father has crowned. Not ochendo, not onwa, not any self prevaricating name. A simple honour, not to himself but his father. It became our name for him, not Papa, but Nnachiri Nweze. His father had crowned him with his sacrifices and as I look back I know he did right the same for us.

Now I know that my father was the first among the seven people from West Africa who were awarded university scholarship based on their high performance in the entrance examination. Indeed, he had the best result and was admitted in the University College, Ibadan, to study Physics and Pure/Applied Mathematics. He did not tell us. It is only part of the telling of his remarkable story of excellence. I was also informed that my father was once president of the student’s union at the University College, Ibadan, and that the celebrated writer, Chinua Achebe was his secretary. He was never one to flaunt his good deeds and credentials.

Now I know that people he never knew, missionaries living in far-away Norfolk, England, paid his tuition at Dennis Memorial Grammar School, Onitsha, and he lived his life almost replicating that in lives of others, as indigent as he was as a student. He paid for more peoples’ tuition than we, his children, know. The other day, one of his students from Western Boys High School, Benin, Professor Joseph Aghenta, came to visit, overjoyed to know that my father, his mentor, was still alive. And he told of how, when his parents couldn’t pay his tuition, and he was about to drop out of school, brilliant as he was, my father took care of that.

The other day I heard that in his first year, Mr. Ken Calebs Olumhese, proprietor of the popular Niteshift, Lagos, lived in our house (where I was born years later) because he was just nine and was therefore too small to fend for himself. Such was my father: his heart and compassion. Years later when I met Ken Calebs Olumhese at his club in Ikeja as a guest, he asked me, having been introduced as an Amu-Nnadi, if I knew Okechi Amu-Nnadi. I answered in the affirmative, and that he was my father. He told me how kind my father was to him and for all the years I went to Niteshift while I lived in Lagos I never paid for anything.

Now I know that he was an honorary citizen and Ambassador of Goodwill of Orange City, in New Jersey, United States of America, decorated by the Mayor himself. He never spoke about it.

Now I know that the Enugu State University of Technology (ESUT) gave him an honorary doctorate degree and only his brilliant letter of acceptance tells us part of the story. He never used that title.

I remember my frustration when he would reject every other award he was offered that appeared to massage the ego. He was offered chieftaincy titles, knighthoods and he rejected them all. Now I know that the only position he was proud to accept was a Vice-President of Nigerian Red Cross, in the old Anambra State, a role of which he was immensely proud. Giving meant more to Okechi Amu-Nnadi than receiving. Now I know he donated his entire building materials, for his proposed first house, to our town’s primary school so they could build a classroom block for the children. Their education was more important than his own “selfish” desires to have a roof over his head.

Now I know that in 1983, the late Chief C. C. Onoh, as Governor of old Anambra State, had offered him an appointment as one of the Commissioners in his new cabinet. My father turned it down, declaring that he was no politician. Not to be outdone, Chief Onoh promoted him to Principal Special Class, on the highest grade of service. Nothing like that had happened before in civil service. But then, who was like Okechi Amu-Nnadi?

Above all, now I know that in spite of my accomplishments, modest though they may be, I can never hold a light to my father. He was astounding beyond words; profound beyond description. And no laurels meant more to him than those achieved in the classroom, or through hard work.

When my first collection of poems, ‘the fire within’, won the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize for Poetry in 2002, I remember he was more concerned that I wrote only with his name: amu nnadi. No Chijioke, no capitals, no punctuations. If the prize meant something to him, and I believe it did, he didn’t dwell on it. He asked me: what would your brothers say by you appropriating the family name?

He insisted that I add my own name, to assert my independence and identity. I couldn’t. How can I? Poetry bears the spirit of the eternal. All art outlives us, just as our family names. Just as amu nnadi, the man and the name. He didn’t know it wasn’t a name for me to appropriate. It was a name that transcends us all, that stands for more than its literary meaning and the words they bear. It is a name that he gave us (a name no family in the world bears except all who bear his blood); a name that defines him, profound and immortal. My father was a work of art. A spirit for all ages.

In appreciating and celebrating my father in ‘the fire within’, I had written: “to my father, Okechi Amu-Nnadi, who gave me a name I return untarnished. I will keep the one that’s not important to mention here. Perhaps when the dawn sun comes down those hills, it is my own name seeking to bring home some lustre.”

When the second collection of poems, ‘pilgrim’s passage’, was due to be published in 2005, I wrote to him: “Okechi Amu-Nnadi, my father under whose shadow the pilgrim is content to dwell.”

To such a man, any epitaph becomes hollow, a mindless ritual, something of a lie. Final words mean nothing. Even for a man, as I, who lives by words.

Addendum:

I found out years after this tribute was first published that as a student of Western Boys High School, the celebrated musician, Sir Victor Uwaifo, received his early mentorship from my father, who was his principal. Once, my father, in celebrating Sir Victor Uwaifo’s achievement in music, spoke, with good humour, about how Uwaifo loved music more than his books and excelled in high jump as well. But Okechi Amu-Nnadi, as humble as he was, never told us that he bought the very first guitar that Sir Victor Uwaifo owned. I found out that later. And I also found out that my father’s portrait hangs in Victor Uwaifo’s private gallery.

Years after his passing, I have had the special privilege of writing two poems, which were published in ‘through the window of a sandcastle’ (Origami, 2013), in celebration of my father(reproduced below):

wreaths
okechi

i lay wreaths on the tombstone of our life
it is all i do now
concussed by memory and many unfinished
poems
i write the twisted stem of loss
sad letters of shuffling leaves
blown hither, thither in a year

your hymns echo in my head
make my tongue heavy
blessed assurance, jesus is mine
not ours,
is not of hope but starvation
forgotten notes stalk my heart
tears escape like bats from one darkness
overshadowing another

leaves fall from grace
fall from sturdy branches of stunted hopes
fall from eyes, bitter and arid
and mark our lawns with dying promises
it is so finite, so total
foreboding
just like this

we mark our days with those leaves
bound together in the song of our lives
they brown, twisting
shriveling
dying
just like this

every leaf broken dies
every stem broken dies
every fruit broken dies
every pen dries up
like ase, spring of childhood
and dies

but your hymn
stubborn and finite
lives
humming like my mind
with this

ihe juru onu

port harcourt rains wash away my face
they are more flood than tears
and i hold flotsam of shared moments
like a paddle
thinking, my father was more alive
than all the waters of rivers

i am stumped like the stump of
a fallen tree
and all the remains of our years
all our lives gather round me
filtering tears, wailings
and many unspoken tributes

openings jump into my gecko head
i cannot wrap myself around them
seeing i dangle from a balcony
simple words evade me
as meteors a darkening sky
verses evade my universe

i cannot give you father
ozo okechi amu nnadi
ihe juru onu adigi ntagbute
nna chiri nweze
nwa eze oha ogota elemu
a fitting goodbye

you are too tall, too rich
you are all the palms of the world
you fill my mouth, tough roasted meat
you fill my cry

you are an elephant
you are a house
i bite into you in vain
igwurube oru miiii
i cannot hold all of you

a star, i cannot leave your sky
a fish, i cannot leave your river
a tree, i cannot leave your soil
a bird, i cannot fly and not return
to your nest, nwa eze oha ogota

you are all the stars
you are all the rivers
you are all the dunes, hunchbacked and resolute
you gather all the grains of life
and all the floods cannot wash you away
all the words cannot hold you

you are eternal my father
one cannot put eternity in a simple word
one cannot mesmerise the stars with a simple smile
a cloud cannot hold on to tears
a house cannot hold a flood
igara cannot hold all the words of grief
odo achi knows all the secrets of life

okechi amu nnadi
nna chiri nweze
igwurube oru miiii
nwa eze oha ogota
my goodbye returns to me
my mouth floods with words of grief
and i cannot chew you

ihe juru onu
you are all the words of life
you are all the words of life, my father
ihe juru onu na adigi ntagbute
okechi amu nnadi
nwa eze oha ogota elemu
you are all the words of life

I also once published a quote on my status which stated: “The beautiful thing about great men who die is that they live with us.”

There is no deeper truth than this with Okechi Amu-Nnadi. He preserved his name better than I have. He was, and remains, a better man than I. A better man than most. A beautiful human.