Prof Charles Nnolim

By Nehru Odeh

Professor Charles Nnolim, one of Africa’s foremost literary critics and scholars, is dead. His death came barely a month after the demise of another great African writer, academic and scholar, Professor Ngugi’ Wa Thiong’o.

Though Nnolim’s age at death is not very clear, it is estimated at mid to late eighties. The renowned academic died in Port Harcourt, where he lectured for many years.

Nnolim remains one of the finest as far as literary criticism is concerned.  According to Prof Chijoke Uwasomba of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, who is familiar with Nnolim’s works, he left an impressive imprint that is fascinating and worthy.

Nnolim’s passing is the fall of an iroko, which will definitely be felt in the literary world. Literature exists only because there are literary critics. They give literature life only after they are done with it.

Nnolim is a product of the old Alvan Ikokwu College of Education.  He capped his intellectual height with a PhD from the Catholic University in the United States. He returned to Nigeria, landing at the University of Port Harcourt, in the thriving and tempting atmosphere at the time Nigerian universities were seen as the place to be.

However, it is not immediately clear if he landed before or after Prof Claude Ake, another star who also came in from the United States but through Tanzania.

Still, it didn’t take long before one of his works titled “Achebe and the Source of Arrow of God” put him at loggerheads with Chinua Achebe, whose Arrow of God is considered the first of Achebe’s trilogies.

Nnolim accused Achebe of plagiarizing  his uncle ‘s story in Arrow of God. The near – impossibility of proving the original in social analysis would have made such an allegation a beautiful site for expanding our knowledge of the Igbo imaginative space if his allegation were pursued to a logical conclusion.

Academics like Prof Uwasomba who are familiar with his works, insist he was a scholar with gravitas. That is what most of those who studied and/or encountered literature in the early 1980s would say.

Nnolim’s scholarly interventions include  “Approaches to the African Novel”, “Teaching African Literature Today,. “Literature, Literary Criticism and National Development.”