Chinweizu Ibekwe

Chinweizu is a Nigerian critic, poet, and journalist. Though he has identified himself and is known simply as Chinweizu, he was born Chinweizu Ibekwe at Eluoma in Isuikwuato in the part of Eastern Region that is known today as Abia State. He was educated at Government Secondary School, Afikpo, and later attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While studying in the United States during the Black Power movement, Chinweizu became influenced by the philosophy of the Black Arts Movement. He is commonly associated with Black orientalism.

Background

He enrolled for a Ph.D. at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, under the supervision of political scientist Claude E. Welch, Jr. Chinweizu apparently had a disagreement with his dissertation committee and walked away with his manuscript, which he got published as The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite by Random House in 1975. He took the book to SUNY, Buffalo, where he demanded, and was promptly awarded, his Ph.D. in 1976, one year after he had published the dissertation. Thus, the publication settled his disagreement with his advisers in his favour.

Chinweizu started teaching overseas, at MIT and San Jose State University. He had returned to Nigeria by the early 1980s, working over the years as a columnist for various newspapers in the country and also working to promote Black orientalism in Pan-Africanism. In Nigeria, he became a literary critic, attacking what he saw as the elitism of some Nigerian authors, particularly Wole Soyinka. One of Chinweizu's works is Anatomy of Female Power, in which he discusses gender relations.

Chinweizu has argued that the Arab colonization and Islamization of Africa is no different from European imperialism. The violent conquests, forced conversions and slavery perpetrated by European Christians were also perpetrated by Arab Muslims. In fact, the colonization and enslavement of Africa by Arabs began before the Europeans and continues to this day in Sudan, Mauritania and other countries in the Sahel region. Recently he published a comparative digest that shows the parallel history of European and Arab atrocities against indigenous Africans. He has been critical of the popular illusion that Islam is free of slavery and racism. Islam and Arabian culture are just as much foreign invasive forces as Christianity and European culture.

Selected bibliography

• The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite, Random House, 1975
• Energy Crisis and other poems , Nok Publishers, 1978
• Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, Vol. 1: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics (with Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike), Howard University Press, 1983
• Invocations and admonitions: 49 poems and a triptych of parables, Pero Press, 1986
• Decolonising the African Mind, 1987
• editor, Voices from Twentieth Century Africa: Griots and Towncriers, Faber and Faber, 1989
• Anatomy of Female Power: A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy, Sundoor, 1990

See also

• Anti-feminism

References

• Simon Gikandi, Encyclopedia of African Literature, Routledge, 2002.

External links

• "Chinweizu corner", House of Knowledge.
• "Afrocentric Scholar Chinweizu Dishes Some Hard Truths About Nigeria And Africa - Chinweizu in Conversation with James Eze". Nairaland Forum