SALUTE TO A COLLEAGUE

BEING A CITATION ON

PROFESSOR MICHAEL JOSEPH CHUKWUDALU ECHERUO,

B.A. (LONDON), M.A. Ph.D. (CORNELL),

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN

Your Honour, The Deputy- Governor, My Lord Chief Judge, Honourable Commissioners, Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen.

Our Lecturer today needs no introduction either here, or indeed any- where the English Language and its Literature are studied and appreciated. If anybody needed introducing, it is perhaps the present speaker. However, the form after which the Ahịajọkụ Lecture is modeled requires that the delivery of each lecture be preceded by the reading of a citation on the lecturer. On this occasion I suppose the idea is not so much to introduce the lecturer to his audience, but to share in the just celebration of his eminence and achievements as a scholar. And 1 am glad indeed that I was chosen to prepare and read this citation on Michael Joseph Chukwudalu Echeruo, B.A. Honours English (London) M.A., Ph.D. (Cornell), Professor of English, because I consider it a great honour to have been adjudged capable of appreciating his many contributions to his chosen field which is literature of English expression.

Michael Echeruo was born at Umunumo in the Mbano Local Government Area, Imo State, of a devout catholic family that is also well- rooted in the traditional Igbo sense in being both di-ala and of consistently noble conduct. Thus his father, Chief J.M. Echeruo B.A., Dip. Ed. (London), is not only a Knight of St. Sylvester but also the Ọnụ-Na- Ekwuruọha of Mbanọ and the Igwe Ọkaa-Omee of Ụmụnnumo.

For his education, Michael Echeruo attended some of the most deservedly famous institutions of his time: St. Charles School Ụmụnnumo, Stella Maris College, Port-Harcourt, University College, Ibadan, the University of Oxford (to participate in its Summer School), and Cornell University Ithaca, New York. In his own quiet manner Michael Echeruo has often confessed himself proud that he attended the institutions he did. What he has refused to mention, in keeping with his unboastful character, is that these institutions must now count themselves lucky that they opened their gates to a man who was subsequently to become, and that in record time, perhaps one of the few Africans so far who bear the title and dignity of Professor of English with unquestionable distinction.

Nor did these institutions need to wait till the 1970s to realise, each of them, that in Michael Echeruo it was producing a distinguished alumnus. At the University College, Ibadan, for instance, Michael Echeruo was a College Scholar, a Shell English Scholar and twice Department of English Prizeman. While at Cornell University he won in 1963 the first Prize in the All Africa Poetry Competition. The same year he became a Hoyt Scholar of the University. In 1965 he was admitted to the highly coveted academic orders of Phy Kappa Phy (Social Sciences) and Phy Deta Beta Kappa (Humanities).

Michael Echeruo taught English at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Enugu, at the University of Nsukka, and now teaches English at the University of Ibadan where again he made history, in being the first African Professor to preside over the affairs of the premier Department of English in the Nigerian Universities' system. He is a member of the Nigerian English Studies Association, the Modern Language Association of America, the Shakespeare Association of America, the International Comparative Literature Association and the Founding President, Nigerian Association for African and Comparative Literature. He is on the editorial boards of Conradiana as National Editor for West Africa, of Conch as Associate Editor and of Okike as Poetry Editor. He has examined extensively in English at the degree level - at the Universities of Lagos, Zambia, the Cape Coast and Ife. And currently he is an adviser to the University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi. Michael Echeruo's national and international standing as a scholar is indeed a source of pride and inspiration to his friends.

And the important point is that this international standing derives not just from his ability as a teacher or just from his achievements as an academic statesman concerned with running departments, founding associations of learned men and supporting those founded by others through active and devoted membership. It derives first and foremost from his productivity as a scholar. And this productivity has been marked by happy versatility, rich variety, unfailing originality and incisiveness, as by limpidity of style and cold un-wavering logic. Michael Echeruo is the one practitioner of his craft on the African continent that I know of today who is at home in creative writing and literary criticism, in African Literature, American Literature and English Literature. He is the only one on the continent I know of who has made significant contributions to the study of some of the seminal minds in English and African Literature.

Thus he has contributed to the study of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and to our understanding of Achebe, Okigbo and Ekwensi. One of his latest books, Victorian Lagos (Macmillan 1977), is a work which touches on intellectual history, on colonial sociology and on literature - a work which, more than any other, guarantees him immortality in that field of academic endeavour concerned with the study of the evolution of modern Nigerian culture.

The population of professors in the Nigerian Universities' system has recently experienced an explosion. On the time honoured principle of 'the more the merrier' this surely is a merry thing. Unfortunately academics is not a merry pursuit. What is worse the average Nigerian is not trained to distinguish between professors and professors. For him a professor is either old or young with the young variety being regarded as a kind of freak. However, more subtle minds have made other classifications. The philosopher Bertrand Russel, for instance, would divide professors into three classes viz: those who are "figures of fun", those who are "technically competent but uninteresting" and then those, usually a minority group, whom inquiring minds admire "whole-heartedly and enthusiastically". In Nigeria we appear rich in the first group - perfect figures of fun, Shakespearian Falstaffs totally out of their elements in the academic environment, men who see a professorship as a kind of retirement benefit to be enjoyed or indeed exploited.

Of Bertrand Russel's third group, we have very few indeed. And it is a matter of joy for us that in the front rank of that small group of dedicated intellectual pioneers we have our own 50n and friend, Professor Michael Echeruo. Indeed one can hardly thank the organisers of this lecture sufficiently for their wise decision in picking on Professor Echeruo to launch the series. By so doing they have offered a double opportunity. The first, to Professor Echeruo to perform also here in our local Jerusalem, Owerri, those great intellectual feats which he has per formed times without number in Capernum and beyond. The second, to this audience to have a first hand live experience of that oratory and high voltage reasoning of Professor Echeruo's which usually leave the alert and the inquiring delirious with joy, and their opposite numbers groaning with throbbing headache. I believe we do not have in this august audience any persons in the latter category. However, my prayer for the organisers of the series is that it may be possible for them to find people capable of maintaining, in subsequent lectures, the standard of delivery and the level discuss which Professor Echeruo is going to set today.

Professor Michael Joseph Chukwu dalu Echeruo. You have, in your chosen field, become a source that generates knowledge and enlightenment. Long after that which, to the uncultivated mind, now passes for power and eminence (whether it be the chief's crown or the soldier's bayonet or the rich man's wealth) has disappeared into the limbo of time, your writings will continue to inform, to stimulate and to delight the cultivated in mind. It is for this that we salute you worthy son of a worthy family.



A.E. AFIGBO

(Professor of History)