Released: July 15, 2017
Profession: Novelist, Children’s Literature Writer, Playwright, Sociologist, Educator, Essayist, Womanist. Awards: Jock Campbell Award for The Slave Girl in 1978. Member, British Home Secretary’s Advisory Council on Race, in the New Statesman magazine in 1979. Listed among 20 Best Young British Novelists, alongside such rising stars as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie in Granta magazine in 1983. Honorary Doctorate in Literature from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1992. Listed among 50 Black and Asian Writers at the British Library for contributions to contemporary British Literature in 2004. Order of the British Empire (OBE) for literature in 2005.
Ojukwu was born on 4th November 1933 at Zungeru in Northern Nigeria to Sir Louis Phillippe Odumegwu Ojukwu, a very successful businessman from Nnewi in south-eastern Nigeria. He began his educational career in Lagos, the hub of political and intellectual activity in colonial Nigeria. At 13, his father sent him to England to study, first at Epsom College, in Surrey and later Lincoln College, Oxford University (from 1952 to 1955.) He earned a Masters degree in history from Oxford at a time of burgeoning African nationalism. Ojukwu remained “Nigeria’s most famous Oxford graduate.”
The Igbo Studies Association (ISA) Endowment Committee was authorized at the November 14, 2008 ISA meeting in Chicago, upon acceptance of Prof. Ernest Uwazie’s proposal, to explore the feasibility of establishing a long-term endowment. The committee recommends that the purpose of the endowment would be to support an Igbo Studies Center (or Institute) at a U.S. college or university with the capacity (by personnel and infrastructure) to sponsor it. Further, the committee recommends that the envisioned Igbo Studies Center will be an affiliate of ISA.
Mandela was an exemplary servant leader who put his life and family on the line for all the oppressed peoples of South Africa. He was a peacemaker who never lost sight of what is important for all concerned. He was an eternal optimist who lived out the conviction that, “If people can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.” Despite his personal sufferings, Mandela raised the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation to a new level, an enduring legacy for our generation and indeed future generation.