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, and was educated at Government Secondary School, Afikpo. He later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for college education. While studying in America, during the civil rights era, Chinweizu became influenced by the philosophy of a 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.[1] 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 advisors in his favor.

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.

References

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

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Name	Ibekwe, Chinweizu
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