Tony Okuyeme
Renowned Nigerian poet and dramatist, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo is dead.
The Emeritus Professor of Literature and award-winning writer passed on in the early hours of Tuesday, October 13, his family announced in a statement.
“Prof. J. P. Clark has paddled on to the great beyond in comfort of his wife, children and siblings, around him.
The family appreciates your prayers at this time,” the statement reads in part, adding that other details will be announced later by the family.
Born 6 April, in Kiagbodo, Nigeria, to an Ijaw father and Urhobo mother, Clark, who has also published as J. P. Clark and John Pepper Clark, received his early education at the Native Authority School, Okrika (Ofinibenya-Ama), in Burutu LGA (then Western Ijaw) and the prestigious Government College in Ughelli, and his BA degree in English at the University of Ibadan, where he edited various magazines, including the Beacon and The Horn.
Upon graduation from Ibadan in 1960, he worked as an information officer in the Ministry of Information, in the old Western Region of Nigeria, as features editor of the Daily Express, and as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan.
He served for several years as a professor of English at the University of Lagos, a position from which he retired in 1980. While at the University of Lagos he was co-editor of the literary magazine, Black Orpheus.
Clark’s includes his translation of the Ozidi Saga (1977), an oral literary epic of the Ijaw that in its local setting would normally take seven days to perform, his critical study The Example of Shakespeare (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), in which he articulates his aesthetic views about poetry and drama and his journalistic essays in the Daily Express, Daily Times, and other newspapers.
He is also the author of the controversial America, Their America (Deutsch, 1964; Heinemann African Writers Series No. 50, 1969), a travelogue in which he criticizes American society and its values.
