Gabriel Okara
Quick answer: Gabriel Okara carried Ijaw rhythm and river imagery into English verse. Learn the Nigerian pioneer's two-worlds technique and use it in your poems.
Long before African poetry in English had a canon, Gabriel Okara was quietly writing it. Born in 1921 in Bumoundi, in the Ijaw country of the Niger Delta, Okara trained as a bookbinder and taught himself poetry, and in 1953 his poem 'The Call of the River Nun' won an award at the Nigerian Festival of Arts. Critics often name him the first significant English-language modernist poet of Anglophone Africa.
His method was singular: he thought in Ijaw and translated the shapes of that language into English, keeping its rhythms, repetitions and river-world imagery. The result is verse that reads simply, sounds like water and drums, and carries the collision of two civilisations inside a single stanza.
Elder statesman of Nigerian letters
Okara's fame rests on a modest, potent body of work. His experimental novel The Voice (1964) pushed the translation method to its limit, bending English syntax to Ijaw patterns. His collection The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) shared the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and late books arrived in his nineties before his death in 2019.
He lived through Nigeria's whole modern history, working in publishing and information services, surviving the Biafran war during which he travelled abroad with Chinua Achebe to speak for the Biafran cause. Achebe and generations of Delta poets acknowledged him as the source of a tradition.
Signature moves
Okara's most anthologised poems demonstrate four repeatable techniques.
What you can learn from him
Build a poem on two sound-worlds from your own life, the temple bell and the traffic, the harmonium and the ringtone, presenting each with full sensory respect and ending in the unresolved space between. Refusing to resolve is the hard, honest part.
If you carry more than one language, translate your other tongue's syntax literally into English for a stanza and see what patterns survive; that is Okara's laboratory. And practise paddle-stroke repetition: pick one phrase and let it return four times at irregular intervals, binding the poem the way a refrain binds a work song.
Where to start reading
Read 'Piano and Drums', 'Once Upon a Time', 'You Laughed and Laughed and Laughed' and 'The Call of the River Nun', all widely anthologised. The Fisherman's Invocation (1978) is the essential collection, and his Collected Poems appeared in 2016 in the African Poetry Book series. The Voice makes a fascinating companion for anyone interested in linguistic transplantation.
What poets can take from this
- Stage two sound-worlds in one poem and refuse to pick a winner.
- Translate your mother tongue's word order into English and keep what sings.
- Let one local river or road carry your poem's metaphysics.
- Use repetition at irregular intervals, like paddle strokes, not clockwork.
- Write social criticism through a child's uncorrected eyes.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which two kinds of music from your life play at once, one inherited, one adopted. Give each its own stanza of full sensory detail, then end with the speaker standing between them, unresolved.
Questions
What is Gabriel Okara's most famous poem?
'Piano and Drums' and 'Once Upon a Time' are his most anthologised works, both exploring the collision between African tradition and Western modernity through sound and gesture.
Why is Okara important to African poetry?
He was arguably the first African poet writing in English to translate an indigenous language's rhythms and worldview into modernist verse, opening a path that later Nigerian writers acknowledged and followed.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.