Chinweizu Ibekwe

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, and he was editor of the Nigerian literary magazine, Okike. Chinweizu's notable intervention on this theme came in the essay "The Decolonization of African Literature" (later expanded into the 1983 book Toward the Decolonization of African Literature), to which Soyinka responded in an essay entitled "Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Transition". Among Chinweizu's other works is Anatomy of Female Power, in which he discusses gender roles, masculinity and feminism. Chinweizu has argued that the Arab colonization and Islamization of Africa is no different from European imperialism. The violent conquests, forced conversions and slavery perpetrated by European Christians were also perpetrated by Arab Muslims. In fact, the colonization and enslavement of Africa by Arabs began before the Europeans and continues to this day in Sudan, Mauritania and other countries in the Sahel region. Recently he published a comparative digest that shows the parallel history of European and Arab atrocities against indigenous Africans. He has been critical of the popular illusion that Islam is free of slavery and racism. Islam and Arabian culture are just as much foreign invasive forces as Christianity and European culture.

Books • The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite, Random House, 1975. • Energy Crisis and other poems, Nok Publishers, 1978 • Toward the Decolonization of African Literature, Vol. 1: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics (with Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike), Howard University Press, 1983. • Invocations and Admonitions: 49 poems and a triptych of parables, Pero Press, 1986. • Decolonising the African Mind, Sundoor, 1987. • Editor, Voices from Twentieth Century Africa: Griots and Towncriers, Faber and Faber, 1989. • Anatomy of Female Power: A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy, Pero, 1990. • The Reconstituted Virgin and Other Satires, Serujtabooks, 2022. ASIN B0BN4Q1FNL (As Maazi Chinweizu) • 432 Centuries of Recorded Science and Technology in Black Africa, Serujtabooks, 2023. B0BWYB96K2 (As Maazi Chinweizu) Essays • "Prodigals, Come Home!" (1973), in Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson, eds, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007..