Ogaga Ifowodo

Ogaga Ifowodo (born May 14, 1966) is a Nigerian lawyer, scholar, poet, columnist/public commentator and human rights activist. He was awarded the 1998 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, given to writers "anywhere in the world who have fought courageously in the face of adversity for the right to freedom of expression". Quotes It’s a chance to prove oneself worthy of the gift of life by doing one’s utmost best to raise children who would be responsible and confident human agents, conscious and conscientious citizens that would hopefully leave the world better than they met it. In a sense, I think it is an opportunity to help shape better versions of oneself. Fatherhood also means to me the joy of rediscovering myself as a child. You don’t have to agree with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke but, as a writer, childhood remains for me an inexhaustible though remote and opaque store of knowledge, that fleeting period of experiencing the world from innocence and then the stumbling exploration of relations with other beings outside the family circle. Parenthood, to use the more embracing word, presents the opportunity of a return to the past, to a less fraught or tainted way of knowing the world. Forty! Life begins at 40, they say, but I didn’t delay deliberately. I guess I became a father just before life and all of its troubles would convince me not to dare to be a father! Actually, I had just begun thinking seriously of getting hitched, a decade after being called to the bar, when I decided to go abroad to ingratiate my long-nurtured desire of studying literature and writing. I don’t recall any specific fears, except perhaps worrying whether I might be able to get my children to know Nigeria and feel any real bond to the country of their father. I met my wife and got married as a doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, upstate New York. And though I knew that I would eventually return to Nigeria after completing my studies and a stint in academia in the United States, I always wondered if it might be too late by then. The real fear I had as a doctoral student just finishing his dissertation was how I would fare in the ensuing job search. Luckily for me, my wife, who graduated from Cornell’s Law School, had a job in a New York law firm; so, I didn’t have to worry about affording diapers, baby food and help with child care. No. I assumed it would be either a boy or a girl! All I wished was that he or she be born healthy. I didn’t even care to find out the sex before birth even though that option was available. For both of them — I have two children, a boy and a girl. I also attended a first parents’ meeting at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York where my first child was born.