In dwelling on the subject of Ana Bendel – as I am now doing – I cannot but acknowledge here – as I had done – in a tiny manner – the role Professor Sonny Afwhefeada played in poking my mind to work on the idea. It really was a gentle nudge from him. Initially, I did not give him the being-ness of his jab, his gentle jab, a perfect thought. But as the days went by I came to the realisation that his pure and gentle challenge to me would soon be being-less and would soon vanish.

Indeed, it would soon assume the formless-ness of formless things – mud, sawdust, lines in the wind, and so on. How many of us are acquainted with a real problem and the theory of a real problem? At first glance it was not apparent to me that Sonny Awhefeada had suggested to me something so simple but certainly much more difficult than some difficult work.

The bond Professor Sonny Awhefeada and this gleaner and glimpser and glisterer and stirrer share is the bond between a pupil, a student, and his tutor, his teacher, with whom he shares and wrestles with the rich ideas of Truth, Goodness and Fidelity.

As Plato might want us to see, and believe and accept them, these very rich, very fascinating and very high ideas “shape all human knowledge, right action, artistic endeavour, and love.” Professor Awhefeada was a very brilliant undergraduate student of mine at the University of Benin for four lively years who proceeded to the University of Ibadan, our premier university, for his Master’s and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in English.

We are always in touch to share ideas and – if need be – to disagree on issues and create problems of interpretation on what we perceive differently.

When the gleaner and glimpser’s reading of Professor Femi Osofisan’s poetry appeared in this column in the not very distant past, he engaged me in telephone conversations of unmistakable liveliness and colourfully creative depth and colourfully creative disagreement. One of the remarkable things he said I should never ever forget to record for posterity lordly and loudly was how ANA Bendel came into being.

His nudge in this wise should not and must not escape my mind. When he learnt of my explicit roles and of those whose shadows flutter no longer in our circle and midst, he introduced into one of our conversations an impulse that reminded me of my mortality.

(In the evening just before dusk of the Saturday, November 2nd’s deep night when winners of the different ANA 2025 prizes were announced, Professor Gbemisola Adeoti, a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and a member of the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, similarly prodded me to do a written record, no matter how slim, of how ANA Bendel came into existence.

We were in the middle of some discussion that compelled me to internalise Dylan Thomas’s remark, to wit; a function of posterity ought to be “to look after itself.” (Somehow ANA Bendel entered my mind and our discussion – unwittingly from me, albeit very briefly).

In the early night of the Convocation dinner everyone in the main hall of the Chinua Achebe International Centre beamed the light of his keen attention toward the beauty of the intense attraction that was fascinatingly hurrying near: the rhetoric and poetics that would provoke a combination of positive and unpositive emotions in the audience once the winners of the respective creations for the ANA 2025 competition(s) were uttered.

Would each created work brought forth in each category of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Criticism have the rich quality of having been brought forth? The emotions this question provoked must have been intensely strong indeed! So I thought as we munched our dinner – in honour of the createdness of each work and the distinguished creator of it.

Now 1983 raced to my mind and memory and to my memory and my mind. ANA Bendel floated in my personal (and our collective) emotions.

Like a mariner’s boat, they floated – in the rhythm of our emotions: Festus Iyayi’s, Odun Balogun’s, Tunde Fatunde’s and mine. The filler of this space that arises and emerges from the createdness of its memory of being was transported to the banquet hall of the University of Benin.

There it was in a splendid early night of stars that Professor Emmanuel Obiechina of the Department of English, University of Nigeria, Nsukka historically announced to a sizeable audience that Femi Osofisan’s play Morountodun had won the Association of Nigerian Authors Award for Drama.

That, as far as the beingness of my memory can recall it, was the only prize that the now late distinguished critic, Professor Obiechina, the chief judge, said ANA awarded. Prof. Chinua Achebe, ANA president was at the event. This rememberer pretty much does not forget that the playwright and dramatist expressed that he was filled with the emotions of surprise when he was named the winner of the prize.

He gave the impression that he was not aware of the fact that his winning play was entered for the historic/historical prize. Some of us thought that he was at the verge of rejecting or declining the prize when he made his very brief speech which culminated in his acceptance of the prize after the then Secretary-General of ANA, Professor Kole Omotoso (now equally late), poked him.

That was then. It was one day (excluding dates of arrival and of departure), of fruitful deliberations that took place at the main auditorium of the University of Benin. The aforementioned banquet hall was where the night’s events happened.

We, four ad hoc ANA Bendel hosts, led by Festus Iyayi, were not short of the high emotions of success that we witnessed in the stars that descended to us.

There was no Convention Dinner. What we had was a kind of cocktail appropriate for the occasion as we watched the gentle ebb of the receding literary night.

Now the rememberer might want to devote his (and the reader’s) attention to the productive memory of the coming into being officially of ANA Bendel – that Chinua Achebe ((and Femi Osofisan) inaugurated at the appointed time.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.