University era, Ensanche de Bilbao, between branches, weak light from a second-hand bookstore. The most marginal: Contemporary African poets (in Spanish, Biblioteca Jucar). For me, for many years, like a beacon. Agostinho Neto, Noemia de Souza, Wole Soyinka, David Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara… and the span of a drum above the mines of all beasts: Christopher Ifecandu Okigbo. Born in 1932 in Ojoto, Nigeria, in the Igbo region. Neither Nigeria, nor Cameroon, nor Benini, nor any colonization that would have belonged to it (nor the Basque Autonomous Community, let us say so, by the way), and that is why its people are not political maps, but forests, sacred places and plain waters: “Mom Idoto, I am naked / standing before you / in front of your aqueous presence,/ I, this neighbor /// the green bean of oil lying on a tree/ wandering on your fable”. Not in vain, Christopher Okigbo was killed in 1967 in the fight for Biafra during the war against Nigeria.

Karmen Irizar Segurola has translated into the poet. That is, it has done the most difficult thing; it has brought to the Basque Country the telluric force of Okigbo in a correct and true way. I insist, I have been reheated by ancient legends, because this book contains the purity of African poetry and the infinity of the heavens, and God gives them, remembering that we are nothing in relation to the sweat of the seasons and of the plants. We, the animals, have the pen to write. Christopher Okigbo invented a drum to talk to the sprouts, although he did it in English (also igboera, in the area): “Magical birds the miracle in feathers…”.

Trapped between Eurocentrism and roots, Okigbo is another example of the long way Africa is going. Elegy for Alto (“Eresia for Alto”) was your Hil-Buruko will and they still sing in their village: “Here are the politicians in this iron dance of the generators, of the mortars…”.

In the second-hand bookstore, therefore, what took me to that corner, to the corner of the corner? They could be voices of the African continent that has not yet spoken the last word. Or, if not, the big delta frogs, woe! ei!, ilargi min.