Renowned writer, critic and scholar, Professor Harry Garuba, has died of leukaemia at age 61.
Garuba’s death in Cape Town, South Africa on Friday came two weeks after that of his older brother.
In a statement, the University of Cape Town, where Garuba taught for much of his career, lauded him as ‘a masterful writer and poet…a luminary in the field of African literature and a champion of postcolonial theory and postcolonial literature.”
Garuba, who left Nigeria during the military era, has works under his belts such as his first collection of poems, Shadow & Dream and Other Poems.
He published the poems at age 24 while he was a lecturer in English at the University of Ibadan.
His second collection of poems, Animist Chants and Memorials, was published in 2017.
Garuba taught as an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town, among others.
He was also on the editorial board of a defunct Lagos-based daily, The Post Express.
The Akure-born academic earned his Ph.D. in 1988 and composed a work of scholarship, Mask and Meaning in Black Drama: Africa and the Diaspora, illustrating his groundbreaking thesis on genre and technique in African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American drama with a comparative study of the plays of Wole Soyinka, St Lucian Derek Walcott and the American, Amiri Baraka.
From 1981, he taught at Ibadan for over 15 years before migrating to South Africa in 1998, first teaching English at the University of Zululand and, from 2001, teaching English and African studies at the University of Cape Town.
Garuba is survived by his wife, Zazi; son, Ruona (20); daughter, Zukina (14); mother and other relatives.
