Seven Amazing Days [An African in British Guiana]
[...] In the late summer of 1950, through the efforts of Dr. Claude H. Denbow of Georgetown, president of the League, the Hon. John Carter, Secretary, and other League officials and various individuals in New York, it was hoped to arrange for the visit to British Guiana of the young West African chieftain, Eze A. Ogueri II, from Obibi-Ezena, Owerri Province, Nigeria. Eze had recently graduated from Adelphi College in New York City, and was about to enter Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. A young man, just entering the twenties, he had been brought up in Eastern Nigeria by his old grandfather, Ogueri Nwokoro I, late Paramount Chieftain of Obibi-Ezena, one of the most famous traditional Ibo rulers of Oratta Owerri. Eze had attended St. Barth’s School, Enugu, and then a leading Nigerian preparatory school called Umuahia Government College, as a government scholar. Later he had achieved much notice in Port Harcourt and Eastern Nigeria as an ambitious, hardworking “cub reporter,” as special correspondent for the Associated Newspapers of Nigeria (Zik Press) and as a correspondent and commentator for a local radio station. As a student in the United States at Adelphi College he had been much in the public eye through speeches, interviews, radio, newsreels, and television. He was about to enter Harvard University for graduate study in political science.
Eze satisfied the most extravagant hopes of the League leaders. First of all, he was an Ibo, a member of that well known “tribal” grouping of loosely associated indigenous states numbering seven million people, who with the million Ibibios occupy the densely settled southeastern section of Nigeria, West Africa. The Ibos, noted among students of Africa for their ambition, energy, and progressive ways, have come to be an important cultural and political force in Nigeria and a symbol of Nigeria’s ambition to become an independent nation.
Equally important, Eze was a member of an ancient family of respected lineage, a family which had always lived on the African continent and had brought him up in the ancient ways of African law and custom. His very name connoted leadership, for the English equivalent of the word “Eze” is “king,” and in addition to having Eze as his given name, he was also the grandson of an Eze and the seventh first son in the latest of many series of first sons going back into the dim past of West African history.This brought him both rank and responsibility. Eventually he, too, would succeed to the spiritual and temporal leadership of the people of his homeland, Obibi-Ezena, a small but populous territory a few miles east of the town of Owerri in Owerri Province. [...]
— League of Colored Peoples (British Guiana) (1954). Seven amazing days in the life of Eze A. Ogueri II. Boston, House of Edinboro. [+]
Eze Anyanwu Ogueri in Jet, April 10, 1958. [+]
