Mamman Jiya Vatsa was a Nigerian Army brigadier general, a government minister under Muhammadu Buhari's military government, and a poet — and his story is one of the more tragic in Nigerian literary history. Executed in 1986 following a coup trial widely regarded as politically motivated, he left behind a body of poetry that is rarely read today and almost impossible to find in print.
Libation and Other Poems (1981) is the primary document of his literary voice: meditative, formally careful, concerned with history and memory in ways that read differently after his death than they did before it. The book is a reminder that Nigerian literature was always produced in the shadow of state power — and sometimes extinguished by it.
This copy, held at No Parking Lagos, is an invitation to read Vatsa again: as a poet, in his own right.