Founder of Indigo Distortion and author of ‘Collaborative and Experimental: The Evolution of Afrobeats and Its Current Landscape’ Zainab Kuku, believes any Afrobeats musician that is currently highly-rated is deservedly so: ‘The Nigerian music industry before streaming was really hard, there was no clear structure for distributing music and a lot of our highly rated artists started out in that era. There is nothing overrated about that.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
Growing up, I read a mix of different books. My personal collection mainly consisted of Jacqueline Wilson books and fantasy stories, such as the House of Night series, The Twilight trilogy books and The Morganville Vampires series. For school I had to read classics like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. My English and Literature classes also exposed me to Shakespeare's work very early on. I read The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing in secondary school and studied King Lear in A-levels. At home, my mum had a bookshelf and I would often scan through it and pick the books that interested me the most. Some of these books included The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta...
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