‘Great Writers Develop Themselves.’ Christopher Olaoluwa Ogunmodede's First Draft

Editor at The Republic and author of ‘John Mugufuli’s Baby Fever’, Christopher Olaoluwa Ogunmodede, believes great writing emerges from practice. ‘Just like leaders are made, not born, great writers develop themselves. Or at least, great writing is a skill that can be taught.’

Our questions are italicized.

What books or kinds of books did you read growing up? 

I got hooked on reading early in life, thanks largely to being raised by earnest, disciplinarian parents in a house full of books. Everything I read ran the gamut from fairy tales and comic books to theology, political memoirs, and poetry anthologies.

I read a lot of the Peter Marlow series by Joseph Hone—the very first book of the series, The Private Sector, was my favourite, I loved The Sixth Directorate as well. I read a lot of Hemingway, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Leo Tolstoy as well. I recall reading Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions when I was six years old and decided right there that he would be one of my patron saints—I eventually chose Augustine as my Confirmation name (Catholic boy here). And I’ll never forget the feeling of being enthralled by a book when I read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

It goes without saying that I read a lot of the classic twentieth-century Afrodiasporic writers and thinkers like Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mariama Bâ, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R James, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, Derek Walcott, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy to mention a few.

Can’t leave out all the Black Latino writers I read either, even though I read most of them much later in my youth—Piri Thomas, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Jesús Colón, and Gaspar Octavio Hernández all come to mind, and many more. Yep, I’m a nerd. I like to think the broad, decolonial reading experience I was fortunate to be exposed to has made a lasting impact.