Author of ‘Nigeria vs the South East: The Glaring Igbophobia of the 2023 Elections’ Ernest Nweke, believes the anti-Igbo bigotry of the last election season was an experience many Igbos are familiar with despite denial and gaslighting from the rest of Nigeria: ‘Nigeria has committed so many undocumented crimes against Igbo people that the only proof that these things happened in the ways we were told they happened are in the traumas they left behind.’
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?
Our house was a house of inherited stories and hand-me-down books my mother used in school, and these were the first books I read. The culture then was to save all your textbooks and notebooks for your younger ones. My mother took this a step further by ensuring she got these books back from her younger ones when they were done using them. So in my childhood home, before I was born, she turned a cabinet with heavy glass doors into a bookshelf and added two locks on it. In this bookshelf, she stored all the books she read in secondary school. Everything from Anezi Okoro’s One Week One Trouble; to Cyprian Ekwensi’s Trouble in Form Six and The Drummer Boy; Eddie Iroh’s Without A Silver Spoon; Charles Dicken’s Bleak House; William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and King Lear; an Atlas of the world; a Geography textbook; and long-note exercise books with her writing that slanted to the left. The list was endless, and these books could be found browned and with that dusty woody smell books have when they have been left alone for a long time on a bookshelf...
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