Nigerian editor and author of Nigerian Gods, Kome Otobo, wants Nigerians to take pride in their traditional belief systems: ‘Our traditional religions were long-established before Christianity, Islam, and Judaism came to our shores and largely displaced them. Other countries have embraced and promoted their pantheons to the world—Greek, Roman, Hindu, Norse, etc.—so I think Nigerians should be just as proud of our myriad traditional belief systems instead of hiding them away.’
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?
I was introduced to books by my mother who began reading to me from when I was a few months old. My parents love to tell the story of how I could recognize that a book was upside down at the tender age of six months, and I would turn it the right way up. I like to think that this was the foundation of my lifelong love affair with books. I’ve always been a reader of a wide variety of subject matters—historical, autobiographical, romance, science fiction, fantasy. I didn’t limit myself because there were no limits imposed upon me by my parents who themselves read authors like Wole Soyinka, C.S. Lewis and Tanure Ojaide. I started out reading teen classics such as Sweet Valley High, The Famous Five and Nancy Drew. I subsequently discovered Nigerian authors such as Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi, then I expanded my horizons to engage with international writers like Arundhati Roy, Gabriel García Márquez and Octavia Butler...
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