Founder and editor of Open Country Mag, Otosirieze Obi-Young, believes African writers are not credited enough as innovators for their adaptiveness to solving problems on the page: ‘When Damon Galgut flits between the first- and third-person in one sentence in his book, In a Strange Room, the acknowledgement never transcends book reviews into literary culture essays or lists.’
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 grew up reading mostly religious books and books on history. My mother had a wide-ranging curiosity about religion and had the holy books, so through her I read the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and bits of the Quran and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. I reread the first third of the old testament, from Genesis to Second Chronicles; the new testament, from Matthew to Acts of the Apostles; and the deuterocanonical books, especially the Books of the Maccabees. It was the stories that I loved, and looking back, I see how following all those genealogies gave me a sense of order—and now, in my fiction, editing, journalism, and curation, I am ruled by order.
I found history in the stacks of books left by a maternal aunt and a paternal uncle. The Mesopotamians, the Romans, the Greeks: I loved not just the politics of their societies but also their social aspects. But it was the Africans that really intrigued me—Egypt, Nubia—and I remember being enamoured by the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, during the Punic Wars. I found a special affinity for the trio of great West African empires in the savannah: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. I liked reading about the organization of the Hausa city states, especially Kano and the Jukun. I was intrigued that it was their cavalries that helped the Oyo Empire in battle, and that the Benin Empire had links with Onitsha people across the Niger. I even took interest in the negotiations of the Ekiti-Parapo Wars. These were teenage fascinations, and because I was drawn to the dramatic, the empires and the wars, I would not get into the Igbo polity until university.
What I took from all that history and religion was a love of foundation and, importantly, an attraction to scale and a guiding philosophy. By the time I read the first literature book that made an impression on me—a coverless book that, years later, I realized was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child—I had also discovered that I was a good storyteller. But I still had no interest in becoming a writer because, at the time, I was only engrossed in the stories, not where they came from. I wouldn’t think about writers in an active, animating way until 2008, when I was 14, and our literature teacher had us read Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty. I started writing poetry after that, keeping a diary.
If your life so far was a series of texts, which text (fiction or non-fiction) represents you at this moment?
Let me say the one book on my nightstand, which is the last thing I read before drifting into sleep: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I read far more nonfiction than I do fiction, and the latter takes me a longer time to digest, and the more my liking of it, the longer it takes. That said, I do not think it possible that a fiction book could represent me at any moment.
I liked reading about the organization of the Hausa city states, especially Kano and the Jukun. I was intrigued that it was their cavalries that helped the Oyo Empire in battle, and that the Benin Empire had links with Onitsha people across the Niger.
What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?
Much of what passes as literary culture analyses in American publications suffers from intellectual protectionism, at best, or amputation of logic, at worst. ‘The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century’ list by The New York Times Book Review, which has just one African writer (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah), and then this one titled ‘What the New York Times Missed: 71 More of the Best Books of the 21st Century’ by Literary Hub, which also has one African (Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83). The Literary Hub piece annoys me more because it pretends to be a corrective and then commits a worse erasure. It claims that the New York Times missed something, but that thing cannot possibly be Africa; it says there are 70 more better written books from anywhere else than any from Africa. Think about that for a moment. It means that these people—the New York Times said it polled ‘503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers’ with ‘a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review’—do not think about Africa as an important contributor to global literature. If you do not know anything about the literatures of a continent that represents almost a fifth of the human race, then you have no business curating global lists, because all you succeed in doing is lowering people’s opinions of your credentials. It is naked bias, and I cannot tell which is worse, that they knew or didn’t. To be clear, I am not asking anyone to include Africans for the sake of ‘representation’, which is a very silly argument in itself; I am stating that some of the very best writers and very best books of the 21st century come from Africa. I am not talking about ‘literary success’— another bad argument for this—but about actual skill on the page.
It is an under-discussed problem that African writers are just not credited enough as innovators, for their adaptiveness to solving problems on the page. When Damon Galgut flits between the first- and third-person in one sentence in his book, In a Strange Room, the acknowledgement never transcends book reviews into literary culture essays or lists. Autofiction is prominent in the American literary discourse, but there are precious few in that genre who write from three continents and articulate culture and politics in the insightful, digestible way that Teju Cole does in Open City and in Known and Strange Things. If a white writer had brought fusion fiction into the discourse as Bernardine Evaristo did with Girl, Woman, Other, they would be on that list. I have read enough books on that New York Times list and some other books that make lists like that, and when it comes to that blend of serious subject, character acuity, authorial vision, emotional range, and overall artistic merit, I do not know any 21st century English-language novel of literary fiction that matches Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Maybe there are, but I do not know them, and I’d appreciate it if someone pointed them out. I feel that if that novel were about the tragedy of the Holocaust and not that of Biafra, it would be number one on that list. She would have two novels there, including Americanah, which deserves its place. The critics polled by the BBC in 2015 ranked both novels the 10th and 13th best of the century so far; I disagree with 10th but at least it is a list that compels respect.
All that said, it is 2024 and Africans should not be begging anybody to be included in anything, especially when the metrics of inclusion are suspiciously para-literary. We should advocate, but no one should be begging. And yet before we demand that non-Africans recognize us, do we Africans recognize each other? Do we write essays and give each other credit when earned? Do we elevate each other by merit? Do we hold up good books as good books especially when written by people who are not friends or in our circles? And that is where much of African literature wobbles. If we do not do that enough, we have no moral authority to expect that others do it for us.
To be clear, I am not asking anyone to include Africans for the sake of ‘representation’, which is a very silly argument in itself; I am stating that some of the very best writers and very best books of the 21st century come from Africa.
What’s the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?
It’s about American politics. I read an analysis of why the Democratic Socialists of America withdrew its endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I had thought the Democratic Socialists were one group; it turned out to be a coalition of groups with sometimes divergent ideologies. It changed the way that I think of them in the liberal wing. And it infuriated me yet again that our political parties in Nigeria are based not on ideologies or policy but on…I don’t even know what.
You’re the founder and editor-in-chief of Open Country Mag. Who/what was your strongest inspiration to become an editor?
I became an editor for a single reason: to help make space for Nigerian writers of my generation. If the space were there, I would not have prioritized editorial work. I was coming up in the scene and watching my peers come up and form communities, and we needed help getting ourselves into the mainstream. That help was never going to come from an African literary culture that is ageist and classist; it needed to come from us, outsiders in the system. I knew I could do something, so I did. And I don’t think—looking at that set of writers and editors that came of age around 2016—that I was the only one with that motivation. It gives you a different perspective when you see, today, that many new writers in the scene take for granted things that were rare as recently as 2016. Now, younger writers can be brave and say they are queer; now they can be bold and make contributions to important conversations without anyone succeeding in discrediting them because of their young age. Now, you don’t need to be born in the West or to have studied there in order to be taken seriously. It wasn’t that way in 2016. We broke class barriers and recentred talent and the work. I couldn’t be prouder of that.
There were editors on the scene doing good work, of course, but no one was doing what I felt my demographic needed. I started as an independent editor of online anthologies, curating the Art Naija Series, including Enter Naija: The Book of Places and Work Naija: The Book of Vocations. It may have been beginner work, but it was and still is a novel concept that I may revive. That series was exciting for the Nigerian writers who were featured and validated the feeling that we were in the midst of something new. I carried that to Brittle Paper and made the blog inclusive of younger and queer writers, and I created and ran the Brittle Paper Awards for three years, which brought a number of relatively unknown writers to the foreground. I ended the awards when my time there ended. I was 23 then and it was an audacious move: it was the first awards run by an African publication and I remember people asking me: Who will judge it? It was me and the founder, but I didn’t tell them that. My position was: it was time to bin the notion that a young writer working in Africa could not be a major curator, could not do things that no one else before them had.
When I became editor of Folio Nigeria by CNN, I viewed it as a learning ground, to hunt for ideas outside literature and reconfigure them for literature. By the time I started Open Country Mag, I was ready for something much bigger, something that would finally let me employ everything I had learned. I made a list of everything I had always wanted to do and everything we still lacked in African media and laid out a plan to get there. It Is why our longform profiles are foundational, tracing the subject’s journey and putting them in a context that acknowledges that they are not working in isolation.
In truth, I am also motivated by a kind of shame that I have heard about and have watched people suffer from: we have so little on the continent, compared to the West, and there’s something about being infrastructurally stranded that dampens zeal and deepens an inferiority complex. I approach my work from a place of equal footing with Western publications. What they can do, we could do—if we had what they have. So, all of it is for one reason: to build the infrastructure that I needed when coming up but did not have, infrastructure that could benefit writers and motivate those behind to build more. We need more of everything.
What makes a great story?
I’d go back to the basics: a story is bad, average, good, or great based on how well it handles the five main elements of storytelling: language, character, plot, setting, and theme. The truly outstanding writers have mastered all five and know when to subordinate one element to another without creating a disbalance. That combination, that choice of which to prioritize and how, is what allows a story to be memorable or devastating or funny or stimulating. It is what lets a reader have that emotional or intellectual experience, those ups and downs of characters or logic that makes a piece of writing relatable or convincing. And the only way for a writer to learn these is by deep reading.
And what’s the greatest story you’ve ever read?
Picking a story based on how it made me feel would be too subjective an answer, and picking one based on a careful analysis of its literary merits would be an impersonal exercise—neither can capture the range of artistic depth and the potential for conversation that underpins great stories. I am unsure if I have a ‘greatest story’ in mind; I do have ‘great books’ in mind, though, but those are not the same. If forced, I would have to defer to any of the stories that have survived through millennia, simply because of their ability to communicate something dear to people of countless cultures through different ages, and their status as the ur-texts from which many more ‘great stories’ have borrowed. I would have to go with the stories I began with: in the Bible.
I became an editor for a single reason: to help make space for Nigerian writers of my generation. If the space were there, I would not have prioritized editorial work.
As an editor, what’s more important to you: the story or how it is written?
The story is more important because it is the substance that the style only works to amplify, yet the work of an editor begins with how that story is written, with style. Most of the stories that people connect to are actually basic in their narration and ordering of events. They are simple and straight to the point, and people love them without the intervention of an editor. A badly written story can still be memorable, but a fine outline of prose with no substance may not be, because, ultimately, ideas are firstly about the what and only later about the how. And the what is a self-contained notion while the how is always an appendage.
As an editor, I can remake a bad story or piece of writing into something better, so I’d rather have that than a block of good sentences that collectively have nothing to say. A writer who has nothing to say has nothing to write. So, in editing, I present myself as an insurance for the writer: give me your best and I will guide you through making it better, as long as you are willing to do the work.
What is the most important contribution an editor makes to a piece of writing?
The work of an editor is to make the work clearer, rounded, complete, or striking. Some editors work in a curatorial mode and some really are co-authors or secondary authors, in which case they supplement the primary authors’ lack with their own perspectives. When I edit, I assign myself the responsibility of information: my job is to know more than, or at least as much as, the writer does about their subject. Only then can I be truly helpful. And my idea of being helpful is to present the writer with potential counterarguments; if they could win me over, they would win over the most dissenting honest critic out there.
This is because when I work on an essay submission, I hope for it to be the definitive intervention in a conversation: not only must it make its arguments, but it must also anticipate counterarguments and dismantle them, so that when it is published, it acknowledges every other view it deems deficient but knocks them down to make space for its own. If the writer is a good thinker, they may even open a whole new conversation. An example is Kanyinsola Olorunnisola’s ‘“Our Literature Has Died Again”: Nigerian Writing in the Era of Nomadists’. So, an underrated contribution I make as an editor is to provide the first wall of resistance. Surmount it and we fly.
And what’s the most memorable edit/revision you suggested to an author’s work?
Over the years, quite a lot, including for pieces I did not eventually publish. In all those cases, they made the difference. But I’d rather not say which pieces. I will say, though, that it would be good if writers acknowledged their editors’ contributions more, especially in cases where their editors made decisive contributions.
What has been the most exciting literary project you’ve worked on so far?
Generally, our longform profiles at Open Country Mag delight me, just for the pleasure of executing a vision that is helping bring African culture journalism to where it should have gotten a long time ago. But in particular, I’d say our The Next Generation Series, for the scale of curation. The first issue was momentous, some of the leading voices of the young generation understanding the importance of their emergence and sharing their stories so we could put them in context. That had never happened before in the scene, and it would be even more exciting years from now when one looks back. Projects like that are the building blocks of our industry, and I appreciate them even more when I am rattled by external dismissals like those New York Times and Literary Hub lists.
You are both an editor and a writer. Do these roles influence each other? Are you a better writer because you’re an editor, or a better editor because you’re a writer?
Sure. I am able to edit the way I do, paying attention to existing and potential angles of logic in a piece, because my own writing has variety. Yet I have significantly more range as a writer and even wider interests as a reader than I have as an editor. When I write, the editor has no point to make; he is there to hold the fort, man the grounds; he is the constant. So, while the writer in me gallops on, he does so in full view of the editor who must rein him in, encourage him to step back and make cuts with disinterest. But it rarely happens in so demarcated a manner; the two blend, me editing as I write.
It is also about my process. I spend a lot of time writing and editing and saving drafts in my head before I put the writing down in ink. It must be ready to go before I bother to start writing; I hate having to start a piece that I would not finish. I do that also because I place such value on the art of writing that I do not bring myself to the desk unless I have something important to say.
We are in a continual race to catch up with the world, and the way that we present that journey of hiccups in literature is important. And the form that I wish to see us exploring that more in is the essay.
What’s your literary pet peeve?
The abuse of the semicolon stands out. But not as much as the random punctuation oversight in major Western publications. I think, why? They all have money to pay several editors to produce clean pieces. So I just screenshot the errors I see.
What excites you today about African storytelling?
Oh. It is partly the present but mostly the potential. We aren’t there yet and I’m both more hopeful and less hopeful than I was five years ago. For good writing to be widespread, infrastructure needs to be widespread, and for that to happen, the government or at least generous donors must come in. For that to happen, the industry must be marketed in the best light to outsiders. We must place focus back on the work and the love of the work. That is not where we are, but it is attainable.
Who is the most compelling character you’ve ever encountered in a book, and what makes them memorable?
I will go with a historical figure and say Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu. It was around ten years ago that I read President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 1987 biography of him. The book is titled Nzeogwu, and it puts layers of humanity on him. It read to me like a dear friend holding back on certain personal details, and I had my thoughts on what those details were, which made him even more intriguing.
Which contemporary books do you think will become classics in the future?
Arinze Ifeakandu’s God’s Children Are Little Broken Things will be a short story classic. If we do what we should, which is to seek out those who went before us and connect their work to the present, then Chike Frankie Edozien’s Lives of Great Men will remain significant for more than only LGBTQ+ readers, for whom it is already a classic. I say that as a general note because there is so much that has gone before us that we no longer pay attention to. It doesn’t apply to Edozien’s book but it applies to so many others, like Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa.
And what book (from Africa) do you feel has not yet received the attention it deserves?
I am thinking not of one book but of a generation. It is the writers who appeared after Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the ones we might say belong to ‘the Second Generation’ of postcolonial African literature, who came of age in the post-independence disillusionment and preceded the set of Adichie and Wainaina. I make that outline because it is a large and shifting group, spread across decades, and includes Buchi Emecheta, perhaps Nuruddin Farah, and Dambudzo Marechera, Kojo Laing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Damon Galgut, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and perhaps Ben Okri and Bernardine Evaristo.
It was only recently, in the last five or so years, that the literary world woke up to some of their work and gave Booker Prizes to Evaristo and Galgut and the Nobel Prize to Gurnah. Some of them—say, Farah and Gurnah—have been unconsciously framed as regional voices in the way that the writers before and after them are not. I’d like to see them recontextualized as more than a bridge between the First and Third Generations, which would result in them being more central to the discourse around the growth of contemporary African literature that my generation, the presumed Fourth Generation, must build.
Which three books from/on Africa should be on everyone’s bookshelf at this moment?
It is for political reasons, but I would like more people to pick up Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit, Fatin Abbas’ Ghost Season, Emmanuel Dongala’s The Stone Breakers, and Diriye Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children. Aboulela and Abbas are Sudanese, Dongala is Congolese, and Osman is Somali. Those are among the countries we should be seeking to read more about at this time.
What is your favourite topic to read about these days?
It is hard to say; I recently considered keeping a media diary but couldn’t track my consumption. But, in the times that I do it, I enjoy reading about reading, just taking in how other writers describe that sensory perception of prose, or even of how they take in other art forms. There is a book called Writers at the Movies, edited by Jim Shepard, which has Julian Barnes, J. M. Coetzee, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, and Susan Sontag, among others, reviewing films.
When I find myself on X, I tend to post about reading, asking people to just read more and more. Beyond that, I try to be updated on global politics and pop culture.
What topic do you wish more authors were writing about these days?
The first gap is that we need more literary essays. Reviews are essential, blog posts are okay, but we need more formal essays as we do not have enough of those: pieces that take on ideas and deconstruct how they apply in books, or that look at the scene and identify patterns. That’s one area—and nonfiction generally—where we are not close to the West in any way. I’d just like more of us to truly understand that global intellectual culture is on a faster pace than we have been moving as Africans. Westerners can afford to bemoan the ‘death of the novel’ and say TikTok can be literary and all that because they have the basics: they have Homer and George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy and centuries of written literary inheritance. We, on the other hand, are mostly working in modern literary forms that Africans did not create but must still document despite the peculiar interruptions of history, from colonialism to military rules to civilian defunding of education. We are in a continual race to catch up with the world, and the way that we present that journey of hiccups in literature is important. And the form that I wish to see us exploring that more in is the essay. But if your skill is top shelf, fiction.
The second thing I hope to see from writers of my generation is sustained critical thinking about the state of Nigeria and Africa. It is good to have some capacity for political contextualization. And we must be bold enough to decentre the American and Western perspective and get back to discussing the world from a strictly Nigerian, or broadly African, perspective. Capturing Nigeria from Nigerian eyes is the only way for our work to benefit Nigeria. It requires us to pause and think deeper about our place in the world; we cannot progress without that humble acknowledgement that we have been slower than we are able to. It is precisely what our forebears fought for, a mental space for Africans to think for themselves, and yet we are drifting back intellectually and emotionally to the West and laying waste to a Nigerian ideal. It is true that rampant corruption and insecurity and the breaking of dreams have forced young Nigerians to seek belonging elsewhere, but it is a problem when our new intellectuals speak and all that comes out are ideas that are not about how Africa can be better but about how the West envisions itself. There is a new ‘we’ and they have hitched their allegiance to that, while continuing to mine the old ‘we’ for literary and traumatic material for career-branding. Stop. This issue of point of view originated in culture and politics—fields that resisted it—but is now finding new growth in literature. It is a weird performance, done for watching Westerners at the expense of your own people. When done intentionally, that, too, is betrayal.
It is a problem when you our new intellectuals speak and all that comes out are ideas that are not about how Africa can be better but about how the West envisions itself. There is a new ‘we’ and they have hitched their allegiance to that, while continuing to mine the old ‘we’ for literary and traumatic material for career-branding. Stop.
What are you currently working on?
Always several projects at once.
Question from Chimezie Chika: What do you want your work to represent in the world?
I hope for it to represent what we can be at our best and most grounded. In fiction, literary journalism, and curation, it could be confirmation that African writers are exactly on par with Western ones. The potential has always been there, but the results never matched—until now, as young people have created spaces for serious, unfiltered conversations and perhaps more people attempt complex storytelling that can carry the weight of history and culture. And I am grateful that I knew this from the beginning and did not need an external voice to confirm it. So, I hope that when someone looks at what I do, they see the results of belief: that they can believe in themselves and in the culture they come from. No one will fix things if we do not, but first we must confront and try to fix ourselves and whatever beliefs hold us back. I’d say to test yourself, test your ability to create and build against odds. The best gift you can give yourself is a mastery of what you do.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft.
I will go with the thoughtful question that Chimezie Chika just asked.
Who do you think we should interview next?
A lot of thinking writers we need to hear from: Chike Frankie Edozien, Arinze Ifeakandu, JK Anowe, Kanyinsola Olorunnisola, Adachioma Ezeano, Ebenezer Agu, Frances Ogamba. Anyone doing something⎈
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