‘Writing is a Work of Care and hope.’

Author of ‘Creating Africa’ and ‘The Prophetic Vision of Chinua Achebe’, Boluwatife Akinro, considers writing, ‘a work of care and hope.’ It is important, she explains, ‘to study the world, to see what is amiss and document what has survived.’

Written by Boluwatife Akinro

May 27, 2020

Boluwatife Akinro. OJIMA ABALAKA

Our questions are italicized.

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

Of the many joys that reading lent my childhood, time spent at the National Library in Akure deserves honourable mention. My siblings and I found excitement in many things: television, picking mangoes our father plucked from the trees in our yard in March, feeding fish in the time we owned a pond, making pencil illustrations of our favourite animated characters. When we were not fisher(wo)men and miniature farmers, however, we passed considerable time burrowing through collections in the library right across the street. There was no short supply of literature texts in our home, from the Oxford Classics my parents read in grammar school to books from the Pacesetters series. Dog-eared copies of Agatha Christie, Hadley Chase and John Grisham got passed around quite easily then.

The range of Kola Onadipe’s works were necessary reads for children who grew up in Nigeria, I think. There was Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, the series, Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, and a fondness for Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Mum also found for me a copy of Batman’s Adventures at a used-books store once. These were the kinds of gifts we received. I have to mention, of course, prescribed texts from school by authors like Zaynab Alkali, Eddie Iroh and Isidore Okpewho—whose The Last Duty was the first fictionalization of the Civil War I read.

There was Ìjàpá Tìrókò by Ọlágòkè Òjó and other texts like it without which I would not have learned to read and write Yoruba. I would not read a lot of contemporary fiction, Nigerian or foreign, until I was much older. One popular bookstore, Arowolo Bookshop, sold foreign books that were not school prescriptions, but they were mostly Harlequin and Mills and Boon romances, which I read for a while before some traveling preacher convinced us that they filled our brains with toxins and shortened our concentration span. There was a book burning at school and that was that.

My siblings and I loved adventures and often made our own, and in a small town like Akure, where everything seemed to stand perpetually still, books were, most times, the only way to leave. By virtue of where we lived, we often felt like observers and never participants in world processes, so we read to familiarize ourselves with the world in preparation for when our time would come.

Which books from your childhood would you pass on to someone younger?

My memory is fuzzy on this, but I recall that I loved Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman as a child, but least of all for the idea of femininity it propagates. Besides it being a channel to view the North of Nigeria, a region that is still greatly mystified in the southern imaginary, I was captivated by Alkali’s depiction of the familial love and tenderness the heroine, Nana Ai, shared with her grandfather and friends. Stories of fellowship and camaraderie, especially with older Nigerians, and in a way not filtered through their sternness and sacrifice, are rare in our literature, unfortunately.

The Virtuous Woman was also a story about disability, about growing up in an inaccessible society where the disabled are perpetually othered. Perhaps most of all, I enjoyed the book’s presentation of girlhood and playfulness before the transition to womanhood. One sees the way the former, girlhood, is quenched in our society’s project to transform it into womanhood, through the performance of culturally constructed and socially acceptable interpretations of virtue.

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