‘Nigerians Read.’

Our questions are italicized.

As a child, my parents would spoil me with books. We had books everywhere. Apart from my having a natural predilection for books and reading, my late dad, an architect, was a collector of books and music and my mum, still a bibliophile and voracious reader, which obviously led them to open our first Glendora bookshop at Falomo Shopping Centre in 1975. In the early 70s, I grew up in Apapa, and our ‘downtown’ had a fair lot of spots—Kingsway, UTC, Leventis where you could buy decent imported children books. I was addicted to comic books and would save all my pocket money to spend on every comic possible—Buster, Whizzer & Chips, Dandy, Korak, Tintin, Asterix, Battle/War, and special comic annuals. We were football crazy and loved to buy Shoot, a weekly magazine that featured idols like Pele and Johan Cruyff and their trademark techniques. I remember bugging our local vendor, not for the dailies, but the popular Drum publication, Spear magazine, whose main character was the great Lance Spearman. From there the classics, fiction, science and general knowledge type books – Enid Blyton, Hardy boys etc. I remember my dad would force me to read weird titles like Ivanhoe, The Three Musketeers, the Tolkien series—The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. At secondary school, I got caught in the popular fiction craze and matured to read James Hadley Chase, Nick Carter, Harold Robbins, Edgar Burrough Rice, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming. This was at the same time my parents opened Glendora, and my reading went exponential because I could order books for the store and for myself – science fiction, history, the Heinemann African writer series, biographies, books on World War I and World War II.

It would have been wonderful for our young minds as middle-class kids growing up in Lagos to be able to read the books of D.O. Fagunwa, or Amos Tutuola’s Palmwine Drinkard, not in book form but as comics or graphic novels. The ideas, symbols and imagery definitely would have expanded our imagination, giving us a stronger sense of identity and an understanding of our culture. Especially Fagunwa.

That Nigerians don’t read. Being a bookseller, I can tell for a fact that Nigerians read. However, the issue I have is with what we read. The joy of selling or living with books is to be able to share and spread ideas through them. In my case, a lot of study and thought is put into how I pick books for my stores, as I consider it crucial for our mental consciousness and personal development. The books we choose to read have a serious impact on who we are and what we make of ourselves as individuals, which is why I consider it important to support and encourage small independent bookstores for the work they do.