‘I Have Always Been an Eclectic Reader.’

Partner at Southbridge Group and former president and CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), Andrew Alli’s reading has always been ‘super-voracious’. Growing up, he said, ‘I remember being told off very often for reading at the table, even for reading at parties when I should have been dancing or otherwise “having fun”.’

By Andrew Alli

October 1, 2021

Photo Illustration by Ojima Abalaka / THE REPUBLIC.

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 in a medical household—my father was a doctor, a pathologist, and my mother, a midwife. They were quite bookish. However, other than scaring myself by looking at the gruesome pictures in my dad’s medical textbooks, my reading was pretty standard fare: lots of kids’ adventure books like Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five and a few of the classics like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. I was a super-voracious reader and I remember being told off very often for reading at the table, even for reading at parties when I should have been dancing or otherwise ‘having fun’. I guess a vice like reading isn’t one that parents want to come down too heavily on, so I got away with it quite often. As I got older, I developed a liking for science fiction and science-based encyclopaedias, the sort of thing that would show the types of rockets that would be ‘regularly taking us into space in the 2000s’. This is probably where I got my interest in science and engineering and, more generally, in how the world works.

And what’s the first book you remember buying for yourself?

The first books that I remember buying with my own money were comic books. They were cheap enough for me to be able to afford with my pocket money, especially when the neighbourhood children pooled their resources. And they were readily available in 1970s Benin city. The newspaper vendors would even deliver them to your house if you arranged it with them. I preferred the UK comics—Whizzer and Chips and The Beano—to the American ones, which were largely about superheroes although I loved Judge Dredd, who was a kind of anti-superhero. The important thing with children is to encourage them to read anything that captivates them. Reading is perhaps the single most important life skill that one can acquire as a child. A love of reading in general, which encourages more reading, trumps any particular genre of reading, especially the ‘worthy’ books that may seem boring to a child and put them off reading for life.

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About the Author

Andrew Alli

is a qualified chartered accountant who has been involved in investing in Africa since the mid-1990s. He has an MBA and a degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering. His main hobby was travelling but, since the pandemic, this has been reduced to watching travel shows on Netflix.

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‘I Have Always Been an Eclectic Reader.’