Paywall down! For 48 hours, registered users can read The True Source of Ladi Kwali’s Genius for free.
While writing her novel, His Only Wife, Peace Adzo Medie, discovered Toni Morrison’s quote, ‘If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’: ‘it resonated with me,’ Medie said. ‘One of the reasons I wrote this novel was because I was hungry for stories about my hometown and of the ordinary in people’s lives in Ghana.’
The Republic is a Nigerian media-tech company dedicated to explaining our time—through deeply reported journalism on power, culture and society.
Focused consumption without interruptions.
Years of reporting at your fingertips.
Long-form journalism that matters.
Create a free account to continue reading this month and access more of our work.
About the Author
is Senior Lecturer in Gender and International Politics at the University of Bristol and author of Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the novel, His Only Wife (Algonquin Books, 2020).
Nigerian novelist, poet and author of Graceland, Chris Abani, does not believe ‘Nigerian literature’ exists as a category: ‘It is a common misconception that there is a fixed category that can be read as essentially “Nigerian literature”. Nigeria has 500 nations, 500 languages and about 2,000 dialects. While culture and language can overlap, the level of diversity is such that Nigerian literature cannot be easily narrowed down.’
For the co-founder and publishing director, of Cassava Republic Press, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, it is telling that African literature is often pronounced dead in recent years, when more women and queer voices are becoming more prominent: ‘The loudest obituary writers about African literature tend to be men. These elegies seem to come from a tacit sense of personal or generational displacement rather than from the actual state of the field.’
Nigerian poet, novelist and author of Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, Ben Okri, argues that Nigerian literature doesn’t always have to be about Nigeria: ‘Nigerian literature limits itself to Nigeria and then limits even the ways in which the country can be written about. What we want is a vast literature, a great literature…that speaks to all humanity.’
Comments
Sign in to comment.