‘Writing Is a Process of Thinking and Thinking Is Living’

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

As a child, I read all kinds of things, but I recall vividly that my reading started with my innocuous fascination with the pictures in a red book I found on my father’s nightstand. The title of the book was You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. Of course I couldn’t read the title at the time, but I picked up the book every day to look at its illustrations of well-dressed happy people living blissful lives. The world I saw in those illustrations seemed vastly different from the one I knew. With time, I became curious to know what the book was saying about those happy people. I used to ask my dad a lot of questions about them, which he found amusing. When I finally learnt how to read and began to read the book earnestly, I realized it was a tract of the Jehova’s Witnesses. The illustrations, too, as I came to realize, were an ideal. My dad was not a Witness by any stretch, but he was interested in their doctrine and allowed their preachers to talk to him, as I would too many years later in university. Growing up, I read all the Awake! and Watchtower magazines my father kept in my parents’ room. At the same time, I was also reading his newspapers, mostly Punch, Guardian and Vanguard. Dad later added Daily Sun to that list when they started publishing. As usual, I started with pictures: the comic strips, which I followed with avid interest. Shortly after, I started reading the articles in newspapers cover to cover. I should add that my father’s friends were always amazed to see me reading the newspapers. It was strange to them—mind you, my dad and his friends were trailer drivers—but it came from the circumstance from which I learnt to read. I read a lot of books in the Lantern and Macmillian children’s series later, as well as abridged illustrated versions of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I remember the first Macmillian I read was A Lucky Chance and the last I read was Mezie the Ogbanje Boy, which I liked enormously because the protagonist bore my name. The defining event of my childhood though, as far as reading goes, was my discovery of an old copy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child on that selfsame nightstand of my father’s. That book changed my life and showed me, even so early in my life, what was possible with literature.