‘I Wanted to Bear Witness to Life in 1990s Nigeria’

First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.

Our questions are italicized.

Growing up, I read everything. I often say that being born to my parents was the first lottery I won. I grew up in a warm house filled with books of all kinds, in the small university town of Nsukka, and I was a precocious reader. I gobbled up everything from children’s books by Enid Blyton and children’s African folktales to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Alex Haley’s Roots when I was five or six. I also read the African Writers Series, the Pacesetters books, romance novels by Denise Robins and Barbara Cartland, Mills and Boon, thrillers like the James Hadley Chase books and the Nick Carter-Killmaster series; child mysteries like The Hardy Boys; Nancy Drew; The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton and Eileen Soper; James Baldwin; Flora Nwapa; Anezi Okoro; Chukwuemeka Ike; Fredrick Forsyth; Jeffrey Archer; Judith Krantz; Jackie Collins; all kinds of books. When I had depleted our bookshelves, I turned to those of friends and neighbours and the wonderful Children’s Centre Library set up by some women in the university. Later, at King’s College, towards the end of term, when teachers were marking our exam scripts and we were left to run free for a few days, I would retreat to the college library and read the set of World Book Encyclopaedias. I think by form three or four, I had read the whole set. I also read a lot of newspapers and magazines from Okike, the literary journal, to Time and Newsweek, Woman’s Own, Punch, The Economist, Readers Digest, everything.

For each stage, there were classic texts. For anatomy there were the pale blue Cunningham’s Manual of Practical Anatomy (volumes one to three) by Rachel Koshi. I skipped volume three, which is why my knowledge of the anatomy of the head, neck and nervous system is shaky. For physiology, there were two texts: one by the American author William Francis Ganong Jr, and my preferred one, by Arthur Guyton. There was also a textbook of African physiology, Textbook of Physiology by Gabriel C. Ezeilo, a rare Nigerian inclusion on the list. I cannot remember the biochemistry text, but later there was Muir’s Textbook of Pathology, with its beautifully written, almost poetic descriptions accompanying grotesque illustrations of diseased body parts. For pharmacology, a choice of US (Bertram G. Katzung) or British (Peter N Bennett). The British text was my preferred one. And then Obstetrics’ by Ten Teachers, and Davidson’s Principles and Practice of Medicine.