With the theme, Mega City, Mega Narratives, Lagos is set to host writers from within and outside Nigeria, under the auspices of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). From tomorrow to Saturday, writers will light up the stage with their creative zest at ANA’s 37th International Convention. What does Lagos have to offer the visiting writers? In this chat with EVELYN OSAGIE, Local Organising Committee Chairman Akin Adeoya, a writer and businessman, speaks on the convention and more.
What is unique about this year’s convention?
A unique feature of the convention is that Lagos, the Centre of Excellence, has not hosted the convention for 26 years; and the last convention Lagos witnessed was a sad one, because right there at the convention ground, Odia Ofeimun, who was then president, walked into the University of Lagos auditorium and announced that the Abacha regime had just executed Ken Saro Wiwa, who was a strong member of ANA. It was a sad convention and, since then, for some reasons, Lagos has not hosted a convention. And so, we are really very excited that the National Executive determined that Lagos should organise this year’s convention.
Another unique feature is the colloquium, which is holding today. This is the first time a local organising committee is putting together such, in partnership with private organisations, to help the aspiration of writers to be commercially vibrant and successful.
Thirdly, the level of organisation, I must say, is one of the most articulate in recent times.
What does Lagos hold for writers?
Well, the first thing that they would see are the huge opportunities that Lagos offers, especially writers. Lagos is a huge market for books, and as such has a huge potential, but those potentials are not tapped. A lot of people think that bookshops should go because of the Internet. Bookshops are still going to come back in a big way, because books serve a particular function. You can read books online or your phone and computer, but the experience cannot be compared to that of going through books, especially for children. It is something that I hold very high. So, the market is in Lagos.
Secondly, we have taken the convention from the university into the heart of the commercial space. Whether they are visiting Lagos for the first time or not, they will have a taste of its robust nature. I think we are going to have a good time.
And what does this convention hold for the economy of Lagos?
Well, let us first of all talk about the value of the written word. The written word is the very basis of civilisation, the very basis of technology, logic, and it is the only reason why you develop. If you cannot document, you cannot develop. Writers are the ones, who lead this vanguard. ANA champions the reading and writing culture. A lot of us started writing because we are associated with ANA. A society that does not take that kind of association serious is itself losing out substantially in the march towards growth and progress.
Like I have always said, the only reason why the African civilisation is backward in the world today is because our ancestors did not learn how to write, or how to document their discoveries. That is the problem we face here. India, which suffered far more oppression, and colonialism, has quickly shaken off the effect of colonialism. they now wear their own clothes, they speak their own language, the country is becoming one of the greatest technology hub in the world, because they have a culture that they can trace back to thousands of years, written down. The same with China, the oldest living civilisation, they can trace back to five thousand years. Look at Europe, all the entire philosophy and technology of the western civilisation is based on grave thoughts and ideas.
And so, today, we still talk about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. What will our children be talking about in 500 years’ time, when we do not encourage them to read, and encourage them to write, when even the history of our country as of today, 20 to 30 years ago, we cannot agree, for instance, on what really led to the Nigerian civil war. Nobody is sure on who the first professor of Mathematics is, some people will mention Alele Williams, some people will mention someone else. Nobody knows where the first lawyer came from, no documentation. Government is not investing on documentation.
The Marina archive is now for the last several decades home to rats, rodents, and rail. You can see the files bursting out of it; these are issues that ANA have been campaigning about. So, when ANA approaches an organisation, asking them to support one thing or the other, people need to see that we are not trying to make money, but to propagate the idea that will advance the society.
So, if we talk about enthusiasm, I don’t think that it is enough, I think we need more people to take interest and understand what this is all about. The government has shown some enthusiasm, but we need more, we need government and the organised private sector to understand what ANA stands for, and to understand the need to partner ANA, and to help drive these habits that we are talking about, through schools, universities and the society. These are life-changing ideas, and it is only people, who have the grasp for the written-word that can help
What the colloquium meant to address?
The first thing I want to do is to hail my colleagues, who have over the years continued to write and publish against the odds. Because personally, many years ago, I just felt, I will continue to write, but not necessarily publish.
Why?
This is because a lot of people, who publish do not reap the reward of their works. You find out that immediately a book becomes commercially viable, it is the pirates that rush to reproduce it, and they sell thousands of copies, and then they buy jeeps, build houses, and the guy, who created the work, just languish in untold poverty. So, in my interaction with ANA, this has become something that you hear all the time, even when the Federal or Lagos State government takes a writer’s book and look at it, the writer gets nothing out of it. Yet, hundreds of thousands of copies are being sold.
So, there is that problem, and then we ask how we begin to deal with this problem. So, we said this year, apart from the regular talk show and conferences, let us do a little business. There will be many colloquiums around the subject of how to advance the course of the writer, but this particular one is about digital publishing, where we try to address the knowledge gap, because a lot of people produce works, and they don’t know how to sell them, they just go to the printer to print, and they lose out.
But now, there are so many opportunities on the World Wide Web to sell your works, and we are bringing in experts, like the Pan- African University, the University of Ibadan, and a lot of other organisations, like Okada books. They are going to help in disseminating knowledge, and it is free. We are very thankful to some of our supporters, especially Nigerian LNG. Digital realities Limited has been of tremendous help, they have printed a lot of stuffs for us for free, and also the Nigerian Breweries has always been supporting us.
We are talking to the state government and we are very confident that something we come from there, so that we can have a hitch-free convention.
Where does it leave Lagos State at the end of the event?
Well, we think that Lagos will be better for it, because we are not just writers, we are also business people. Don’t forget that when we bring so many people to Lagos, first, business benefits from it. so there will be a long lasting effect, and we believe that ANA will be more like want to organise more conferences like this in Lagos. And we believe that a lot of writers are going to leave Lagos with ideas about Lagos that can lead to a positive relationship in the nearest future.
