Tag: Barack Obama

Former President of the United States of America Barack Obama is by any standard a world icon. Not because he became the first African-American to preside over the affairs of the world’s most powerful nation, but because he is an active and a rounded man. A man who writes with elegance and talks convincingly, a man who can make a leper buy a pair of shoes. A reading of his two books – Dreams from my Father and Audacity of Hope – would tell you he is a rapacious reader. I have never met him but I enjoyed watching him on television and especially during his eight years in the White House or even during the campaigns he went through to become a two-term president. Not to forget that he earned his deserved place as a presidential candidate because of his oratory.

His oratory and quick wit can be traced to the fact that he is a voracious reader. As president, he observed an annual ritual of releasing a list of books he reads every year. The list is not just to name books and impress us that he read them, he demonstrated his understanding of each through writing a few lines of summary, talking about the essence and the heart of the book. He did it in a way that any reader is convinced that this is a leader who knows what he is writing about. If he lists a book, he would let you know what he likes about the book and what he does not so as to let you know it was not for showmanship.

I am looking forward to the day we will have such a public figure in Nigeria who would celebrate reading and show us that he reads. What do we have? We have men and women in power who spend their time holding endless nocturnal meetings on how to plunder our commonwealth to service their own greed and not to promote any better life for the citizens. It would be the day when a public figure would convene a meeting where books would be talked about and he/she would be able to give insights to what he/she is reading. That is when we would be able to convince our younger ones that readers are leaders.

A few weeks ago, I saw a publication where Obama’s book list for the year 2018 was published. Top on the list of course was his wife Michelle’s bestselling book, Becoming. Although I have not read the book, the reviews of it that I have read tell me it is a book I would enjoy because of its down-to-earth writing. An electronic copy of the book was sent to me a few days after it was published by a reader of this column. I was grateful to the reader, but on further enquiries from him how he got it, he said it was downloaded online. I thanked him for thinking it fit to send to me. However, I told him I am not an eBook person and that I don’t want to encourage piracy by reading it.

I am also impressed that in the Obama list are a sizeable number of books by African writers. Perhaps this could be traced to the fact that Obama’s African ancestry is coming to play here. Among the Africans on the list are two Nigerians: the immortal Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s runaway success Americanah. When next you meet one of our public officials, ask if they have read the two writers or any of them! God help you if they’ve ever heard of Chimamandah. The former president also read Kenya’s biggest writer Ngugi wa Thiongo’s massively political novel A Grain of Wheat, not leaving out Libya’s Hisham Matar’s The Return and of course Nelson Mandela’s magnum opus Long Walk to Freedom. Finally on the African list is Canada’s Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, who like Obama has links with Africa. Her parents are from Ghana.

There is also the controversial VS Naipaul on his reading menu. Obama last year read A House for Mr Biswas, a novel which for me signifies the essential Naipaul. I read the book about thirty-five years ago and the death of the author last year has made me to tell myself to find it and read it again. Not left out of the former president’s list is award-winning Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, who Wikipedia describes as “Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor and filmmaker” and the English novelist Zadie Smith’s Feel Free. 

Whither our own reading leader? Or are books banned in our State Houses?