The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Chigozie Obioma

  • My Toni Morrison story

    It was my intention to write about the Booker Prize Longlist which was released about two weeks ago. However, the death on Tuesday of one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Toni Morrison, hit the world like a blow in the jaw. It was a rude shock. But why should the death of an eighty eight year old be a shock?  Well, death is usually what we all don’t think is right to call anyone, no matter how old. So I am going to pay tributes to Morrison this week and leave the Booker Longlist of which our own Chigozie Obioma is once again listed just as he was for his first novel Fishermen.

    I must confess that I came late to Toni Morrison. It was only in my first year in the university that I came across her in the eighties. Prior to that I’d encountered other Black American (they were then mostly referred to as Afro American) writers. I had read Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and even Alex Haley and a host others, but not Morrison. In fact, her name never featured in any of my reading list. Even at that time despite all my traversing most bookshops in major cities around the country, I never for once came across her book. Or I might have but failed to pay attention to her- blame this not on any chauvinism. I never knew this word existed then.

    However, as a first year student at the Bayero University Kano, I was a regular face in the library walking among all those tall shelves of books neatly arranged and looking so sexy and inviting. It was on one of those days that I stumbled on a book with the curious title Song of Solomon! At a first look at the title I thought the librarian must have mistakenly tucked it at that point because it sounded to me like a chapter from the Holy Bible!!

    I decided to bring it down to have a closer look. I turned to the blurb. I was mistaken, behold it is a novel by one Tony Morrison. Curiosity took hold of me even before reading the blurb. I saw a picture of a vivacious woman with the then rave of the moment hairdo ‘Afro’. After reading the blurb I saw that it was not a Bible. I decided to peep through it. I was glued. Before I left the library that day I was almost half way through and because I didn’t have my library card with me, I had to quickly dash to the lecture hall and later returned with my card to lend the book from the library. That was my initiation into the world of this great American writer who was to serve as my window into the world and heart of other great raconteurs of her ilk.

    That was when university libraries really lived up to their names. It was in the university library that I came across a gamut of world literature and writers of different hues that made reading about this vast world to be my oyster, the window through which I peeped into the possibilities of the human spirit and dynamics. Are university libraries this rich again? Haven’t we turned them into sepulchres and mockery of a building? How many of our undergraduates today can name any writer of note that they have read without scratching their noses? Make no mistake I was not a literature major.

    With the death of Morrison, the American publishing world is going to make some more money as more people would be eager to read her books. New readers and those who have read her before would seek to buy her books and reconnect. I won’t be surprised if a few months from now her complete novels, essays etc are published. What have we done with the works of our own writers who have died? I once asked when are we going to have Prof Ola Rotimi, who published almost all his plays in Nigeria, compiled as The Complete Plays of Ola Rotimi, or The Complete Novels of Cyprian Ekwensi etc?  Shakespeare’s are still being reissued!!!

    So why can’t our local publishers also learn from this, or must we wait for foreign publishers to seize the initiative from us as always under the wrong notion that Nigerians don’t read? That’s a topic for another day.

    What a better way to close this tribute than with the words of another award winning writer Ben Okri who described Morrison as “a literary warrior in whose work the US peered into the black mirror of its untold truths. But her work spoke to people everywhere, to their traumas and their joys, in a language in which inspiration was at home.”

    I love her sense of dignity unlike that of many of today’s writers who pander to the white establishment. She once declared that she writes essentially for Black people and that “the point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder to approve it.” Such bravery.

    Farewell, the mother figure of Black literature. Ipade di oju ala, odi arin nako.

  • Obioma: Art endures, propaganda doesn’t

    In An Orchestra of Minorities, the narrator speaks of “the land of lack, of man-pass-man, the land in which a man’s greatest enemies are members of his household; a land of kidnappers, of ritual killers, of policemen who bully those they encounter on the road and shoot those who don’t bribe them, of leaders who treat those they lead with contempt and rob them of their commonwealth, of frequent riots and crisis, of long strikes, of petrol shortages, of joblessness, of clogged gutters, of potholed roads…and of constant power outages”. Associate Editor Olukorede Yishau spends time with the 33-year-old author, Chigozie Obioma, in Lagos:

    Chigozie Obioma, author of the Booker Prize shortlisted The Fishermen and the wave-making An Orchestra of Minorities, has a problem: He hates telling stories the traditional way. This problem led Obioma, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska, to write an over 500-page long novel in which the narrator is the chi, the guiding spirit in Igbo cosmology. “I don’t like to tell stories in a traditional way so I am always thinking of an invention,” he says in a restaurant in Ogudu-GRA, Lagos.

    The chi tells us the story of Nonso, a poultry farmer, and Ndali— set largely in Umuahia, slightly in Lagos and Abuja, and a lot in Cyprus. Nonso, a 24-year-old lonely orphan, sees Ndali trying to jump off a bridge into water. He persuades her against it. To show how painful it will be, he flings two of his prized fowls into the water. She rescinds her decision and both of them go their separate ways. They run into each other months later. Ndali feels she owes him her life. He is to find out that heartbreak was responsible for her attempted suicide. A relationship soon starts and before long, Nonso feels like marrying Ndali and tells her his plan. And then begins the real drama of their lives.

    Ndali’s father is rich, stupendously rich, and finds it difficult to accept an illiterate poultry farmer as son-in-law. Through Ndali’s brother, Chuka, Nonso is humiliated a couple of times. The humiliation gets him thinking and talking with Ndali and a friend, Elochukwu, and in the long run, he discovers that getting an education may swing things in his favour. Another dilemma sets in: with universities in Nigeria ever on strike, he wonders how many years it will take to complete a degree. Still, he picks the matriculation form, but soon opts for selling his valuables and heading abroad for studies. Everything appears set until he gets to Cyprus and discovers he has been scammed.

    Cyprus turns out hellish. Passers-by call him “slave”. He is mistaken for the Brazilian football star Ronaldinho, and the jealous husband of an expatriate nurse from Germany who helps him turns things upside down. He turns out one of the minorities in faraway land and his shouts for help or his cries for bailout sound more like an orchestra without efficacious power. Returning home only aggravates things. And a lot more sad events follow!

    An Orchestra of Minorities is the story of the power of love, the sacrifice a man or a woman is ready to make for love not to suffocate and die. It is a wrestle between destiny and determination. It is rich in folklore and it is a morality tale, with betrayal and revenge as major themes.

    This tragicomedy is far more ambitious than Obioma’s critically acclaimed debut The Fishermen. No one knows you better than your guardian spirit, and using this all-seeing spirit as the narrator gives Obioma the opportunity to tell it all despite the fact that the narration is in first person. The omniscient nature of the chi also gives Obioma the leverage to dwell in the spiritual realm, such that parts of the book read like magical realism. We see the spirit taking leave of the host’s body to spy. We see the chi putting thoughts in the host’s mind in order to influence his actions. We see the chis of two beings having a chit-chat. We also see a ghost crying in a bus pleading against a marriage on account that the suitor is a murderer. Of course, the one the ghost is speaking to cannot hear, only the chi does. And we see the chi at times helpless while Nonso faces the adversities of life.

    The novel, Obioma says, was inspired by the death of a Nigerian, Jay, while he was studying in Cyprus for a degree. He says: “The guy whose story inspired the novel, why did he so badly want to get out of the country? He had been deported from Germany, then hardly had he come back to Nigeria that he wanted to badly to get out. People walk through Sahara Desert, through Libya at a time when ISIS was beheading people. They saw this but still they were undeterred. It is because it is almost as if Nigeria is a hellfire. Why will you so badly want to leave?”

    Jay, says Obioma, came to Cyprus because of a woman he was betrothed to. He needed to make money to be able to give her the best in life.

    A house full of books

    Unlike Chinonso, Obioma has had a pretty good life. He grew up in a home with twelve children. His banker-father ignited his love for reading in Akure, the capital of Ondo State, where he learnt first to speak Yoruba before speaking Igbo and English. He would later learn Turkish while in Cyprus.

    The very interesting dynamics in the house, he believes, made him a writer: “I was not the very playful type. So, I sought a sort of privacy through reading. Reading was an escape from the noise.  It was very early in life that I developed interest in reading and writing. When I learnt how to read was very early, probably six or seven. And then I discovered that stories go into books. Once I made that discovery, the more I read and the more I read, the more I quietly wanted to produce my own work.”

    Because of the metaphysics in his works, some people, he says, have been asking what they should call his type of writing. “It is not fantasy. It is reality and it is also not at the same time. I guess for me I just begin from the principle, from the world view of the Igbo that there is no difference between the world of the living and the dead. I think even the Yoruba and the Edo people have such belief, which was what Ben Okri used in The Famished Road.  You could have extremely realistic thing happening with interference from the metaphysical world. I think it is unique. You see it in our films because that is our reality. A novel as a genre is European. The first novel was Spanish. You have free will in the Western tradition and agency. A character has to have a motivation and that motivation spurs him. I do it because I believe it is a form of reality,” he says.

    Art endures, propaganda does not

    Obioma believes the first focus of any work of art should be the artistry. “Fiction, for me, is a lot of things. It is a story but it is also how you tell the story. For instance, everybody can draw, but what makes a great painter is the light, the colour, the shades brought to the drawing. Two hundred people can draw a portrait of you, but one will stand out and people will say this is a work of art.”

    He adds: “For me, the concept is very important. For The Fishermen, the way the story is told is to have Benjamin as an eccentric narrator who tried to understand things by associating it with something else. The father is an eagle, the mother is a snake, the brother is a sparrow, stuffs like that. For An Orchestra of Minorities, the concept is through the chi telling the story, being so loquacious, going on tangent, sometimes, for a long time because he is trying to defend something difficult to defend. Instead of telling the story directly, it is going on this digression to convince Chukwu not to punish his host.

    “There is also the issue of classicism, which we experienced in Cyprus, the way they treat Nigerians, Africans and all that.

    “I think it is a mistake when you just set out to pursue an agenda. Artistry should be the focus. If not, you end up writing propaganda and I see that a lot. True it can get you a lot of money and fame because everybody is politically wired, but it will not endure in the end. What endures in the most is the art.”

    Before studying in Cyprus, a private university in Enugu was where Obioma first tried to have tertiary education. “I did Economics in a Nigerian private university in Enugu but it was a complete waste of my time. I left there because I was always protesting and they were going to throw me out.”

    Obioma believes in luck. He says: “Writing is not vocational. It is a gamble. I have classmates; we went to this elite school top programme in creative writing and we graduated and even the set before me, I was like the only one who sold my book. Then there is this girl now who just sold hers and there is another about to sell hers. That is out of about 22 people. Some of them are working in McDonalds now, getting very low pay but they are fantastic writers.  Not everybody is going to succeed in that. But being in academia also helps because I have time for research and there is a research fund and they pay for everything.   Not everybody will have that opportunity because it is very competitive. You need luck.”

    It is for this reason that he always advises his students to not rely on writing alone: “You have a soft landing like tortoise has. If you are a successful lawyer and you sell your novel for a million dollars, fine and good.”

    With the success of The Fishermen, Obioma can live off it, “but there is a twist to it because there are so many dependants asking for money. If it were just for me and my immediate family, I will be fine without having to do any other work, but I am still teaching”.

    But there is a price to pay for remaining in the academia: “There are so many invitations that I cannot accept because of my being in the academia unlike (Chimamanda) Adichie who can go anywhere.” But he has no regret because “teaching develops you as well because you are reading a lot of works that are embryonic, in their early forms and the more you read the works of these future great writers, when you see the pitfalls in their work and you follow through to see them improve, the more you are immune to making those mistakes in your own work”.

    He is also happy affecting a lot of people: “Over the next five years, I would have taught some 2,000 students and those will keep buying your books and they will always remember what you did. I think one can even form a solid base from doing that.”

    He says he may consider teaching one semester a year so as to have more time for public speaking, which he is bound to get invites for now that he has published a powerful sophomore whose Nigerian edition has just been published by Parresia Publishers. The United Kingdom and American editions came out earlier and foreign rights have been sold in several countries. Soon Nonso and Ndali will speak French, speak Chinese, speak German and so on and so forth.

     

  • The Chi who wrote about chi

    The Chi here is not the guiding spirit in Igbo cosmology. This Chi is Chigozie Obioma, the author of An Orchestra of Minorities, in which the chi is the narrator. You can say Chi wrote about chi and you will be right.

    If there is any paragraph in Chi’s book that will stay with me for a long time, it is where the chi speaks of “the land of lack, of man-pass-man, the land in which a man’s greatest enemies are members of his household; a land of kidnappers, of ritual killers, of policemen who bully those they encounter on the road and shoot those who don’t bribe them, of leaders who treat those they lead with contempt and rob them of their commonwealth, of frequent riots and crisis, of long strikes, of petrol shortages, of joblessness, of clogged gutters, of potholed roads…and of constant power outages”.

    I am sure we all know this land, which Chi used the chi to talk about. But my concerns today are my take away from my Monday evening chat with Chi— a first-class student at the Cyprus International University, where he won a scholarship for a second degree and stayed back to lecture before America beckoned. At 27, his novel The Fishermen, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shook the literary community. Now at 33, he is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His An Orchestra of Minorities, in my view, has the potential to do better than The Fishermen.

    For someone with these sterling records, you will expect Chi’s head to swell like Ijebu gari. But no, he acknowledges the fact that luck had a role in his achievements in life.

    He says: “I have classmates; we went to this elite school top programme in creative writing and I was like the only one who sold my book, even from the set before us. Then there is this girl who just sold hers, and there is another about to sell hers. That is out of about 22 people. Some of them are working in McDonald now, getting very low pay but they are fantastic writers.  Not everybody is going to succeed in that…You need luck.”

    Another takeaway from our encounter is that art endures more than anything else. That is why he believes the first focus of any work of art should be the artistry. “Fiction, for me, is a lot of things. It is a story but it is also how you tell the story. For instance, everybody can draw, but what makes a great painter is the light, the colour, the shades brought to the drawing. 200 people can draw a portrait of you, but one will stand out and people will say this is a work of art.”

    He adds: “I think it is a mistake when you just set out to pursue an agenda. Artistry should be the focus. If not, you end up writing propaganda and I see that a lot. True it can get you a lot of money and fame because everybody is politically wired, but it will not endure in the end. What endures in the most is the art.”

    This quest for enduring art has created a problem for him. The problem is that he is always on the lookout for ways, other than the traditional, to tell stories. No wonder he wrote an over 500-page long novel in which the narrator is the chi. “I don’t like to tell stories in a traditional way so I am always thinking of an invention.”

    Those who have read Chi’s essay, The Audacity of Prose, will not be surprised about his ‘disdain’ for the traditional.

    “The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world. That is, the language acts to give the “ordinary” the kind of artistic clarity that is the equivalent of special effects in film. While the special effect can be achieved by manipulating various aspects of the novel, such as the structure, voice, setting, and others, the language is the most malleable of all of them. All these can hardly be achieved with sparse, strewn-down prose that mimics silence,” he argued in that essay for The Millions.

    I left Labule restaurant in Ogudu-GRA, Lagos that Monday with the feeling that pursuing one’s passion and standing for what you believe are enduring virtues. Before studying in Cyprus, Chi was at a private university in Enugu. But, his chi led him away from the place, which he saw as a time-waster. “I did Economics in a Nigerian private university in Enugu but it was a complete waste of my time. I left there because I was always protesting and they were going to throw me out.” His chi led him to Cyprus where his star shone and soon America saw it and liked it and we are all reaping the goodness through The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities and more to come.

    He also struck me as very principled. Or, how do you see someone who pulled his book from a dollar-denominated prize because he felt the sponsor was causing havoc to the people?

    My final take: I love the fact that Chi also put to good use the interesting dynamics of his childhood. He is the fifth of twelve children. Their home in Akure, the Ondo State capital, was noisy. As a recluse, he would always hide and books provided him safe havens. This Chi, who speaks Yoruba, Igbo, English and Turkish, started reading as early as six years of age. And the more he read the more he discovered he could also write. Noise thus produced a world-class writer. What this means is that we can always make something of whatever situation we find ourselves.

  • Chigozie Obioma: writing is a gamble, not vocational

    In An Orchestra of Minorities, the narrator speaks of “the land of lack, of man-pass-man, the land in which a man’s greatest enemies are members of his household; a land of kidnappers, of ritual killers, of policemen who bully those they encounter on the road and shoot those who don’t bribe them, of leaders who treat those they lead with contempt and rob them of their commonwealth, of frequent riots and crisis, of long strikes, of petrol shortages, of joblessness, of clogged gutters, of potholed roads…and of constant power outages”. ASSOCIATE EDITOR OLUKOREDE YISHAU spends time with the 33-year-old author, Chigozie Obioma, in Lagos:

    Chigozie Obioma, author of the Booker Prize shortlisted The Fishermen and the wave-making An Orchestra of Minorities, has a problem: He hates telling stories the traditional way. This problem led Obioma, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska, to write an over 500-page long novel in which the narrator is the chi, the guiding spirit in Igbo cosmology. “I don’t like to tell stories in a traditional way so I am always thinking of an invention,” he says in a restaurant in Ogudu-GRA, Lagos.

    The chi tells us the story of Nonso, a poultry farmer, and Ndali— set largely in Umuahia, slightly in Lagos and Abuja, and a lot in Cyprus. Nonso, a 24-year-old lonely orphan, sees Ndali trying to jump off a bridge into water. He persuades her against it. To show how painful it will be, he flings two of his prized fowls into the water.

    She rescinds her decision and both of them go their separate ways. They run into each other months later. Ndali feels she owes him her life. He is to find out that heartbreak was responsible for her attempted suicide. A relationship soon starts and before long, Nonso feels like marrying Ndali and tells her his plan. And then begins the real drama of their lives.

    Ndali’s father is rich, stupendously rich, and finds it difficult to accept an illiterate poultry farmer as son-in-law. Through Ndali’s brother, Chuka, Nonso is humiliated a couple of times. The humiliation gets him thinking and talking with Ndali and a friend, Elochukwu, and in the long run, he discovers that getting an education may swing things in his favour.

    Another dilemma sets in: with universities in Nigeria ever on strike, he wonders how many years it will take to complete a degree. Still, he picks the matriculation form, but soon opts for the option of selling his valuables and heading abroad for studies. Everything appears set until he gets to Cyprus and discovers he has been scammed.

    Cyprus turns out hellish. Passers-by call him “slave”. He is mistaken for the Brazilian football star Ronaldinho, and the jealous husband of an expatriate nurse from Germany who helps him turns things upside down. He turns out one of the minorities in faraway land and his shouts for help or his cries for bailout sound more like an orchestra without efficacious power. Returning home only aggravates things. And a lot more sad events follow!

    An Orchestra of Minorities is the story of the power of love, the sacrifice a man or a woman is ready to make for love not to suffocate and die. It is a wrestle between destiny and determination. It is rich in folklore and it is a morality tale, with betrayal and revenge as major themes.

    This tragicomedy is far more ambitious than Obioma’s critically acclaimed debut The Fishermen. No one knows you better than your guardian spirit, and using this all-seeing spirit as the narrator gives Obioma the opportunity to tell it all despite the fact that the narration is in first person. The omniscient nature of the chi also gives Obioma the leverage to dwell in the spiritual realm, such that parts of the book read like magical realism.

    We see the spirit taking leave of the host’s body to spy. We see the chi putting thoughts in the host’s mind in order to influence his actions. We see chis of two beings having a chit-chat. We also see a ghost crying in a bus pleading against a marriage on account that the suitor is a murderer.

    Of course, the one the ghost is speaking to cannot hear, only the chi does. And we see the chi at times helpless while Nonso faces the adversities of life.
    The novel, Obioma says, was inspired by the death of a Nigerian, Jay, while he was studying in Cyprus for a degree. He says: “The guy whose story inspired the novel, why did he so badly want to get out of the country? He had been deported from Germany, then hardly had he come back to Nigeria that he wanted to badly to get out.

    “People walk through Sahara Desert, through Libya at a time when ISIS was beheading people. They saw this but still they were undeterred. It is because it is almost as if Nigeria is a hellfire. Why will you so badly want to leave?”

    Jay, says Obioma, came to Cyprus because of a woman he was betrothed to. He needed to make money to be able to give her the best in life.

    Unlike Chinonso, Obioma has had a pretty good life. He grew up in a home with twelve children. His banker-father ignited his love for reading in Akure, the capital of Ondo State, where he learnt first to speak Yoruba before speaking Igbo and English. He would later learn Turkish while in Cyprus.

    The very interesting dynamics in the house, he believes, made him a writer: “I was not the very playful type. So, I sought a sort of privacy through reading. Reading was an escape from the noise. It was very early in life that I develop interest in reading and writing.

    “When I learnt how to read was very early, probably six or seven. And then I discovered that stories go into books. Once I made that discovery, the more I read and the more I read, the more I quietly wanted to produce my own work.”

    Because of the metaphysics in his works, some people, he says, have been asking what they should call his type of writing. “It is not fantasy. It is reality and it is also not at the same time. I guess for me I just begin from the principle, from the world view of the Igbo that there is no difference between the world of the living and the dead. I think even the Yoruba and the Edo people have such belief, which was what Ben Okri used in Famished Road.

    “You could have extremely realistic thing happening with interference from the metaphysical world. I think it is unique. You see it in our films because that is our reality. A novel as a genre is European.

    “The first novel was Spanish. You have free will in the Western tradition and agency. A character has to have a motivation and that motivation spurs him. I do it because I believe it is a form of reality,” he says.

    Obioma believes the first focus of any work of art should be the artistry. “Fiction, for me, is a lot of things. It is a story but it is also how you tell the story. For instance, everybody can draw, but what makes a great painter is the light, the colour, the shades brought to the drawing. 200 people can draw a portrait of you, but one will stand out and people will say this is a work of art.”

    He adds: “For me, the concept is very important. For the Fishermen, the way the story is told is to have Benjamin as an eccentric narrator who tried to understand things by associating it with something else. The father is an eagle, the mother is a snake, the brother is a sparrow, stuffs like that.

    “For An Orchestra of Minorities, the concept is through the chi telling the story, being so being loquacious, going on tangent, sometimes, for a long time because he is trying to defend something difficult to defend. Instead of telling the story directly, it is going on this digression to convince Chukwu not to punish his host.

    “There is also the issue of classicism, which we experienced in Cyprus, the way they treat Nigerians, Africans and all that.

    I think it is a mistake when you just set out to pursue an agenda. Artistry should be the focus. If not, you end up writing propaganda and I see that a lot. True it can get you a lot of money and fame because everybody is politically wired, but it will not endure in the end. What endures in the most is the art.”

    Before studying in Cyprus, a private university in Enugu was where Obioma first tried to have tertiary education. “I did Economics in a Nigerian private university in Enugu but it was a complete waste of my time. I left there because I was always protesting and they were going to throw me out.”

    Obioma believes in luck. He says: “Writing is not vocational. It is a gamble. I have classmates; we went to this elite school top programme in creative writing and we graduated and even the set before me, I was like the only one who sold my book.

    “Then there is this girl now who just sold hers and there is another about to sell hers. That is out of about 22 people. Some of them are working in McDonalds now, getting very low pay but they are fantastic writers.

    “Not everybody is going to succeed in that. But being in academia also helps because I have time for research and there is a research fund and they pay for everything. Not everybody will have that opportunity because it is very competitive. You need luck.”

    It is for this reason that he always advises his students to not rely on writing alone: “You have a soft landing like tortoise has. If you are a successful lawyer and you sell your novel for a million dollars, fine and good.”

    With the success of The Fishermen, Obioma can live off it, “but there is a twist to it because there are so many dependants asking for money. If it were just for me and my immediate family, I will be fine without having to do any other work, but I am still teaching”.
    But there is a price to pay for remaining in the academia: “There are so many invitations that I cannot accept because of my being in the academia unlike (Chimamanda) Adichie who can go anywhere.”

    But he has no regret because “teaching develops you as well because you are reading a lot of works that are embryonic, in their early forms and the more you read the works of these future great writers, when you see the pitfalls in their work and you follow through to see them improve, the more you are immune to making those mistakes in your own work”.

    He is also happy affecting a lot of people: “Over the next five years, I would have taught some 2,000 students and those will keep buying your books and they will always remember what you did. I think one can even form even a solid base from doing that.”

    He says he may consider teaching one semester a year so as to have more time for public speaking, which he is bound to get invites for now that he has published a powerful sophomore whose Nigerian edition has just been published by Parresia Publishers.

    The United Kingdom and American editions came out earlier and foreign rights have been sold in several countries. Soon Nonso and Ndali will speak French, speak Chinese, speak German and so on and so forth.