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I didn’t start life
as a voracious reader, in the way that the average member of the Lagos
literati supposedly did. I didn’t hear about the character named
Bambulu in James Ene Henshaw’s ‘This is Our Chance’, like most people
of my age seem to have done. I wasn’t the most passionate member of the
debating society at Baptist Academy. I didn’t belong to the Press Club
at the Federal School of Arts and Science. I picked up the idea of
writing sometime in the course of studying at the University of Ife;
after the German culture activist Ulli Beier came to give a lecture on
Duro Ladipo and discovered, a few months later, that ‘Lagos Weekend’
paid 25 naira for published articles. “The proceeds” helped pay for my
final year Geochemistry project on Laterisation (the creation of those
red soils that form the sub grade in tropical roads).

One thing led to the other and the last time I checked, my arts column has been 21 years in the running.

To write about 10
Nigerian works of literature I found most memorable in my 50 years of
life is thus a way of presenting a slice of my biography:

Burning Grass:

I read this in
Class 2 in Baptist Academy (read Age 13). It’s the only Nigerian text I
read in my teens whose basic message has stuck with me. This is the
story of a man who wanders aimlessly from village to village, having
been struck by Sokugo, the wandering disease. I don’t know if Cyprian
Ekwensi, who ordinarily tells simple stories without trying to hammer
in a sermon, meant that this should be about living a life of purpose,
but whenever I evaluate my contributions to my immediate environment,
in the 50 years I have hung around this earth, I am always hoping I
haven’t lived like the protagonist in this slim novel.

Season Of Anomy:

Wole Soyinka’s
second novel, published in 1973. This was my introduction into
‘literary enthusiasm’, so to speak. Three years after graduation,
having worked for The Guardian, and now at ThisWEEK, a news magazine, I
did more of film reviews (pre-Nollywood Nigerian, celluloid based
movies), visual art appraisals, some (very little) literature reviews
and a lot of evaluation of stage and TV drama content and trends. But I
needed to do more book reading, if I wanted to be a rounded arts
writer, I was warned. So I borrowed Niyi Obaremi’s copy of ‘Season of
Anomy’ and read it specifically for finding out for myself the so
called obscurantism in the typical Soyinka work. It was heavy going,
but I enjoyed the flow. It provided quite a very gory picture of the
pogrom, but it wasn’t so much the detail, but the language – the
cadences, the imagery – like linking a paunch with rolls of Amala. You
don’t exactly read a work like this, it happens to you.

On A Darkling Plain by Ken Saro-Wiwa:

This is one of
those non-fiction books which I found most illuminating about the
National Question. I started reading this type of work, at the turn of
the last decade of the last century (the 90s for short), more out of
the wish to be a front row witness in the unfolding of the Nigerian
drama. These ‘minutes of the last meeting’ kind of books are always
being written by other people about us. So it’s always welcome when a
Nigerian does it and does it in a properly structured literary style.
On A Darkling Plain is a long, extended, rigorously delivered argument
against the Nigerian Civil War. You can’t always agree with the
author’s opinion (I found ludicrous the length to which Saro Wiwa wants
to go to declare that the Ikwerres are non-Igbos, especially as I have
read Elechi’ Amadi’s ‘The Concubine’ and ‘Slave’ and found the lore so
close to the basic societal order in ‘Things Fall Apart’ and ‘Arrow of
God’).

Roots In The Sky, by Akin Adesokan:

I read the
manuscript of this book at around the time I decided that the way to
truly find out as much as I could about Nigerian literature was to
start reading ANA award winners, especially those works which won in
the Prose Fiction category. I was amazed at the task the author set for
himself. He packed in: History (it’s about three generations of a
Nigerian family from pre-independence to the 90s); Poetry (the author
swerves into long verses, chanting); a city’s subculture ( a vivid
portrayal of the underbelly); linguistics (there’s a gush of words by
one character in Pidgin spread over three pages). I was awed by the
perpetual storytelling and the effort at turning phrases around.

Anthills Of The Savannah, by Chinua Achebe:

This is a very
different Achebe from the one I’d come to know. I somehow found some
similarity with ‘The Interpreters’ in terms of temperament. This book
reads like a discursive argument, about power and its intoxication.
It’s a theme Achebe had explored in ‘A Man Of The People’, but this is
an updating because it fits with the emerging tendencies in the novel
form around the 70s to 80s, that novels can be written, more like a
conversation, than like a story that starts from A and ends at Z.

Conduct Unbecoming by TM Aluko:

While everyone
insists that Cyprian Ekwensi is the dominant spinner of yarns about
Lagos, I find ‘Conduct Unbecoming’ an instructive portrait of life in
the city in the immediate post-independence era; the mentality behind
the take-over of the famous Public Transportation company owned by a
Greek businessman; the sneer (by the Lagos elites) as the last
remaining British public servants insisted on adherence to city code in
building construction and destroyed illegal structures. This sort of
novel is good for a journalist, because it provides a context. It shows
how everything started to crumble.

Arrows Of Rain by Okey Ndibe:

This is an onion of
a story, you read one story – it leads you to another, which leads to
another. It’s an utterly beautiful storytelling and like ‘Roots in the
Sky’, it tackles the Nigerian political landscape through three
generations of a single family. It ends with a twist.

Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta:

This book grabbed
me because it reads like the story of my life; growing up in Lagos.
It’s the first book I ever read where someone depicts childhood exactly
as I lived it and the scene in Ikoyi Park, even though on the dark
side, reminds me of what we enjoyed, holidaying every Easter in what
has been mercilessly sand-filled and renamed Parkview. It’s one of the
joys, like the view of the Lagoon while driving along Oyinkan Abayomi
Drive, that has been snatched from the majority of us by a few.

My favourite 2010 reads are “minutes of the last meeting” types:

You Must Set Forth
At Dawn by Wole Soyinka: is a feisty account of one man’s exciting
journey through the world over a course of 30 years. It’s not a
chronological reading but you can fix the beginning at around 1960 and
end it at 1994. It’s the entire story of key global concerns in those
years and how one man engages all through personal and public
interactions.

When Citizens Revolt:

Ike Okonta uses
the Ogoni tragedy to attempt an explanation about why access to power
at the Federal level is still important to every ethnic unit in the
country. The Ogonis were citizens in the pre-independence era, who
became subjects as the colonial project took hold, and muzzled their
most enterprising individuals out of the economic mainstream. Like many
other nationalities in the Nigerian agglomeration, they are still
subjects even in a democratic environment run by Nigerians.

Toyin Akinosho is Publisher of Africa Oil+Gas Report