 Again, for those of you who weren't in the first session, my name is Stephen Klingman. I'm a professor of English and also director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute. We had a wonderful first session with talks by Esther Terry and Janetta Cole and equipment Michael Thelwell and no doubt there are questions out there in the audience and we hope the conversation will continue. I've been asked by Ronda Cobham-Sander at Amherst College to announce that there'll be, that Bingewanga Waianana will be with us next week and there'll be a facilitated conversation on Wednesday morning with him from 8 to 10 a.m. in the Frost Library and then a reading again at Amherst College in Fairweather Hall on Wednesday 21st October at 6 p.m. So there's a lot going on and the World Studies Interdisciplinary Program has wonderful things coming up next week so there's a lot going on on this campus at present. So welcome to our first panel discussion featuring Oké and de Be, Carol Phillips and Chico Onigue. It's a session entitled, It is the Storyteller who makes us what we are and if you look in your program you will see that each session has a particular phrase or sentence associated with it and most of those are direct quotations from Chino Achebe. One of them is a sort of paraphrase but it captures the spirit of something occurring in one of Chino Achebe's novels. There's a kind of, you can test yourself. You can see whether you know where those quotations come from. My plan here is not to say too much about our distinguished panelists. I'd rather hear from them than about them but I do want to say that we're honored to have them here today and again if you weren't in the first session our aim is to commemorate Chino Achebe's remarkable lecture 40 years ago but also to hear from contemporary voices and that's the direction that we begin to move in at the moment. And two of our writers, at least two, will have known Chino Achebe directly and all of them will have been deeply influenced by the parts opened up by his legacy. I'll plan to say just a few words about all of them, all three in a row, and then they will take it in turns to come up and speak for 15 to 20 minutes and then we'll plan to have time for Q&A afterwards. So I'll begin with Okende Bair, who's the author of the novels Arrows of Rain and Foreign Gods, Inc., a truly wonderful novel, Foreign Gods, Inc., both of them are wonderful but Foreign Gods, Inc. was really widely celebrated, named as one of the top 10 or most remarkable books of 2014 by numbers of sources including NPR and The New York Times. Okende Bair worked for many years as an editorial writer for the Hartford Current where he was a prize winning journalist and he's written also for The New York Times, BBC Online, Al Jazeera Online and The Financial Times. Key point here and I'll try to say something personal about each of these writers is that Okende has a double connection with the symposium and with Amherst, one because he came to Amherst at the invitation of Chinoachebe to be the founding editor of African commentary which Chinoachebe published. Yes. And secondly, equally praiseworthy, he earned both his MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst indeed from our department, the English department. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was on and may have chaired both of his committees so I won't claim his work as my own but it is a special pleasure to welcome Okende back and to hear the unusual perspectives he will have. Carol Phillips also a particular pleasure to have him here. Carol Phillips was born in St. Kitts but grew up mostly in Leeds in the north of England and later attended Oxford University. He's become since then and this is my view one of the most significant writers of our time and that's not only my view, but many others as well. With ten quite remarkable novels to date including Cambridge, The Nature of Blood, A Distant Shore and his most recent work, The Lost Child, a remarkable work. He's also a prolific essay writer and his nonfiction volumes include The European Tribe, The Atlantic Sound, A New World Order and Color Me English. Actually, the title piece of which he gave as a presentation in this very room in 2010 if I recall correctly. His work has been translated into more than a dozen language and he's won numerous awards including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. I've known Carol Phillips ever since he was a writer in residence at Amherst College, I've written on his work, I've interviewed him. When we first conceived the symposium I knew that he would be a perfect speaker for it. We're really happy to welcome you here, Kaz. Then I have to say that I met Chico Negue for the first time today so I haven't known her personally, but I do know her through her work and what I know is enthralling. Ms. Negue was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She has degrees from the University of Nigeria and the Catholic University of Leuven. She also holds a PhD from the University of Leiden in Holland. She's the author of three novels including On Black Sister Street published in 2009 and then republished in 2011 and Night Dancer published in 2012. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals and her works have been translated into various languages including German, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Dutch. As I say, I've come to know Chico Negue through her work. Some of you will know it too and if you don't know it yet then you'll soon have the pleasure of being introduced to a writer of rare perception, clarity and insight. So welcome to all three and what we'll do now is that we'll begin with OK. He will come up and speak for 10 to 20 minutes followed by Karen Phillips and then Chico and then we'll have Q&A at the table over there. Thanks. Good afternoon. We're going to do better than this. Good afternoon. Much better. Actually this is part of a cultural prescription. I come from a culture where you can't begin to address any audience without offering salutation. And if you gave a greeting and you didn't get a response that would be a very polite way of saying to you, take a hike. So I always make sure that I'm welcome to speak. This is for me particularly an extraordinary and moving event, but one that also makes me nervous because as Professor Klingman rightly said, he and several of the other members of faculty at this great university were responsible for my education. So when you stand up before your teachers to speak, there is that sense of trepidation that perhaps you will fall short and therefore disappoint them. Michael Thirlwell, who gave a wonderful keynote. I consider a great teacher. And there are a number of you here who were part of my intellectual and creative formation. Chinua Chebe, I did not have the privilege of taking any classes with, but I actually tell people that Chinua Chebe was my greatest teacher. And so when Professor Klingman asked me to propose sort of the focus of my talk, I suggested the Kola Knot that Chinua Chebe gave me. The Kola Knot that Chinua Chebe gave me. Those of you who are here when Professor Roland Abiodu gave a wonderful invocation will remember what he said, that the Kola Knot is a quintessential storyteller in Igbo tradition. I'm very fortunate to be Igbo just like Chinua Chebe. When somebody visits you, you give the person a Kola Knot, but to eat in your home, let one always to take home. And what the person says is that when the Kola Knot gets home, it will tell its story. And so the Kola Knot becomes a provocation to narrative. Once somebody returns from a journey, he calls together his friends because Kola Knot is also a knot of communion. You don't eat it alone. You eat it with your friends in a community. So you gather your friends and you say I went to visit my great friend Stephen Klingman and he gave me this Kola Knot. So what I propose to do really is in the tradition of storytelling to sort of describe the trajectory of my intellectual and creative formation and how Chinua Chebe was seminal in that process. And I'm going to do this as a writer, as a storyteller through stories. So I first met Chinua Chebe when I was in high school, secondary school, we called it in Nigeria. And of course we were lucky, we were fortunate. I was actually the first set in Nigeria to be allowed to read for our school certificate exams African literature. Our predecessors were exposed mostly to Victorian literature. So as my time came, they offered us African literature on the curriculum. And so I was, I had read things for the first time in a formal setting, I encountered things for the part again. And so one day during the holiday I was doing what young men do, hanging out by the roadside. And we saw from the distance a rather remarkable car come in in our direction. It was a blue car, it was huge. And so we became attentive. As the car passed us, we looked and saw that it was Chinua Chebe driving an American maker, a monarch. And so in different to danger, we jumped onto the road and began to wave at him. And we saw him raise his hand in acknowledgement. Chebe had made our week. So every, this was a Saturday. So every Saturday we'll come to the roadside and just hang out there hoping that Chinua Chebe will be passing. And some weeks we were lucky. We'll see Chebe now from the distance. We recognize the car and the color. So we'll start waving before he actually passed us. Then one day I was just wandering around alone, passing a gas station. And this time where I lived, and here was Chinua Chebe buying fuel. And so again with great dread, I walked up him and I said good afternoon sir. And he said good afternoon. So I ran back to my friends and I said, I will be waving to Chinua Chebe today. I met him in flesh and blood. I said good afternoon to him and he responded. So I saw them notice that for the next two weeks I wasn't going to talk to anybody else. Several years later as a fresh college graduate, I went and just finished college. I got a job with a concord newspaper. And I was to resume, take up the position in about a couple of weeks. So I was seeing friends and I went to visit a friend who was from Ogidi Chinua Chebe's hometown. And I kept waving. I said look I wish I were from Ogidi so that I could claim Chinua Chebe as my own. And so this woman looked at me with right amusement and she said do you know that Chinua Chebe is my uncle? I said you don't mean it. And she said in fact his house is around the corner. I said you don't mean it. And she said and his home this weekend would you want to meet him? So she took me to Chinua Chebe's home. I still remember the Coca-Cola that Chinua Chebe offered me. Some kind of cola, European cola right? And some cookies. So I told her that I had just finished college and I got a job with a magazine and that my dream would be to interview him. I had read everything he'd written several times over. So I Chebe gave me his number at the University of Nigeria where he was a professor then and said anytime you're ready call me. So I came to Lagos to take up the position and I told the editor that I had met Chinua Chebe and he would give me an interview. So he said to me that's your first assignment. So the magazine sent me out, flew me out to Enugu. I booked an interview with Chebe and we met at his office at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria and for almost three hours I kept asking questions and the tape recorder was picking it all up. Then I returned to Enugu and some of my friends came to my hotel room, hotel presidential, wanted to listen to Chebe's voice. I was happy to share. So I pressed play and there was silence. I went forward, pressed play again, not a word. I had interviewed Chebe for close to three hours and I didn't have one word from his mouth to prove it. So in panic I called him. I said, I'm sorry I wasted all your time but the interview that you gave me I didn't get one word from it. And I was so in awe as the man spoke that I didn't even take notes. I was just looking at him. So I said, could I come back tomorrow? I said, just give me 20 minutes because I know I wasted your time. 20 minutes will suffice because if I went back to Lagos without any interview at all I would lose my job even before it started. And those of you who met at Chebe in life knew that he was such a generous and gracious man. And that Chebe said to me, I can't do it tomorrow but if you can come the day after tomorrow I'll give you as much time as you wanted. So I had to borrow money to stay another couple of extra days at the hotel because the money that the magazine gave me had run out. Then I ran around and borrowed two other tape recorders. Sai was Andrew Tree. And I went two days later and that Chebe gave me as much time as I wanted. So Chinua Chebe saved my professional career. Not only did he do this but he became a champion of my work. I was flattered that Chebe would write to me from time to time and say, a poem of mine has been said to music. He'll send me a letter to that effect. So I'll write up a story in the papers. And so in 1988 I was working for the Guardian, African Guardian a weekly magazine in Lagos. One day I came to work and the secretary said, oh Chinua Chebe called you from the US. He said you should call him back. So I called the Chebe back and he says, is there a private place where I could have a conversation with you? I said yes. So I gave him, we didn't have cell phones in those days. So I had a friend who had a business. So I gave him a number. So Chebe on their appointed day told me that he and some other friends had decided to set up a magazine in America and he had proposed me as a founding editor of the magazine. So Chinua Chebe brought me to this country to edit this magazine. And in bringing me he then offered me this great harvest both of knowledge and of people. And a lot of the people that I know today I knew from my days as an editor of African commentary. And some of the people in this room were indeed editorial columnists for the magazine, especially somebody like Michael Thelwell. And so the magazine came to this country and it's important because Michael Thelwell and I were outside a moment ago answering questions about the continuing depiction of Africa in very unfluttering terms. Chebe recognized this and Chebe recognized that it was his place to do something about it. Hence his investment in this magazine, African commentary. Well, the magazine won prizes in this country. It was chosen by Otna Rida, the library journal as one of the best magazines that came out in America. But we were not able to impress the publishing industry. I mean the advertising industry in New York. So when we looked for advertisement, we were told that black people don't reach serious magazines. You guys are too intellectual, so you are bound to fail. And that became self-fulfilling prophecy because they would not support the magazine with advertising dollars. The magazine after a while at Chebe and the other investors who were almost exclusively professors, academics who didn't have a lot. The magazine had to fold. So after I folded, one day I ran into John Edgar Weidman in the center of town. And John looked at me and said, so now that the magazine is no longer in operation, what are you planning to do? I didn't know, so I confessed that I didn't know what my next plans were. And looking at me intensely in the eye, he said to me, you are working on a novel, right? I wasn't working on a novel. But the way he asked the question, I somehow felt that it was imperative that the answer better be yes. So I said yes. So he said to me, Mike Farewell and I have been talking about perhaps getting you into UMass to do a program. Why don't you get me 15 to 20 pages of your manuscript and let's see if we can get you into the MFA program? Well, I lied myself into writing. So that night, I began to write, scribbling something that I didn't know what I had resembled a novel or novel. But the following week, I sent 23 pages that I had come up with. And the only thing really that I fell back on was the fact that I had been well educated in my reading of Chinua Chabeh's work, in my reading of the incomparable harvest that is the African writer series. So that whole tradition was what informed, what became my first novel, Arrows of Rain. And in the acknowledgement page of that novel, I thanked Chinua Chabeh for opening my eyes to the beauty of our stories. And it was a heartfelt acknowledgement and compliment. Well, so two days later, Jeanette Gawite Mann called me and he said, wow, I really find what you produced captivating and fascinating. He said, wow, so it resembled fiction after all. And so he said, we'll see, you'd have to take your GRE and Esther Terry was part of that whole process, actually. I remember, but I was able to get admission to study for my MFA in the English apartment on the passport of wonderful people that Chinua Chabeh had introduced to me through the work that he invited me to come to this country to do. And so again, when I was invited to speak and Professor Klingman said, every person will speak for 15 minutes. I said, aha, I'm somebody who is usually constitutionally incapable of brevity. But when the subject is Chinua Chabeh, I tell people when Chinua Chabeh died, an interviewer called me and said, what is the one thing that you must, one quality about Chinua Chabeh that you must remember. And I said that Chabeh was a wise and eloquent man. But I said, Chabeh was a man who never wasted one word. When I Chabeh gave a lecture, if the lecture was written in 2000 words, it would be impossible for any editor, the best editor in the world to remove one word. I Chabeh did not waste words because I Chabeh treasured words. And he realized the importance, the power, the potency of words, the importance of language. And he used language in the most effective way. I Chabeh did not have Kant in him. I Chabeh did not have affectation for his own sake. I Chabeh was not a writer who was interested in lying. A lot of times it is when we want to lie that we become extremely verbose because you have to garnish and embellish and embroider lies. When you tell the truth, you tell it in exactly the number of words that it takes to tell the truth. And so, I stand here today in celebration of Chabeh who years ago as a high school student gave me that colonnade of a great literary tradition. Gave me that powerful colonnade of encouraging me to have to claim the voice for telling my own story. Thank you, Chinua Chabeh for making it possible for me to realize that a novel could begin with the words or conquer was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. That is fame rested on solid personal achievement that as a young man of 18, he brought honor to his village by throwing Amalindze the cat. That Amalindze was a great wrestler who for eight years was unbeaten for Mon Morphia tombina. That he was called the cat because his back would never touch the earth and so on and so forth. I would not have imagined that Amalindze the cat which was part of the folklore that we grew up on. Again, one was fortunate. I tell people that I was fortunate not to have TV growing up. And so every night after dinner, my parents or some uncle or aunt will sit the children on the floor and tell us a folk tale. If I had been left to my own knowledge, I would never have known that those folk tales could be transported to the world of great literature. He took Achebe's magic, Achebe's extraordinary and incomparable imagination to bring that truth back to me, home to me. And so, I don't know how much time I've got. Am I out of time? Okay. I've actually on occasion been known, and maybe today is gonna be one of those rare occasions since Achebe was a man who never wasted a word, right? How about in his memory, in his honor, I leave some time on the table? How about that? Thank you very much. Good afternoon. It works. First of all, I'd like to thank Stephen Klingman and everybody associated with the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute for this invitation to speak today. As Stephen mentioned five years ago, I spent a wonderful week here in residence at the Institute and at the end of the week, I resolved to try and learn from the experience and step outside of the departmental box in which I usually hide in my case an English departmental box. I think I've done a little of this, but probably not enough. But whatever I've done has been in great part led by the example of this Institute. So thank you, Stephen. I know this is a panel discussion, a panel session, and I don't want to take up too much time as the focus is supposed to be on discussion. But I do want to say a few things about Chinua Achebe, which hopefully resonates somewhat with our title. It is a storyteller who makes us see what we are. I've been thinking about this title and have come to the conclusion that in the case of Chinua Achebe, he was also a storyteller who made us see who we are, or at least he certainly did in my case. I make the distinction between what and who as a way of suggesting that a personal encounter with him is likely to engender a transformation that's at least as profound as one we might receive by reading the remarkable body of his work. He was such an extraordinarily charismatic man and having had the privilege of knowing him a little, I would like to speak about both what we are because of his example and more specifically who we are or who I am because of personal encounter. First, Chinua Achebe is a storyteller whose very existence made it possible for a whole generation of writers to imagine that it might be possible for them to begin to think of themselves as writers. From 1958 onwards, his face was there on book jackets in the newspaper columns as part of an ongoing global literary conversation and he established a presence at a very young age for a writer. As we know, things fall apart, quickly became a worldwide publishing sensation. Not too long afterwards, there was a canonical intervention as syllabi and university courses had to be sometimes reluctantly cantilevered into new shapes and groupings to include Achebe and his work and the work of others like him. His example was audacious and it was bold but it was extremely important for writers need elders. They need to be able to see those who have gone before them who have established a presence. Without rehearsing the details of the emergence of African literature in the West, it's clear that somebody had to kick open the heavy forbidden door to the literary and publishing world and make it possible for others to imagine that there might also be a place for them to come inside and sit down at the table and participate and we know full well who that man was. Chinwa Achebe knew from very early on that he bore a great responsibility for he was part of a generation of writers in English which includes Derek Walcott and Guggy Wattyonga, Wale Shayinka, Wilson Harris, George Lamming amongst many others who had to develop equal fluency in both imaginative and critical writing for they were having to write themselves into visibility. They all chose fiction and non-fiction. It was a generation in which it was pointless to make a distinction between the validity of both because both were crucial as these writers tried hard to invent themselves. Achebe of course famously took an extra step as the editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series and was responsible for ushering over 100 books into print. Achebe understood his solemn responsibility to others both past and present but he was fully aware that others would come after him and he was assiduously clearing a space for them and he continued to do so throughout the length of his life and his career. That in a sense is the what we are. This storyteller certainly made all of us ordinary citizens and would be writer alike more clearly see both what we are and what we might become. When I think of the who we are the more personal relationship if you like I have to recognize appropriately enough given the timing of this present gathering that it was a chair based battle with Conrad that really forged whatever connection there was between us. We didn't overlap during the eight years that I spent teaching here in Amherst. I arrived in the fall of 1990 the same year that Chinua had his terrible car accident and nearly three years after the death of James Baldwin but the spirit of both writers was still very much in the UMass air. Their wisdom, their brilliance, their contribution I suppose the best word to use here would be legacy. The legacy of their tenure at UMass was being kept alive by stories of their lectures the classes they taught here by the accounts of those who had been fortunate enough to be their students by their colleagues and their friends principally of course by Professor Michael Thelwell. It would be over 10 years in fact not until early 2003 before I would finally have the privilege of meeting Chinua Achebe in person. The BBC in London asked me if I would agree to participate in a half hour film documentary with him which would involve my being an interviewer and with the focus being upon Achebe's life as a writer. Of course I said yes and readily agreed to drive up to Bard College with the director and whatever crew he brought with him from London. I also suggested that I arrange for a small group of my Barnard College students to travel up with another teacher in a minibus and therefore create a sort of informal seminar setting and providers with an audience. I assumed that Mr Achebe might enjoy the company of a group of young New York based undergraduates forgetting of course that he had plenty of undergraduates at Bard College to keep him company. But he graciously agreed to the proposal and the small caravan, my car and the minibus took off through the snow and full of eager anticipation we made the journey from Manhattan to Annandale on Hudson. As it transpired there were two parts to the day. The first involved shooting the filmed interview with him for the documentary which we eventually called The Power of Stories. We did the filming in his home in a rather cramped corner of the living room which was soon filled with eight or nine young women sitting cross-legged on the floor, notebooks in their laps and pens hovering eagerly. Christy, Mr Achebe's wife, had made sure that everybody had taken off their shoes and not walked snow into her house. And I still bristle with embarrassment realizing that I had probably been the chief, perhaps the only potential offender. For I remember her looking pointedly at me as she laid down the law. Anybody who has been involved in filming knows that it's a mind-bogglingly tedious process and requires great reservoirs of patience should you be the subject. As the director proceeded to rearrange the furniture in the Achebe household and plug out various appliances to free up sockets into which the crew might plug their own equipment, Chinua looked on with great vigilance and a butter-like calm and then asked me what exactly I thought we might talk about. I had been deliberately vague in my exchanges with both himself and the director, wanting to give him the space to set the agenda. However, being a very generous man, he in turn was reciprocating and letting me know that I should take things in whatever direction I wished. And so with the student seated at his feet, we began and spoke for what felt like hours, but was in fact a little more than an hour and a half, breaking off only to check that the film recording was working or for Chinua to have a sip of water. He hardly needs stating how mesmerizing he was, but what people who have never had the good fortune to know him probably don't realize is just how mischievously witty he could be. In fact, I love the opening of the essay that forms the basis of this symposium. I'll just read the first couple of lines. In the fall of 1974, I was walking one day from the English department of the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning, such as encouraged friendliness in passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said, no, I was a teacher. What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing or perhaps it was African history in a certain community college not far from here. He'd always surprised him, he went on to say, because he'd never thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time, I was walking much faster. Our good comedy requires good timing. And during the interview, I learned that Chinua was a master of the rhetorical pause. As he spoke, the students gawked and they scribbled in turn. He took his time with every question. He raised his finger to gently emphasize a point and he smiled to soften the blow of any corrective opinion he was about to deliver. It was clear that I was lucky to be in the presence of a master teacher. And appropriately enough, given our present location, the only other time I've ever felt this compulsion that I should sit, listen, and learn in the presence of another writer was when I first sat and talked with James Baldwin in the South of France back in the summer of 1983. Once the filmed interview was over and the adoring students had had their book signed and their photographs taken, they all trudged out into the snow. However, I continued to talk with Chinua and this time raised the subject of Conrad, who surprisingly enough had not been discussed in the film documentary. The BBC crew were ready to leave but it was clear to me that there was unfinished business. Chinua had more to say and so as the light began to fade, we moved to a more central part of the room and the second part of our encounter began. Without cameras rolling or students taking notes, now I was the student for I began scribbling in a notebook. I won't bore you with the details of the conversation for I made enough notes and my memory held up well enough for me to be able to write an essay about Achebe and Conrad, which was soon after published in the Guardian newspaper. But what I will say however, is that on that late wintry afternoon, our difference of opinion about Conrad seemed to revolve around the simple fact, well, not so simple actually, seemed to revolve around the fact that I was not an African and therefore I didn't take Heart of Darkness personally, which Chinua obviously did. The more I listened to Chinua talk, the more it became clear to me that the key to understanding Achebe on Conrad involves except in the notion that the essay is perhaps not so much about Conrad's opinions about African people as it is about Chinua's love and respect for his own people. I was listening to a man who had probably been an elder before he was out of short pants. And as he spoke, I remembered all the cultural apparatus, which as a black boy growing up in England had cast and set images of Africa in my own mind. That afternoon, I didn't change my opinion of Conrad, but I began to rethink my diasporan relationship to Africa and by extension to the whole African diasporan family. Suddenly it became a much more fractured and difficult familial relationship, less romantic, more nuanced and more challenging in all sorts of positive ways. Of course, I thereafter did what anybody would do in these circumstances and I began to read, reread all of Chinua Achebe's work. And I could clearly see his ongoing frustrations with Western media images of Africa, as well as his own impatience with Nigerian and African politics and the way in which some behaviors were contributing towards perpetuating negative images of Africa in the West. I read him on James Baldwin and his poignant memories of first reading Baldwin in the Nigeria of the 1960s and then finally meeting him in Florida in 1980. I was very powerfully struck by his account of his difficulties on meeting some African diasporan writers, particularly Ralph Ellison, with whom he clearly did not get on. And this in turn made me remember Chinua's anecdotes about V.S. Ngai Paul, who referred to always with a big smile on his face as my friend Ngai Paul. Re-reading Achebe made me realize that like every great teacher, everything he said to me on that late wintry afternoon had already been distilled and taken on board over many years of careful thinking and writing. Yet he presented it to me as though his conclusions had been provoked by being in conversation with me. And these conclusions have been freshly arrived at for my benefit. And of course they had not. But re-reading him and being reminded of this fact served only to make the encounter all the more precious. Two years later in 2005, I shared a platform with Chinua at the Royal Festival Hall in London. When we came out on stage, he received the tumultuous standing ovation which the director of the center later told me had never happened before for any other writer over a period of 50 years. What the upstanding audience didn't know was that I had absolutely no idea of what direction this evening's conversation might go in. For as we had hovered in the wings ready to go on, I had assumed that we would rehearse some of the issues that I had already talked with him about, principally of course, his long tussle with Heart of Darkness. As a stage manager's signal that we should step forward and into the light, I suggested this subject matter to him. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and he said, tonight we can talk about anything but not Conrad. Enough of Conrad. Good. Good afternoon. It's a privilege to be here. So I'd like to start by saying thank you to Professor Klingman and the ISI for having me here. But it's also a bit intimidating to stand here after Okay and Cal's have so eloquently spoken. Storytelling, this is a true story. In this story, the girl has tightly plated hair gathered on top of her head in an intricate style and decorated with a dozen multicolored bubbles. It looks like a miniature, brightly decorated Christmas tree. So we will call this girl Christmas. Christmas is eight years old or maybe nine. It doesn't matter. We're less concerned with the preciseness of our age than we are with the fact that she's a child. Another important fact about Christmas is this. She's a greedy reader with an appetite for books that stones even her own parents. And this appetite is encouraged not just by her parents, but by the numerous well-intentioned adults who surround her. Another important fact, this child, Christmas, her literary tastes haven't yet developed. Therefore, in addition to reading the, in it Blighton books, her parents bring back from holidays in London and America. She reads everything else she stumbles upon. The romance novels her older sister has discovered and reads sign and morning on her bed. The literature books her older siblings are prescribed by school to read. And the Ian Fleming Bond novels with long delightful titles that her brothers read while listening to Bob Marley and Uroy. And the books with beautiful black women on their covers, both stories of women with eyes like dolls, blue, red, green, hazel eyes, waiting to be riskilled by tall, dark, and by dark, I mean tanned nights in shining armor. A setting social aunt brings her. And on the day this story begins, the social aunt is visiting and as usual she has a book for Christmas. It's a small, well-thumbed book. On its cover is a striking, frightening illustration of a long-tailed, two-horned, charcoal black devil with glowing eyes and a three-pronged peach fork. As a child, as is the case with most people who become writers, I was a ferocious reader. I read everything from bread labels to newspapers in hospital waiting rooms. I had no literary fancies. My parents bought me age-appropriate books, but they were not the only ones who invested in my reading. And the danger in a young child reading indiscriminately is this. Sometimes they read things that are so unwieldy. They lie awake at night, pondering over them. Sometimes they read things that they cannot speak about that cause them brain trauma. Psychogenic amnesia, I think it's called. But psychogenic amnesia, like all amnesia, can be selective. You can forget the title of the book, but not that you stayed up many nights afterwards praying for your soul. Other for a long time, you believed the truths of that book. In this story, Christmas takes the book from the end and goes to her favorite reading spot, a long red couch under a framed, long-haired Jesus with benevolent blue eyes and hands spread out, calling all to his sacred heart. The heart is red and surrounded by rays of light. There is something comforting about the heart and about lying on the couch right under that heart. Christmas always feels safe on that couch. She ignores the cover which slightly unnerves her and begins to read. The book is more than 50 pages long and begins innocuously enough by quoting the book of Genesis. And on the sixth day, God created man saying, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. The book emphasizes that man was made in God's likeness. And God's likeness, as we see in illustrations of Jesus, one of which is above the girl's head, is Caucasian. And then the next chapters go on to tell the story of Cain and Abel and how Cain kills Abel out of jealousy and is punished by God with a mark on his forehead. So far, the story is familiar to the girl. And then, bam, the mark that Cain gets on his forehead signaling him out as a murderer and cursed for generations by God. Isn't really just a mark, as the girl has always thought, but a skin color. That mark is the black Cain. And that curse lives in every descendant of Cain. And these descendants are distinguishable, of course, by the color of their skin, according to the book that Christmas reads. And the author goes on to list all the tragedies that have befallen the black race, those descendants of Cain, from slavery to wars, bad government in Africa, as manifestations of the curse. The only thing Christmas is perhaps more passionate about than reading and writing is her soul. She wants more than anything to go to heaven in the future, where she's been told that there'll be an abundance of walls, vanilla ice cream, and rooms full of books. And now she's reading that no matter how good she is, no matter how hard she tries, her soul is already doomed. There is no saving her, he seems, from perdition. I was raised in a very strict Catholic home, and the tussle for our souls was between the devil and my parents. And my parents were determined to win. And so everything, or almost everything, was censored. If the wrong kind of music came on the radio, it was turned off. And at a certain point, salt and peppers, let's talk about sex, baby, was my favorite. So let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about you and me. But the only way I could think about it was to replace sex with bread. So I'll go, let's talk about bread, baby. Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things we could bake, you know. They did my mother quote one of my sisters, wearing a t-shirt with the print, fantastic in dark places. My sister got two choices. To bring the shirt or to iron over the print. My sister, who liked the shirt for the image of one of her favorite bands on its front, had to iron another print over the fantastic in dark places so that the message was gubbled, made no grammatical sense. But my mother, who is punctilious about proper grammar, did not mind. Better to enter heaven with proper grammar than to dance, sorry, better to enter heaven with bad grammar than to dance all the way into hell with your eyes and with your eyes dotted and your teeth crossed. Whatever films we watched on video were bought by my parents, Jesus of Nazareth parts one to four, Sound of Music, King and I. I went the video, when the first video club opened in Enugu where we lived and all our friends joined. We were not allowed to because my parents could not be expected to watch every movie and decide whether I was right for us or not. The only sphere we had a certain kind of freedom was in what we read. My parents believed in the redeeming value of books. They encouraged us to read. They expected their friends who bought us books to choose books that were appropriate for us. There was no need to censor those. Sometimes I told them exciting things I had read. Sometimes I wrote my own stories, sparing off mostly of what I had read, especially in the Inid Blighting books. And so I wrote about white children eating apples and having adventures blighting characters had. They had grandmothers who baked cakes because as far as I was concerned, those were the only kind of characters valid enough to occupy books. And all writing begins with imitation after all. My imitation lacked the scope to include characters like me or a grandmother like mine who came from the village with bags of cocoa and guava covered in sand and who would have thought that wearing an apron while cooking was a silly indulgence? For many nights after reading the book with the devil on its cover, Christmas cannot sleep. When she tries to speak of this book to her parents, her tongue cleaves to her mouth and she cannot find the words. She doesn't have the maturity to question the injustice of being sent to hell for nothing she's done. She's always thought of the written word as sacred. Books like parents do not lie. The written word is too full of integrity to lie. And so it doesn't occur to her to question the legitimacy of the facts that she has read. At night, she's haunted by the image of the devil chasing her with his pitchfork and mocking her. She begins to bedwet because she's too afraid, too burdened to get up at night to use the bathroom. She sleeps with the lights on but it does very little to relieve her. She dreams of waking up miraculously white. If there was a way that she could scrub up her skin, no matter how long it took, she would do it. She tallies up all her good deeds, not lying, not cheating on tests, even when the opportunities are there, praying, refusing to bribe, refusing the bribe given to her by an older sister with whom she goes to church to skip church for an afternoon visit at a friend's. This is a sacrifice that she makes so that she would be assured heaven. But she sees how all those deeds or her goodness fall limpid and inconsequential beside a fate that is already sealed by King's murderous deed. If being good cannot save her, then what can? I grew up in a middle-class family and what this means in practical terms is that I had access to good schools. One of the distinguishing features of a good school, then, and I'm fairly sure it's still the same in present day Nigeria, is that the use of vernacular is prohibited. You were punished for using any language but English at school. In high school, French was compulsory as a second language. We learned enough French to write essays. And in our final year, the three major Nigerian languages were introduced for the first time. But we're only supposed to learn how to count from one to ten. Nobody expected any of us to write exams in Igbo, Hosoa, Yoruba. I doubt any of us, even those of us whose spoken local languages fluently, would have been able to write a meaningful essay in them. At school, in social studies class, we learned that the wife of a British administrator or his mistress named Nigeria, we learned that a European explorer, Mongo Park, discovered the River Niger. Whatever we learned of Nigeria as taking an active part in Nigeria was limited to the Patriots who fought for our independence in 1960. It was almost as if before then, before the English came in 1849 to colonize it, Nigeria was a huge void where nothing and nobody existed. And the road to rectifying this one-sided view of history is far. A few years ago, I ran a workshop for middle school students in three different schools in Nigeria, in Portaqot. These three were all very good schools. They were all private schools. The students spent holidays in London and America. In each school, I asked the students to write the opening paragraph of a short story, introducing their protagonists to the reader. Without fail, all their protagonists had Western names. When we worked on settings, all their protagonists were in a foreign, non-African country. So I changed tactics. I gave them the opening sentence. I made sure to use Nigerian names so that there would be no ambiguity. To my dismay, I still had Bola with blue eyes, long, silky hair, and a straight pointed nose. That was when it struck me how deeply rooted the problem was. Adichie had published Purple High Biscuits by then. Farafina was publishing novels by Nigerian writers accessible to middle school students from homes where their parents could afford to buy those books. And yet, a majority of these students could not imagine people like themselves occupying the spaces in their own stories. It also occurred to me how lucky I was to have discovered Achebe when I did, and why such discoveries should not have to depend on luck. I made a concerted effort in those schools to challenge the students to read other books, to imitate other kinds of writers. By the end of the workshop, 99.9% of them, I think, I hope, got it. That is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, by the way. A short while later, a week, perhaps two weeks later, after reading that book whose title Christmas Has Forgotten, Serendipity Throws Achebe's Things Fall Apart Into Her Path. Reading it is like a spiritual experience. She'll recognize later when she's older and wiser how it saves her. This book that tells the story of a civilization and a community completely disrupted by the coming of the white man. Its protagonist will conquer as a warrior, a proud man whose life is completely ruined by the clash of civilizations, which is brought by the English colonizers. For the first time in her life, Christmas reads a book which shows that her ancestors' history does not begin with colonization. That her people had a world that was complete on its own and which did not seek validity outside of its own community. For the first time, colonization was presented as an intrusion and not as something that she ought to be grateful for. Achebe writes in Things Fall Apart, the white man is clever. He can quietly and peacefully with his religion wear muse at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has one of our brothers and our clan can no longer act as one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. That line, that line even at that age stands out for her. It consoles her. It's power is so transformative that she begins to question the veracity of the history lessons she's learned at school. She begins to see her ridiculous it is that someone would name a people that already existed or discover a river that was not only already in existence but was being used by the locals. She also begins to understand the tragedy of punishing someone for speaking their mother tongue and to imagine a heaven from which her skin color does not preclude her and a world where everything she is is enough. In a 1994 interview with the Paris Review, Achiba himself says, when I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kinds of things that fascinated me, weird things even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp. Fascinating to me because they were about things remote and almost ethereal. Then I grew older and began to read about adventures on which I didn't know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine, they were excellent, they were intelligent, the others were not. They were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. Once I realized that I had to be a writer, I had to be that historian. Discovering Achiba and his protagonists who have Igbo names and do things more identifiable, to me than ice-kating a grandmother in an apron baking cakes introduced me to that danger Achiba spoke of. More importantly, it gave me the courage or perhaps the license to write my own stories. Nothing in all my experience of literature since has ever had a strong and effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Christmas comes to reading and therefore to writing with fresh eyes. She also begins to ask questions. There's a curiosity about the past that has been awakened in her. Even about her own family's past, the grandfather she never met who converted to Christianity in adulthood and so began to eat cassava which was considered Christian food. Her great-grandfather who was buried sitting down in the dead of the night because he was a titled man, but only after the family had pretended to bury him in an empty coffin so as not to get into trouble with the colonialists. There's a wealth of knowledge where she previously imagined none. Telling those stories, correcting the single story of Africa becomes important to Christmas too. Her early writings reflect this, a passionate insistence on writing about the past as if the present does not or should not matter. It takes time and some maturity and a transcontinental move on a homesickness that almost pulverizes her and becoming invisible and becoming invisible before she realizes that the present and the future are as important as the past. And that in fiction, there is no space for interrogations of not just how the other sees us but how we see ourselves and how we see the other. And something else Christmas lens is this, that empathy for others, even others unlike yourself can only be achieved when you begin to believe that you are as valid, as worthy of celebration as the other. For the writers who come after Achebe, there's a recognition of Achebe's role in making us not just writers but the kind of writers that we are. In the words of Toni Morrison, he opened doors for us. From Flora Nwapa, who's republished four years after Things Fall Apart, gives us a female protagonist who is to a large extent antithetical to Kunko's Wives and Things Fall Apart to a measure that we published in the 80s and continues the tradition of strong female protagonists to the present generation of writers. My fellow travelers, such audacious adventurers with such interpretivity of vision, such heroic penchant for the tremendous, discombobulating the erstwhile notion of African literature, perhaps encouraged by Western theorists as a homogeneous almost anthropological genre, quite distinct from and certainly ranked lower than its Western counterpart, a particular kind of commodity for a particular market. There is less anxiety about how the world sees Africa than with how Africa sees itself. The relative explosion of African writers present on the global scene is not a coincidence. In a 2000 interview with Eme Nyonno, Achebe says that he hopes that the 21st century will bring African writing fully into the arena of raw literature. This is the fulfilling of that hope. One of the most hopeful Igbo proverbs says that the chicken scratches her head and scratches behind and asked her children which is better. Its implication is that the future is greater than the past or the present and it's an honor for me to be a native participant in that. In this story, there is a happy ending. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, Kaz and Chika. We'd like to throw it up into the audience right now. There are two microphones which people can come up to and because the acoustics in this room are not of the best, I'd advise using those microphones. And as people think of things to say, I wondered if I could just kick things off with one observation which comes out of your talks combined actually because we've struck something that I always quote from when I teach Chinua Cebe is his essay, the novelist as teacher in which he says, I'm content to be a teacher. He says, you know, in certain versions of art that's regarded as a kind of degraded version of art that you're to be a teacher but he said, I'm content to be a teacher and each of you has spoken in a way about Chinua Cebe as a teacher and some of it has been quite haunting really the sense of deeply buried images in one's unconscious which you have to overcome as you make your way forward in the world and how liberating it can be to read certain kinds of writing. And I want to draw on something that Kaz said and then shifted in a certain direction because in your talk, Kaz, you spoke about the what and the who, you know, what we are and who we are. But I wonder if we could also focus on the how, you know, what Chinua Cebe might have taught in terms of how, how to be a writer. You know, each of us, all of us here in this room, we live in very different times now from the times that Chinua Cebe lived in. There are different issues to confront, different topics, different stories, different narratives to tell. But maybe one of the ways in which his spirit lives on is a sense of how to be responsible to one's time to find those stories that need telling and to do one's best to live up to them. So just to start things off, I wonder if that's something that each of you might reflect on or whoever wants to take it up. Can you hear me? This works. Okay. Well, the how question I think was a central to Cebe's practice. As a novelist and as an intellectual, I said in my brief remarks that Cebe was a man who disdained affectation and pretentiousness, especially when it was in the service of itself. Cebe believed that he had a particular patrimony, a particular cultural heritage, and therefore a particular lens that enabled him to see the world in his fullness and complexity. And he sought for the tools to tell the story from within his evil cultural heritage. And that's a powerful witness. So the way that Cebe told his story and the way that Cebe positioned himself in relation to African history and memory, I think, was always exemplary. Now, there are writers who are coming up who don't have accessible to them the same kind of cultural wealth that is rooted in Africa that Cebe had. Cebe was a man who received two kinds of education. An education, first of all, in his tradition, so he was, when you encountered him, you felt like you were in the presence on Igbo Elda, primarily. But then he combined this with his intellectual, he was enlarged by his intellectual training also. But the magic of Cebe, the genius of Cebe was how he was able to bring these two dimensions of his experience into harmony. And so in doing this, I think that he instructed us about an organic way of being a writer, of being responsive, of being always aware of your community and having that community in mind as you write and reflect on their experience. Honor of words, yes. That is one of Cebe's titles. Honor of words. Either of you want to take up that question? I don't think, I don't think I can improve upon what OK has said. I mean, it's, I just had a PS. I think that the letter that Mike Felwell read that he sent to the Swedish Academy, to me is a perfect example of how to be a writer. I think that for Cebe as well, well, I remember reading the essay you wrote after you spoke to Cebe and you asked him, well, you know, is Heart of Darkness, great art? I said, no, it's not great art because, you know, it has felt, it felt in its responsibility to humanize the other and so far, Cebe, you can't distinguish your moral obligations from your literary aim or literary goals. So both of them are interestingly joined. There is no, you know, there is no distinguishing between the two. Thanks very much. Questions, people have thoughts? Observations? Bill? Ashil, yeah, please, I think so. Brief question to Karen. What did you mean by the last sentence of your presentation? Could you expand a little bit on that? When he didn't want to talk about Conrad? Conrad, yeah. And what does it mean for us here now? Well, I think because like any writers, you get fed up, have been defined by one book or one issue or one essay. You feel you've rehearsed so many times in print, on the radio, in public. The same arguments, there's much more to the man than his position on Conrad. And so in front of that particular audience, I think he felt very keen to talk about the broadness of his career, the complexity of his career, without having it pigeonholed just to the issue of Conrad. And honestly, quite right too. He was there with a sold out huge audience in London who actually, I don't think they wanted to hear about Conrad either. I think they wanted to hear about the novels, the essays, the journey, the trajectory. He was right. Thanks a lot. It was wonderful to hear you all speak. My question is probably directed primarily at OK and Chika. And it's about the use of the English language. I often teach HSA, the African writer in English language, with Ngugi Watiyongo's essay, African Literature. I forget the title. But about whether or not to write in English or in one's native language. And that goes to Stephen's question about the how. If you would like to address that, I'd be very interested. Thanks. I think that Hachibay actually articulates the case very eloquently. I don't think that Hachibay was one who particularly enjoyed the predicament, the predicament that he faced, which was what Ngugi articulated. You know, the irony that African Literature, what announces itself as African Literature, is primarily written in European languages, right? But that literature is also a product of that fact, that reality is also a product of an undeniable historical fact that the British came to Nigeria, for example, and put together this behemoth called Nigeria, right? Which is a collection of more than 450 different languages and ethnicities. Okay? So, our brother, Rolanda Biodu, was here earlier. I don't know if he's still here, where he gave a wonderful invocation. But Roland is Yoruba, and so do Amiibo. And, you know, he's a man that I admire, but the only language in which he and I can make sense to each other, because of this colonial history, is English, right? So the British put us together and established English as the language of our education of the media, and so on and so forth. What I like to see done, and Achybeth's position was a very practical position. Achybeth says, I'm going to use English, okay? But I'm going to use an English that is both still in communion with its ancestral home, but that is informed, shaped, by the rhythms and cadences. Not that he said it in this way. This is an incompetent or keen debate using too many words. But an English that will bear the burden of his cultural experience, and I think he did it better than any writer that I know. And so he set the example that all of us aspire to. But Achybeth himself wrote in Ibo, right? He wrote poems in Ibo, and he wrote all kinds of other things in Ibo. He gave a lecture, the Denebo lecture, and it was all written in Ibo. Which then, if you follow the controversy, Achybeth went and gave this lecture in Ibo. And then some people said, oh, it's not the scholarly Ibo. It's not the official autography answer. And Achybeth says, you know, it's like if you're going to say to your children, come here in your language, you say, okay, I have to stop and go and learn the official Ibo words, saying it. So there are all kinds of problems there. But Achybeth says, write in any language. It is necessary to write. And he wrote in English, but that English, in fact, when I read Achybeth's works, thanks for the part, especially, an arrow of God, I experience those novels simultaneously in Ibo and English. You know, the sensibility is Ibo. The language becomes accidentally English. Achybeth said something, I can't get the quote right now. I said, do not be fooled by the fact that I'm writing in English or we're writing in English. Because I tend to do unheard of things. Unheard of things with it. And Achybeth is writing Ibo in English. I mean, that's the way I read it. You know, we're discussing Ibo's tutu ala this afternoon as well. And you read Ibo's tutu ala. What you read, the parwan drinker, for example. You're reading your brain in English, basically. And I think it is less important. I'm trying to be, not to, if he wrote Justin Ibo. And he understood the problems, again, due to the historicity and due to, you know, the burden of colonization and all of that, that has made it impossible for writers. Africa and Nigeria, apart from Ausa, to write in their local languages, there are no publishing, no, I can't, is there any Ibo publishing company? The structure is not there. And anybody who can read Ibo can read English better. And those who do not read English are probably unable to read Ibo. So who are you writing for then? Even though I must add that that is actually a painful reality, right? Because as Chika rightly said, when we were in high school, we were punished, we were caned. When we spoke Ibo, it was called vernacular. So you have to speak in English. And some schools will find you. So that kind of deracination where we were uprooted from what should belong to our hearts, you know, now became alienated is something that we need to correct. In fact, I was discussing this problem with Ngugi Wachiyongo in Kenya in 2010. And I said to him, I made that point that any Ibo person who can read Ibo will read English much better. So a novel that will take you five hours to read will take you like three times that to read it in Ibo. But he said to me that the problem is that we have not undergone the formal training in Ibo that we have in English. And that's a point that I couldn't argue with. Can I just say something? I mean, it strikes me that you're having read your work, all of you as writers, you're three very different writers, you know, doing very different kinds of things. And yet you all have this reverence for Chino-Achibian for his legacy and it comes into your writing in different ways. I don't think he could have written the novels that you have written, just as you probably couldn't write the novels that he wrote. Chika, just something for example that strikes me as a curious irony is that you have lived in Belgium, right? And have written in Dutch as well as in English. And Heart of Darkness is about Belgian colonialism, you know? In fact, you seem to have traveled into the heart of the Heart of Darkness in your own life. And in that heart of the heart of whiteness, darkness, whichever way you want to look at it, you write a story about sex workers on the streets of Antwerp, not a topic that Chino-Achibi would have written about, you know, to say the least. And yet he has done something for your writing, you know? And okay, you may be closest in the tradition that you're writing into Chino-Achibi's tradition, because your writing is very, very different also, kind of written in fragmented forms, so set in various times and spaces, different times and places. So you've taken on your own responsibilities of writing and yet you draw something from Chino-Achibi. And you, you know, it may be that how there are a sense of responsibility and accountability that brings you to your own subject matter. And maybe that's how he influences. This has something to do with the question of what tradition actually is and how it changes and how a legacy actually transforms over time. I'm not sure if that's a question, but it's an observation. Don't know if you want to, you know, take that up in any form. Chika, did you ever reflect on the fact that you were in Belgium in the heart of... Well, I'll just say that I have written about Nigerian sex workers on the streets of Antwerp. And I read that, AC, it was a beautiful day, the Senate minority, and I felt challenged to go and write about the women myself as well, yeah. There is an exchange, actually, because the fact that they were Nigerian, I mean, it's a non-fiction piece, it's a non-fiction essay, but the fact that they were Nigerian is what really fascinated me, and that came directly from Chinua, which... I mean, I think that, I mean, like Toni Morrison says, that Achibi opened the door for her and for many, you know, writers like her. So I think, I mean, there's a difference between influence and imitation, you know. There would never be another Achibi that couldn't be. And so what Achibi has done for me is to give me the license to, you know, write my own stories, tell my own stories. Doesn't matter whether the stories are about Nigerian sex workers in Antwerp or about, you know, Nigerians or that we're keeping in Atlanta, you know. Any other questions? Yeah, and since there wasn't any time for questions after Michael Thull was talking, if anybody has any questions they'd like to put to Michael, a good suggestion. This would be a good time. Michael, if you'd like to answer the questions that they were never asked in the first place, you could do that. Are there any leftover questions from the previous session? There is one. Professor Linfoss, and it's a great pleasure to see you here with us today. But Achibi, in 1969, when he came to the University of Texas as a spokesman for Biopra, he was raising money for Biopra. We set him up with television and radio interviews with a lecture he was going to give at the university, but also he met with some... Get closer to the microphone, I think. He also met with some African literature classes. And what struck me in his interactions with students and faculty and townspeople was his oral art. People have already spoken about his effectiveness as an interviewer, as an interviewee, and the importance he placed on words. I just wanted to quote one question that was asked. In 1969, students here would be too young to remember that period, but in the U.S., we had Vietnam, we had riots and the burning of black communities, we had terrible assassinations. Nigeria was going through a traumatic period too. Military coup, counter-coup, pogrom, secession, civil war. So writers at that time were being asked why they wrote. What kind of political commitment did they have in their work? What was important to them? So it was inevitable that Chebate would be asked a question of this kind. And I'd like to read his response because I think it shows his persuasiveness as a speaker, but also shows the kind of oral art he could improvise, not with a printed text, but just to articulate his views as clearly as possible. The question from the audience was, do you believe literature should carry a social or political message? Some of you may be familiar with this answer. Yes, I believe it's impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest, even those early novels that looked like very gentle recreations of the past, what they were saying, in effect, was that we had a past. That was protest because there were people who thought we didn't have a past. What we were saying, what we were doing was to say politely that we did, here it is. So commitment is nothing new. Commitment runs right through our work. In fact, I should say that all our writers, whether they're aware of it or not, are committed writers. The whole question of life demanded that you should protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your traditions, your struggles, your religion, and so on. One big message of the many I try to get across is that Africa was not a vacuum before the coming of Europe. The culture was not unknown in Africa. The culture was not brought to Africa by the white world. You would have thought it was obvious that everybody had a past, but there were people who came to Africa and said, you have no history, you have no civilization, you have no culture, you have no religion. Well, you know, we didn't just drop from the sky. He also said that the Europeans were saying, you're lucky we're here. Now you're hearing about these things for the first time from us. Well, you know, we didn't just drop from the sky. We too had our history, our traditions, our cultures, civilizations. It's not possible for one culture to come to another and say, I am the way, the truth, and the life. There's nothing else but me. If you say this, you're guilty of irreverence or arrogance. You're also stupid, this is my concern. Finishing kick, the way he phrased this argument to make it quite clear that Africa had been misrepresented in the world. And if you just had common sense, you'd know that Africans were people. There was a message he kept trying to get across five and a half years later here when talking about Conrad. Well, thank you very much. Chima, you have a question. Yes. Chima Nukola. I was trying to save my question since I have a slot for tomorrow, but it seems that nobody wants to ask. I'll just ask mine now. It's a question for everybody, but I think Quema has already answered this part, really, because it's obvious he's attacking the prize. But when Chino Achebe spoke, I think what he really said was he took a popularly accepted plank, an institutional plank, in that case, Conrad's position in the canon. He took it and he, within the course of a lecture, he basically upset it. So I'm putting this question to the panel. What institutional plank, what issue which is taken for granted, would you select and would you subvert in one paragraph? Simple question. Yes. Chuma kind of question. And Chuma is, for those of you who don't know, Chuma is actually a god in human form, and he's a god in different countries, and I'm not joking. I'll tell you the story later. But, ah, Chuma, they, I'm intrigued. I'm not sure this is quite something that I'll take on and want to demolish in one paragraph, but I'm intrigued about the whole evolving idea of social media, and the ways in which all the forces as the social media have unleashed on us. So on the one hand, giving people voices, democratizing expression and communication, but on the other hand, enabling all kinds of things to be out there without mediation. So there is the immediacy of with which people can spew toxicity right in through every corner of the world. So they, so I'm still wrestling with that, you know, and so that's in a sense why my involvement in social media and my response to it is still problematic and evolving. So I have, we have a mutual friend, Ikide, who proposes, Ikide Ikilua proposes that the most interesting writing in the world is on social media. He says, forget literature, forget books. They are, you know, per se. If you want to know, if you want to read exciting stories, go to social media and the ignorance, stupidity. Yes, okay. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. So. Ome has, I'll tell, I'll convey that message. We need, we need a microphone to mic. So everybody hears it on this. I was going to say I respect humanity and the generality and as trouble for their freedom. But and everybody has opinions. And they also have certain sections of their anatomy which people say that too. But every opinion ain't equal. And every opinion don't deserve expression and the means for everybody. And the people most quick to express those opinions. I don't want to have the least instructed opinions. It's a disaster that social media. I think that sometimes when Ikide says that, that he's been sarcastic. I think that Ikide quotes controversy. I don't think he really means it. But back to Chuma's question, I think that the sort of vitro that we read about refugees you know, down with Syrian refugees and sort of vitro we read about Muslims. Newspapers, I mean if you, newspaper comment sections and in the media and everywhere else. I think that perhaps writers and literature haven't done enough to create empathy for refugees for that person who is being forced to leave their home, being forced to leave behind everything. I don't think anybody leaves home of their own volition and go through sometimes really dangerous travel routes like some of the Syrian refugees are doing now because they want to. And I think that perhaps there is space for literature to create that sort of empathy where we begin to see the other as just a fellow human being who wants to give their children or themselves even the same things that we have. And so perhaps that is the job that is for the kind of vitro against Muslims as well. I mean all you need to do is listen to the apologies to any Republicans here, but listen to the Republican debate sometimes. And it just makes you lose faith in humanity almost. And the fact that that is happening in the 21st century in a country that is built on diversity and built on the backs of other people makes it all the more ironic and all the more tragic. Perhaps connected to the social media question, I think we live in a very narcissistic age of celebrity. And the problem is I think that the difference between fame and celebrity, Chinwachev is a famous man, but he had no desire to be a celebrity and was surrounded by a lot of writers who are more interested in being a writer than they are in writing.