 Welcome to day two of Afqarites 2021, the themes of imagination, pleasure and activism and it's just been incredible to see people back in person and to know that there's so many more people tuning in online as well. So thank you for being here. My name is Desta Haile and I'm the Deputy Director of the Royal African Society. We have an incredible lineup today so just a few housekeeping things before we get started. So welcome. We'll be taking your questions online and in-house. If you're watching online you can submit your questions using the question box below the video and for the audience in the theater just raise your hand and someone will come to you with a mic. Please turn off your phones or put them on silent. We're not expecting any fire alarms so if you do hear any please follow the emergency exit signs and we will be starting with of this our country. Powerful, lyrical and entirely unforgettable of this our country. We used to gather a living portrait of Nigeria, one that is as beautiful as it is complex. We have wild imperfections at 2.30 where we will look at the work of black women and women ex poets from Botswana to Brazil and dismantling the patriarchy is later on today so please don't miss that at 5 p.m. with award-winning American Egyptian journalist, activist and author Mona El-Tahawi and Dr. Leila Hussien. So we hope you can stick around the whole day and welcome. Bola Musero will be chairing for us as well and we hope you have a wonderful day. Please check out the books. Please check out the merch and check out the different memberships we have as well so you can join Royal African Society and we can see each other more often. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. Thank you very much, Desta. Hello and welcome everybody to a very special event. As Desta said, this is of our country, of this our country and any of you who are Nigerians in the audience here in the Knowledge Center Theatre at the British Library or who are joining us online will know the very question of Nigeria. What is Nigeria? How do you identify with Nigeria? What do you think about it? It is a very complex, very emotive, quite frustrating, sometimes very beautiful question. But during the lockdown two women came up with a wonderful idea. Well, they conceived a baby, Aurea Guardia Williams and Nancy Adimora, to bring together 24 writers to talk about what is Nigeria for them. And these writers have put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and spilt their guts. And I can imagine it was quite a painful process on the stage with me. And also, you know, who are here to talk about their writing. But first of all, as Desta said, a few housekeeping rules, especially for those who are joining us online. Please join the conversation on Twitter by following at Africa rights UK. You can use the hashtag, hashtag Africa rights 2021. And if you have any questions, any points, you can put them. And also, if you have any questions that you'd like to put to the panelists, please do so. There should be, if you're joining us online, there should be a link underneath by which you can pose your questions. And they'll then be sent to me online. And I'll try and read them. If you're here in the audience with us, and you've graced us with your presence, please do indicate if we have a few people who are from Africa rights and the Royal Africa Society, if you could please, or the British Library, if you could make yourself known, please, just so that people can see you if they have a question. Thank you. Do you mind standing up just so that they can see you, please? If you don't mind. And this lovely lady will come around with it. There are two of them, another lady at the back. And they will come around with a microphone. If you have an issue with, and I can understand because of COVID, and you don't want to either touch the mic or speak directly, you can actually in write your question, and they will then put it online and send it to me as well. So if that's an issue for you, I think they can tell us how to do that. Also the Royal Africa Society and Africa Rights, if you're interested in joining Africa Rights is brought to you by the Royal Africa Society, which is a Pan-African membership charity, and you can find out more about joining and supporting by visiting www.royalafricansociety.org forward slash African rights, and the festival is running for the whole day today here at the British Library. And it relies very much on public funding. So if you'd like to donate, you can do this by visiting the Royal Africa Society website, or using a link which is provided in the comment. You can also, if you're interested, join become a member, an arts and culture member, and I think you get 50% off Africa Rights and film festival events. And at the end of the conversation and the discussion with Inran and with Chigadilly, we'll be taking questions both online and also from you here in the audience. So please, please, please do feel free to participate by giving your questions. And sadly, I have to say that we were to be joined on the stage also by Abidari, but unfortunately, she's taken ill today, so she won't be joining us. But we also do have online, and we have four other individuals who'll be joining us, not joining us online, but we have readings from J.K. Chuku, from Chigozie Obiyama, Ayobami Adebayo, and Umaturaki. So that's all, can I ask you to welcome our panelists? I'm sorry I didn't introduce myself, I'm Bola Mosuro, so pleased to be with you. So without further ado, I mean maybe if I can you know put into context what there, and I hope that both Aurea and also Nancy forgive me if I paraphrase it in this way, but the 24 essayists were asked, or the 24 writers were asked to write an essay to share their memories, their thoughts, you know, their thought processes, their frustrations, whatever their hearts desire was about Niger reminiscing, and I'm sure it must have been very hard for each and every one of them to to say what was in their hearts or in their minds. For some it might have actually been a rather cathartic process, maybe something that you've always wanted to spill out, which we'll hear later on. So without further ado let's hear one of the readings, and the first reading we'll have is an online pre-recorded reading by Ayobami Adebayo. My father packs the car and goes to look for a tree, other motorists have done the same, leaving their vehicles to go scout, any form of vegetation, any form of vegetation within sight. In this situation, any branch will do as an way, but some marker of solidarity is required for a vehicle is let through. I watch the protestant show that my father's been sent out, and have the sense that this is the one that's been seen and about to open this time. These people who are taking over the world, compatriots, and I could not quite piece together, listening to my parents, about the military regime. As I watch them, as I watch them, and same protestant, same protestant, I have never had before, I become sure not only of this man and this man, but somehow of the angry parents share with each other and their friends. They understand everyone, and I'm going to do something about each discontent. I am transfixed by the crowd, I don't notice how much time passes before my father returns with several branches. He sticks them all in front of the car and begins to drive against the Santana forward until I can see these protestants up close. Suddenly, the national anti-abstractions have crystallized into something I could touch if I try. That was Clarion Calls by Ayobami Adebayo, reading a short excerpt from her reading, and it was a very powerful one which took me back to 1993, when we had elections dissolved in Nigeria, which many of you may or may not remember had been disputed by Ibrahim Babangida. He said the elections weren't fair, and to all intents and purposes everybody felt that MK Abiola had won the election, and we all know what then happened, what then transpired. But clearly Ayobami was caught up in those protests. Maybe I can start with you, Inua. What did you think when you heard Ayobami's recollections at that time? So in 1993 I was 11, so I remember being in Lagos and driving through a protest. We had a driver at the time, and he had stuck an olive branch between the windscreen and the windscreen wiper, and he expected that to give us free rein through the traffic, but it didn't happen, and the protest was getting more and more heated. So he just opened his door and leapt out of the car and left us there, myself, my twin sister, my older sister, and my mother. So my mother had to take the wheel and pilot us through the chaos, and that's what I remembered. Wow. In you, Chigadili, do you remember that time? Were you here or were you back home at that time? I was back home. I was a home years old, like I'm going to tell you. And I think I was in boarding school. I was in boarding school, and the one thing that struck me was how the entirety of the country was united in this unease and fear and just general chaos. It wasn't what we have now, which is some parts of Nigeria will sometimes have a flare up and then other parts will go, really? There was a flare up there? It was the whole country, because I think this was the first time, after the military rule, that people felt they could speak their minds or express themselves by way of voting, and then being told that how you expressed yourself was wrong, it was really hard for people to deal with. What I remember at the time was, because my boarding school had no gates, which is a long story in itself, a lot of the teachers having to double as security and as parent figures, even more so than usual, because with teenagers, I wasn't one at the time, but people used to sneak out to go to Oeri and do parties and stuff, and they wouldn't have that. That whole lax thing just completely disappeared overnight. It was like being on the military rule, but much scarier, because people had been within the reach of hope, they had been within the reach of deciding for themselves that they wanted this person to lead them and to have that snatched away, people couldn't deal with that at all. I remember also being able and having parents come down on you like a ton of bricks, not to speak, not to say anything. Don't say anything that would put not just yourself, but the entirety of the Igbo group in danger. We don't want them to, even though Igbo people voted majority for MKO, nobody wanted to kind of take that fire, because we're used to taking the fire. Is it reminding you back to the Civil War? Exactly. Nobody wanted to take that fire, nobody wanted their kids to, you know, be to come on the fire or to draw attention to themselves and thereby spark something else. So we had a lot of chaos, but a lot of it was also like in families banked. Like we're talking about inside the house, don't go outside and open your mouth, just close your mouth. And that was even you in secondary school, in boarding school? In boarding school, yes. And I remember, you know, I was here, you know, when it happened, but it took me back to, I think it was 79 when we had a similar, I guess you weren't even born at that stage, when we had Ali Musko, there were students who were also demonstrating against then it was the lack of resources in education. That was even when times were good, if you know your parents thought to you this is when they still got grants, being in university was actually, compared with now it was like a holiday. You got, you know, so much in terms of book allocations, you know, being on campus was wonderful. And yet the students were protesting, took to the streets and again, we had to use branches in order to protect ourselves. And I remember the day that the the riots broke out and we were taking my mum to the airport, to Muratala Muhammad Airport in Lagos. And we were caught up again like you with your mum and your siblings in the car. And the students were kind of rioting and you know, and they smashed all the glass and my dad had a tiny Volkswagen Beetle. And we got to the airport and had to sleep that night in the airport whilst my mum came here to the UK on the plane. And when we finally got home the day later there was glass in in my hair. So when I heard this happened and just reading Ayobami's story, it just took me right back, you know, and you said something there which is interesting, you said people felt that that election was within reach of hope. Yeah. That people, and I just wonder for my love, you know, have you seen this replicated again? Yeah, EnSars. Yeah. It was with the EnSars protest and I mean it's funny that that I can only speak from Igbo culture all the time and I do that a lot. So you are going to have to deal. But in Igbo culture, the practice of putting live branches is supposed to ward off evil, okay? And so I don't know about it from a other cultural standpoint but for us, usually when people are having things like a funeral, you would have a lot of the young men, the men with the chest and things, have branches in their mouth, not supposed to speak, they would have branches in their mouth and the whole purpose of it was to ward off any evil spirits that want to kind of like latch on to the world of the living because the whole idea of spirits that wander around is one, they didn't die well or they weren't buried well. And they too, they really want to live again. So they want to latch on to and if you have branches or even leaves around the corners of your mouth or your outfit, on the ambulance, on cars, the idea was that it would ward them off and so seeing that replicated in protest is a way of people wanting to hang on to their lives. Listen, we are protesting this thing but we don't want you to kill us, okay? We don't want to die, we're just protesting this thing. And for the ensar's protest, it was it was quite telling that people didn't even go for the norm of taking branches from trees because they didn't think it was going to work. What they did instead was to call themselves as Nigerian flags and we know how that worked out. It didn't work out either, you know, it just didn't work and so I think that there is that symbolism between the warding off of evil with live with live vegetation or branches or whatever and the flag and in both instances, it couldn't stop the glass from being in your hair and it couldn't stop bullets from piercing people's skin and taking their lives, you know, it just it doesn't work, unfortunately. Did it, you know, make you think of either what happened last October or did it take you back to other events in our history, you know, thinking that especially when thinking we are within a reach of change, some form of change. I think it made me consider ENSAR as in a global context which is a violence perpetrated in a weaker contingent of people but a more powerful one, but particularly by the police force and I'll never forget when there were riots happening through Ferguson. There were kids in Palestine tweeting them information on how to deal with tear gas because that was the globality of violence and resistance against violence. And a friend of mine who was called, I'm no longer talking with Nigerians about race, she spoke that the police violence within America was exactly replicated in ENSARs and it isn't along color lines but it is still caged within the dynamic between the police force and people, between suppression, between those who willingly abuse power and have been systematically taught that they can do so with no repercussions for generations and that's what I thought is the same dynamics here. And much like do you remember when there was a British politician who was fired for discussing how our British police force were trained by Israeli militia? Yeah, she was fired for just state in fact. Right, same thing NYPD in America were trained by Israeli police officers and we know now that the ENSAR, some of those soldiers were trained by British police, so we see the same systems of violence playing out across the world and they're all linked and that took me back to them. So that was Ayubami and do you remember if you have, whether you're here in the audience with us in the theater or listening online, please do submit any questions you have, any thoughts you have even via the line if you're online there should be a line underneath, I can't see the screen so I'm not sure what it says underneath but please link or as I said if you're in the audience here please do raise your hand and tell one of our sisters here about your question or pose it. And so it's very very remiss of me because I haven't done three major introductions as well. Rachel is a signer and currently is not Rachel it is another lady whose name is Vivy. Vivy and Rachel will be our interpreters they are doing British Sign Language for those of you who need interpreting and also let me do proper introductions about for Chigadilly and also but you know I said too much. I was so excited that I didn't actually tell you more about our esteemed and honored participants panelist so Chigadilly is an Nigerian speculative fiction writer is that the right term to use? That's what people use I just thought I was writing what do I know? Yeah because I wondered about that terminology too but we'll hear more about Chigadilly's writing but one of the the book that really put you on the map for some people even though you've been writing for many years is Dazzling which won the inaugural Curtis Brown first novel prize and also that was in 2019 but also Chigadilly has been short that was shortlisted for the Cain Prize for African Literature twice twice yes sorry thank you for the correction and she's also a former colleague because we used to work together many years at the BBC World Service but her writing is just I mean it just transports you to another world and I think that's why people call you a speculative fiction writer and I had to look up that terminology because I always just thought that Chigadilly writes in a very magical way taking you to a different realm but they say speculative fiction writing how would you describe that? I think it's just supposed to encompass everything else really I mean horror, bizarro fiction, weird fiction, science fiction, fantasy, fabulism, magical realism, folklore, mythology the whole works basically if you like Marvel you won't like my work but it's in the same field it's in the same field my point wait you don't consider Marvel speculative fiction? No no it is I didn't say that I said it's in the same field I don't know if I don't know if I mean I I think that a lot of what I write is not I mean okay so so Marvel is kudos to Marvel but it's very much a Hollywood version of of the sort of Nordic folk tales that I read when I was growing up so if I think what influenced me the most were all the original stuff so not the Disney Marvel versions of things like Cinderella where she's like oh princess princess but the other one the proper grim one where the stepsisters have to slice up their feet to get into the shoes that one was what influenced me you know and obviously like in in the original Nordic tales you know Balder is the favorite song not Thor and what happens to Balder does anyone know? I'm talking to myself What happened to Balder? He died He pops up in the Marvel comics by the way but I know but not in the same series and he's dying Sorry but you know what I mean like it's a lot of it is properly grim and probably in keeping with real life real life is not all you know rainbows and sunshine it is sometimes but what makes you appreciate the rainbows and sunshine is all the hard horror, disgusting, gory, evil stuff and that's what I write Thank you I couldn't have done a better introduction and to my left is Inouye Ellams who is an acclaimed poet, playwright, director and you're also your graphic artist as well? Yes Okay and you may know him many of you by the Barbershop Chronicles which I have to thank my daughter for you know forcing me, not forcing you actually, for swaying me to watch and because I'd seen it and seen it advertised and I'd never I'd never gone to see it until the lockdown we actually saw it and I was blown away and I think many people were too and now you can actually catch Inouye Ellams with an evening with an immigrant are you still touring or? In America next year there are no plans to do it here just here Okay and he's also somebody that has also been involved in other things other than writing I understand that you take people on walks at night what's it called or you used to no no no I kid you not I did no she's absolutely correct I just shrugged because there's a lot of other things that I do and it would take too long to explain but yeah I do this midnight walks thing but I don't even I try Do you bring them all back at the end? Yes because you see like if I took them they would just be gone Well the reason it's interesting that you're saying that because I when I heard about these walks and it might come into our discussion later I just wondered this is something you could never replicate in Nigeria Exactly and I just wonder if you can just give people a taste of what these walks are so that people can keep this in their mind so that later when we're talking about the state of Nigeria today we can feed them into discussion I tried to create one in Nigeria for this idea so it's called the midnight run but we don't run now and then we do relay races but we don't set out to run it's called the midnight run but we walk for most of the time and I find routes through a city and I invite strangers to explore the routes with me and I invite local artists to design workshops or artistic interventions during the course of the midnight run it lasts from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. sometimes 12 hours from 6 p.m. to midnight we've done them in Australia New Zealand right across the UK four or five in Italy a couple in Rome Spain here and there and it's just a great way to create a mobile village for a duration of time we spend most of the time playing a laughing and creating artwork which we share for one night only for maybe between 25 to 30 minutes each artistic intervention and then we just move on it's the greatest amount of fun I have each year I'm sure many didn't actually realise you did that too because that is a revelation to me but um let's hear now one of our other readings which is a pre-recorded reading it's Umaturaki and this is father's land the land where father is born it is my land too father says so and teaches me so with his choices and his living and his working even with his dying father works for the land in a manner of saying so but also in a concrete sense because father works with concrete and the kinds of things that go into concrete sand gravel father also knows a lot about the land he knows about rocks and minerals and metals he also knows the deep stuff like ores and tectonic plates and fault lines there's a picture of him as a younger man in an underground mine he's wearing heavy duty overalls and a yellow helmet with a headlight I can't recall if he's holding a pickaxe or not but it is an image that hurries forth whenever I think about father and his work on a fishing trip once somewhere in Rayfield back when it is just the back of town and not the swath of real estate that gouges you penniless if you don't take time I see a hillside made of kaolin and stopped to pick up a few lumps as a birthday gift for father knowing he loves rocks I am 10 years old and our thanks to umaturaki for that reading that was called father's land and talking in very beautiful terms about our land the actual soil the ground what did that conjure up for you um the very first thing it made me think about was the was my first artistic endeavor I was four years old and I planned a city this is when we lived in Jorz and because I was four years old and a bit of an idiot and was probably beefing with my twin sister I segregated the city so the guys were on one side and the girls were not there and it was all built on concrete foundations and we had the swimming pools the ice cream parlors the coca-cola bottling cups what did the women have of just grass pretty much so it made me think about that and also he talked a lot about my father and my father was really proud that his son had planned a city so he folded it and put it into his briefcase and took it to work which just felt like he was telling me to go forth and colonize my Jorz so it made me think about yeah just thinking about rocks and soil and me trying to invent and sculpt my own reality I mean it made me think I wondered if his son if his father rather worked in the oil industry or the geologist or something like that man I'm like I don't even know if I need to answer these questions again because you know I'm going to go back to being Igbo again that's fine you know it's always about like I'm Igbo and this is the thing you know land is so important to Igbo people you know how many Igbo people are here first of all three is enough there are four of us now sacred number but land is very important to Igbo people not just for what it can bring forth but also for what it symbolizes and he uses my father's land a lot you know even in I mean it's funny that in Nigeria right we refer to Nigeria as the country as my fatherland we don't say motherland like people say oh I'm going to my motherland we say fatherland and it's because Nigeria is such a patriarchal culture and so with regards to land and my culture land is not just about like I said what you can what it can give you but also what it is and what it symbolizes is continuity lineage connection and also sort of value so if you don't have land you you really have nothing you know you could have seven sons but what are you going to leave the sons when you're dead if you don't have land you might as well have only daughters and I'm saying that with irony you know you might as well only have daughters because what do daughters do after all they go away and they marry into other families so if you have kids if you have sons and you have no land you're nobody and that is why a lot of people no matter what they achieve outside Nigeria would always try to have even if it's a little bit of land that is as small as this glass that you can put a finger on and be like this is my land you know it's really important in that regard because the land is what makes you a person if you don't have land they are not a person my kids are from a place called Oka in Anambra state and what a lot of people do in Oka is a child is not a child until they are two years old right until then the spirits can have them and the spirits often do because some kids as you know don't live that long you know they would die from a any manner of childhood diseases and so the reason I'm using Oka as an example is that Oka is the one place in which women and men are treated the same and so a person could come from Oka and go to my four-year-old and do the with her like like she's a man you know but they wouldn't do that with me because I was married into the place and so what happens when they become two years old is they are even given a tree do you get a tree planted a palm tree planted for you and the tree is supposed to symbolize yourself but then it's planted in the earth and that's supposed to symbolize that connection that you have to the earth no matter what happens this is who you are and this is where you come from so that essay reminded me how similar we really are even when we don't think we are similar even when we think we are looking at the land as something else or as a different sort of thing to how we would normally see it it's still that it's still that connection that belonging that we're talking about but also when you're also talking about how women are disenfranchised later on that is such a don't get me loathed uniform thing and not just in Nigeria I mean there are people I'm showing the audience here in the theatre or even at home who are not from Nigeria who can also identify with the fact that women are robbed of their birthright as soon as they marry or even if you don't marry even if you don't marry exactly yeah they have no birthright even if you don't marry you are not given a portion of land you are not regarded as a full entity in yourself and have no right to inherit inherit any land you know and it also made me think of our our national anthem you know Nigeria we hail the our own dear native land that's what you mean that's the old one so that dates me so you would be I mean my fifth so that dates me I used to sing that that you know national anthem when I was young you know and it's now what Arizo Compaccio it's Nigeria's school obey you know to serve our fatherland that's why we love and strength and faith yeah you know I mean so exactly we don't and you know let me ask you when you think about it's interesting that you took you back to you making this kind of was it at a utopian I mean it was utopian in fact that you had the segregation you wanted to be apart from your sister I was four years old but as you grew older yeah how did that vision of the land and the city that you wanted to create Joss I have to say for those that don't know Joss in in Plateau State is central Nigeria and I remember when I was growing up they called it the Switzerland of Nigeria it was the you know kind of Beall and Endall if you couldn't go abroad you wanted to go to Joss not just because of the climate the climate was kind of similar to Europe at some stage especially during the Hammer Time but just the floor and fauna what you would see a place of beauty now sadly it's a place of discord it's a place where university students are scared to go to the campus it's you know as in replicated in other parts of Nigeria not just because of sectarian conflict but over land we have battles for the very land you know that you have herders who are now conflicting with farmers who are now spilling blood over who owns the land and we have hundreds of thousands millions across different parts of Nigeria the the nation is torn apart so when you had this vision or if you still have this vision what does it look like to you it's definitely changed I remember there's this play I'm working on I should start working on it tomorrow it's a year late but corona right it's all set in the north of Nigeria it begins in 1865 or so and ends in 1903 and it's about the last days of the Sokoto Empire and I reached out to Nigeria Northern Nigerian academic saying I want to come and meet all of you and discuss all of this thing and they said don't come I said why they said the roads are not safe the land is not safe they said politicians were traveling via helicopter because they didn't want to encounter anyone from bandits to the extremists on the land itself so the land the land no longer holds the people it's their fault lines everywhere and just as my hometown you know that's where I was born and I haven't left haven't been there since maybe 93 or 94 so I really want to go but my land is hostile to me it's a hostile environment and like you said the skirmishes between them is because not just of sectarian violence but because of poverty which is all linked to how the British divided the land when they were withdrawing and given the country it's independence but their fault lines everywhere I mean some would also say that climate change also plays a part because when you have communities struggling over resources and with desertification and lack of watering holes for the cattle you then have the cattle wearers who are now entering into a farmland and that causes a conflict but then again what are our governments doing in order to prevent this happening what protection are they giving to the indigenous communities and then you have different states which are saying well okay give a little grazing land to these I heard of the story about the very early days of Boko Haram and what happened was just exactly like you said there was this watering hole somewhere in the north and they were camped around it and they were mostly just like Muslim hippies right they had nothing to do with the Nigerian state they wanted to avoid all of the wahala that govern the country so just they were just camped there but the Nigerian government wanted this watering hole so they tried to bribe them and they said we are out here with deserts and camels what are we going to do with money no thank you so they then tried again they refused then they got weapons and just killed a bunch of their ruling class and drove them away from the watering hole so those Muslims traveled up through Nigeria to Chad and that's when what you call them ISIS got in contact with them saying I heard you guys have been mistreated come we'll treat you we'll teach you how to treat them and then gave them weapons and it came back and started their madness but they weren't called Boko Haram until the CIA called them Boko Haram and the phrase Boko Haram itself comes from Boko which was the scripts the British and the French tried to impose of the Northern Nigerians to get them to write everything in this in this French script so that's one theory there are also other analysts who would also differ quite distinctly from your own and I just wonder especially talking about the land and talking about cattle it kind of brings me nicely before we go to Jay Chuklu's reading to your reading Inua if you can also give us the reading that you've been selected for so writing my essay wasn't difficult at all I think it just poured out in a day or two and it's because one I was writing I was writing this play which meant that I was researching the North and two is because I you know I grew up swimming through lakes of Suya so it was easy to sort of put pen to paper and there was a writer whose name escapes me now but she tried to write about the different types of Suya so I reached out to her and for those that don't know I mean my mouth is watering now just thinking about Suya for those of you that haven't had your breakfast I apologize but for those of you who don't know what Suya is and for those of you who are carnivores like me it is uh it's um well delicious meat it's heaven it is heaven and it's delicious meat on a stick which is dried but particular spices it's infused with spices both when it's roasting and also after it's finished I think in Kenya it is yeah a bit like Yama Choma but it's a distinct it's not like Yama it's not like Yama Choma no no no but in the way okay are there any Kenyans are there any Kenyans in the house okay oh yes have you ever tasted Suya not no but you know in terms of the roasting that's that's as far as the the resemblance goes but the taste of of Suya is just out of this world so apologies to all you vegetarians or vegans in the house I know one or two but um this reading by Yama centers on Suya is at the Clarkson okay five minutes right so I'll stop right a brief history of Suya it began this way a long time ago in the land before the country on an afternoon in which the sun stood static and thankless in the sky it grew angry such was its fury at that thanklessness that stuffed the breeze back down the gullets of wind tunnels roared at crippled remnants of rain boiled the breath of the land to a slow ooze of air and maintained a steady and solid beating down on the desert ground such was its fever that the scorpions found it too unbearable to move mere cats had altogether stopped playing the ostriches had shrugged off their feathers and all the cacti tribut up camels had gone on strike beaching themselves on the shores of dunes and even the snakes had shed down to the thinnest skins in a nearby cave two thieves hiding from the travel into our regs they had stolen from were baking in the thick voiceless dark famished and desperately parched they waited for dust to settle then crept out with their dry lips cracked and thin rivulets of blood seeping like tiny springs they licked these wounds hissing at the sharp pain their tongues like sandpaper across the dunes they could see an encampment an archipelago of campfires where flames flickered like dancing beacons they could hear the lull of a lute or reed pipes floating lilt and a kettle drum mingling with laughter and dancing feet they moved to satiate their hunger creeping close and closer their bodies never more than an inch off the shifting sands their eyes like four low-lying moons luminous in the night one had a stone knife its obsidian blade tucked into an antelope bone handle the other a length of rope woven from palm fronds tools for the nefarious trade the slit passed the kitchen quarters the cleric sprawling tent the courtesans caravans and came to the clearing that held the cattle there they rose to their feet and stared my earliest memory of storytelling also happened at night centuries after these thieves decades after the land had become the country and thousands of miles further south in the breakneck speedy city of Lagos by then the country had wrestled itself away from those who had invented it had survived the civil war begun to trade in oil preserved through several coups and from these closed shaves with destruction and desertion had spun new stories of ingenuity and resilience in the face of impossible odds these thematic strands were woven into the fabric of the Nigerian spirit and that night my father and his friends were deep in its folds they had gathered in the living room of a house in a Butemeta and they had been talking for hours they had drunk enough beer to sink a dwarf whale and you could tell by how richly they laughed at thin jokes how completely they emptied themselves of all reservations cackling into the briefest silences or cascading with thunderous joys that they were completely at ease in their company that they could end up begin each other's sentences that they were that close so intimately known to each other and the table before them was a mountain of Suya and around them fist-sized newspaper parcels of extra red pepper ground nuts and thinly sliced raw onions the mountain of meat was ever rest to me and I wanted to eat its summit my eyes were leveled at its topmost slice the aroma moving my mouth to water my father knowing his son warned this boy you didn't learn from your lesson from last time eh and the friends erupted into laughter like father like son one chimed and the bouts of laughter strengthened anew the thieves were should I stop okay the thieves were a perfect duo the knife-wailed are cunning and the rope bearer are strong among the cattle they stood far apart and opposite each other with their arms spread out and walked forward getting closer and closer until they had cornered a small goat the rope bearer swiftly bound its mouth to keep it from bleeding then its legs and the knife bearer slid a thin wooden pole a thin wooden pole he'd broken from the fence under the nuts they found the trough filled with water for the cattle gulped down as much as they could and crawled back to the bound up animal they crouched down lifted one end of the rope onto a shoulder each and looked around to ensure no job obsessed goat herd wandering guests no young couple a drunken reveler no one was tottering towards them then rose up and fled back across the dunes the night eating up the dust raised by their feet thank you very much in your answer tell us about the inspiration was it just dreaming about Suya I mean was it a gift when you know Nancy and yeah or they said that you could write something that you thought okay here's my time so in the essay I refer to my father telling me this boy you didn't learn from last time and it was this incident where it's similar thing my father and his friends were eating Suya and I fought to take a piece and then my father let me and I was there trying to bite and the meat slipped through my fingers and hit my face very elastic it was probably what do you call it the tendons yeah yeah yeah and I cried I cried for about two days because of the pepper because of the pepper so that was that the pain of that is still in my bones you know so I wanted to I've always wanted to do something with that so thinking about Suya thinking about the the creation of those spaces and my father and friends would sit down I just wanted to talk about yeah I wanted to sort of rebuild of that in something and that's the beauty of this of this book I think of This Our Country is that it has it's such a a mix of different emotions different memories you know and you know yours also took you back to your childhood which we'll hear a bit later you know and and a lot of the writers it's the same but some it's just thoughts about the present as well as the past it's thoughts about joys of you know being in Nigeria some it's of a Nigeria that they can imagine because not all the writers have lived or grown up in Nigeria and it's just please remember I mean one especially if you're here in the theater the book of This Our Country is available in the foyer later they'll be assigning later on for any of you that want to buy it but also please please please if you have any questions that are prompted by any of the readings either by our two lovely authors on the on the stage or any of the authors whose readings you've heard please do remember to send any questions and post them either raising a hand or if you're at home and you're listening please do put your questions in the Q&A section at the bottom now they will have the reading by J.K. Chukwu and hers is against enough against enough by J.K. Chukwu very powerful but quite abstract also reading what did that conjure for you because and if I can read a little bit also from before coming to you Jigadilly she said as I mourn the lives and hopes lost from the BLM protests and the leaky massacres I unravel as I wait for the next act of violence from white terrorists and debate whether Trump who rots with hatred whose murderous hands are dyed red from his ignorance in truth is the most American president since Andrew Jackson I unravel I unravel I unravel and this clearly you know written during the time 2020 was such a an emotive time for so many of us on so many levels and it brought for J.K. so many issues two to the four when you heard her reading did that conjure up similar thoughts for you yeah because I mean I'd read the essay and I think for me it's it again it's it's the similarity you know we were all going through the same things it seemed but I mean we've always gone through the same things all around the world but this time it was it was brought home by the pandemic we all had to be at home at one level or another and so we were all not distracted there was that ability to connect fully sometimes a bit too much because you had nothing but time and so I think what happened was it it brought a lot of people an awareness of themselves yes because you have nobody at the end of the day but yourself to face and a lot of people spent their pandemic lockdowns alone you know but also it made you more aware of how much people were just like you and were going through the same things that you were going through there was just an awareness and for a lot of people a lot of mental breakdown as well because with that awareness came the sense of powerlessness the knowledge that there was only so much you could do and so for me it all tied up to ensars protests in Nigeria the BLM protests in America still ongoing the right wing movement sweeping the whole of Europe and then there's the madness of Brexit you know there was a lot of trauma last year and I think that the fact that there are a lot of Nigerians in all these places made it also a Nigerian problem because we couldn't then do the thing which a lot of Nigerians do which is when things are bad in Nigeria like oh well at least I have a British passport no no Britain was burning too America was burning too where are you in Europe it's burning too so we had to pay attention and we we're still having to pay attention because it's no longer a matter of it's all the way back there it's happening in Nigeria it's happening here too there's no oh it's hot here I'm going to run back to Nigeria in fact our parents have told us not to come back like Inua said you know I said to my folks I'm going to come back with the kids and I need them to do one year they said come back to where where do you want to come back to there's fire everywhere so it's stay and and build or stay and bank up bank up your shores and try and bank keep the flames at bay because there's nowhere to run to we're all going through the same things and it's interesting as you say how everything kind of conflated and just hearing and you can imagine how people would unravel when they were by themselves you know how do you deal with this if for instance the Black Lives Matter protest started but you were worried about COVID you wanted perhaps you you had debated with yourself should I go out and protest shouldn't I do I want to go out and protest do I believe in it but even if I do can I go because of COVID I'm worried about COVID it's the same as with Nsars people were worried but I had cousins and others saying me I'm going out and their mother saying don't go out you know either because they didn't believe in Nsars or because they were afraid of COVID though there wasn't as much of the worry here for you did you did you understand the unraveling talking about the unraveling definitely and in the in the in the last sentence she talks about song she talks about singing and she talks about the civil war and it was something that we we played a lot of attention to when we're working on three sisters which was my last player the national theater about the civil war and and we we flew in the last cast member was a singer an Igbo songstress and poets who we flew in from Nigeria to do that specifically and each night she improvised each song that that she performed which was the bridge between all the acts and we wanted to keep a live element of the story something that we couldn't curate that we couldn't try and and and invent or or or steer too much we just created space for her to be herself so and each night she would do that she listened to the play she'd try and get the feel of the audience and improvise a poem specifically so no two shows were the same specifically for her but also for each show in that very simple literal level but um the use of song in the play to transport the lift was really really really really poignant and it was the same thing when I was researching that I discovered just how many choirs and acts where despite the intense consistent destruction attacks by the Nigerian government at the time just the importance of song yeah that just came back to me in her reading yeah and celebration because it was the birthday and that is how three sisters begin with with with the birthday and it's interesting as well when you're talking about song you know during this period especially during 2020 when um Nancy and I thought about this whole idea this is when so many people may be reverted to song especially if you're by yourself or even if you're with family and I I certainly did music helped so many of us you know and so many people I know may have even had a playlist for you know during that period you know either it's for the pandemic or whether it's for Black Lives Matter or whether it's for N Sars and the role that musicians also played and was so important please please please can I please remind you if you have a question that you want to pose and and don't feel that the questions have to be after the discussion if any of you have any questions now that you feel like putting to either the authors please do just raise your hand and one of our lovely sisters will come round with a microphone so if any of you are prompted to to ask a question please feel free right now I'm sure they'll be happy to answer oh and a gentleman already does thank you and you can say your name if you want to because I'm feeling ah thank you very much my name is Billy Cahora yeah um yeah thanks guys incredible discussion when I think I'm a Kenyan writer and when and I write a lot about political events and and I mean there's just so many right and they're just so big and when I try and kind of either novelize or kind of impose any form of creative writing on a political event my struggles always like what is it that you take how much of it do you take what do you select what do you omit how do you fit those so-called real life political events into the form that you've chosen so I just really wanted to hear about your process how you choose what what events to take on what part of them how do you fit them into whether it's a novel or a play or a poem and and and yeah just just process thanks who wants to take that first you know Chikadoo Chikadoo yeah I wasn't sure because you didn't you didn't look as if you wanted to speak please just I'm tired of hearing my own voice and I'm just recovering from a I'm recovering from a cold and so I'm trying to give the old voice box a rest because I can hear it going sexy you know I think that a lot of the time this is this is true for me I don't know about anybody else but when you're writing characters in a particular setting at a particular time given that the whole of Nigeria is one big conflict it's just easy to choose the conflict that is happening at the time and there's always something sometimes it's local sometimes it's is you know according to ethnic group and sometimes it's natural and sometimes it's all three at once and so I think for me personally I tend to make it small is an old journalism trick you know to focus on the smallest element of a massive conflict conflict as a way of making people care about that conflict because if you were to broaden it out then it's you're talking a lot of numbers and it's very hard to relate to you they tell you 52,000 people died from Covid in Britain last week you're like oh if they say to you there was a three-year-old boy who died from Covid and in the middle of his funeral 20 family members caught Covid and out of that his mother his father his brother and his dog died you care more about that because it's one three-year-old boy and it's one family and you're looking at the people within that family versus 52,000 people we're not saying that 52,000 people are not important or that this one boy whom I'm calling Billy now sorry Billy whom I'm calling Billy now is is has got Covid that he's more important but it's easier to humanize the conflict when you're looking at it through the lens of one person or a small group of people so I tend to kind of like bring it down to smaller groups of people and that's how I select what I put in I have yeah similar ways of working but I'm but I'm maybe a little bit more pedantic than that so I have a workshop on creative writing specifically to do with theater which I teach a lot it's called volatile space and what I do is I invite all my students to pick a big-ass topic one of the you know massive things happening in the world climate change whatever and then I tell them to make a list of 10 places that engage with this theme from the most obvious to the most ridiculous from the most concrete to the most abstract so you can imagine it could start from if say for instance Black Lives Matter maybe the streets of London to a filing cabinet inside the houses of parliament to the factory where they make the pens that are in those pining calvates to maybe you know somewhere where they mind the rubber which is used to make the cap for the pen and I ask them okay so imagine there are two individuals who work in that farm how are they related to Black Lives Matter how far are they and that's who I try to write about so I try to go far and sometimes it doesn't work and sometimes it does but you have 10 potential locations and individuals in those locations who interact with the topic and that's how I do it so like you said going head on just doesn't really work but going distance from it and lateral can create really interesting narratives and points of view and also just one thing to bear in mind was them not all the essays interestingly a lot did focus on the state of the nation or historical or future kind of feel feelings and tensions but not all of it they the you were asked your brief was to just talk about Nigeria and what it wanted to talk about meant the hopeful and exactly like the hopeful bits of Nigeria because you have to remember this was commissioned during one of the bleakest periods in Nigeria's history of recent so we're hoping to bring some hope back to what we thought of Nigeria or what we remembered of our childhood in Nigeria Suya for instance I mean we all like Suya you know you tell people you're vegetarian they're like okay do you want chicken instead you know that kind of thing so it's just it's just you know looking for those little moments of light within the darkness you know because even like a small little ray of light can pierce so much and for me it was like holding up a blanky full of holes and just having the sunlight stream through that's what we're asked to do in the end the sunlight will overcome the massive blanket that's blocking out most of the story blocking out most of the sun and so I that's how I visualized the brief and so I chose a moment you know that's what we're hoping to do to choose moments where even though there might be conflict in the essays the overarching feeling is one of positivity and hope and not all and not everybody was talking about politics and politics so just just don't feel that this book was all just about politics but I see there's somebody else and just to tell you we do have another reading another reading but before then we can have this lady's questions okay I'll be really quick thank you for a really interesting conversation I could listen to you guys talk all afternoon my name's Aboyo and I'm a Nigerian but very much a Southern Nigerian both my mum and dad are from Delta States and I think when I read books by Nigerian authors what seems to be a recurring theme that I see is a lot of representation from the south of Nigeria and I guess there's a little bit of a issue around like the what's the name of that Ted talk there's the problem with a single story where all I hear about the north is conflict and Boko Haram and I guess I wanted to guess hear your opinion on how we could amplify the voices of writers from northern Nigeria because I feel like we've heard a range we know a range of authors from the south of Nigeria we know lots of perspectives but not that many from the north if you knew or if you had any thoughts on the topic thank you I mean I can't speak for Auré or for Nancy but just to say that in this book they I think they have tried to get us spread you know so not Nancy can speak for Nancy Nancy is over there I wanted that's Nancy she can speak for Nancy I was seeing you yeah there we go I wondered why give her the microphone give her the microphone she can answer this question no no no please can you no no no no it's a question this is your baby nice try it's a question you can answer so I would say we were very intentional in terms of even as editors we were very aware of who we were so I'm from a number of states Auré is a you're a bad woman so what we didn't want necessarily is when we're speaking about Nigeria to just focus on our perspectives of Nigeria so even when we were listing all the authors we were very aware of what part of Nigeria they represent right so we in terms of diversity of voices that was something that we absolutely considered when we were kind of putting the collection together I don't know in terms of people who've read the book what you thought about the diversity but one thing that I loved particularly I would say maybe Umar's essay is as a Nigerian I realized that there's so much of Nigeria that I had never like there are languages that I had never heard about before and I think that's one of the most moving things for me reading the essays is to see how much as a Nigerian I can learn from the north from different parts of Nigeria so that was something that was really important to us I hope it's reflected in the book but yeah that's what I have to say it definitely is thank you Chickadilly for pointing out because I did think at one stage she must want me to get away with it she was like she was thinking to my chair at one stage I said something which was representative of the authors that I kind of saw Nancy and I thought isn't Nancy or isn't she yes it is Nancy so forgive me but thank you very much for answering the question um but I I do think you did represent you know I certainly you've got that sense and I think also it has to be said it isn't just a political it's not just a polemic it's not just people standing you know on their soapboxes you know saying what they think about the state of the nation and how it can be rectified I think it's a celebration of Nigerianness or what we think about the nation and our thoughts and our dreams not mine the authors thoughts and dreams so let's hear another if we can this is now Chigo Zio Bioma and the reading is Pride and Punishment At the airport in Lagos I felt my pride crescendo feeling impressed by the edifice my beleaguered country had despite its youth it only got its independence in 1960 and its infant democracy it's only been a democratic state since 1999 provided the light shone in my face and carefully I gave the airport workers money waved at my dad and siblings and when the plane ascended I fixed my eyes on the window wiping and reframing my gaze at the land disappearing into the arm of us darkness in the distance then as the plane entered the planetary darkness of clouds I started to weep it took two days of opening my eyes into the daylight reality of the new country for the first internal shift about Nigeria to alcohol it had been many schools as if the change had happened behind some invisible subconscious coughing and its appearance now at the sharp wind of my mind surprised me that day I noticed that most of my friends had said to me that my speech had started to end with the fries I am disappointed I had just thought at this word in reaction to the fact that electricity was constant in Lefkosha the capital of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus it had surprised me to find that a country so small with landscapes so dry and under international embargo could have such reliable infrastructure when Nigeria did not then when I went into the city itself I was confronted by the cleanliness of the streets and again I uttered those words and so I became disenchanted but had so much I struggled to sleep my settling into the country was going well but I had I could not take my eyes of what was happening here I found that increasingly as I discovered more of Northern Cyprus I came to see it in it everything my own country lacked and the accretion of these deficiencies in time came to compose a mean a tower of afflictive rage Fied and Punishment by Chigozye Obiyama it's quite powerful because he starts by recounting the 1966 coup and at one stage he said when he when there was a national address afterwards and why the soldiers amounted that coup he said of that speech all of which was transcribed in the newspaper I still remember this line we promised you that we promise that you the citizens will no more be ashamed to say that you are a Nigerian and yet here we then hear how many decades later when Chigozye and he was actually in Northern Cyprus and he just couldn't understand why Nigeria after how many years of of independence and talking about us as the you know the how do we describe ourselves in terms of South Africa with that competition that we always have Nigeria seen as the bigger more developed of the state you know we are the the giant of Africa that's the term the giant of Africa that can't produce constant electricity for the citizens the giant of Africa that doesn't have free education or even education at a particular level for their citizens the giant of Africa that can't protect citizens from even from armed robbers let's not even go to Boko Haram you know and here he was in Northern Cyprus saying oh hold on a minute how come they can do it in this tiny nation and we can't do it so hearing what Chigozye said what did it make me think did it make you think or is it something that you've heard all the time I mean he says that Nigeria has only been democratic since truly the dogmatics is 1999 and for me that's that's the answer right if we think about this country they've had centuries of democracy we've been wedded into the consciousness of the people quote-unquote democracy because as you know there are caveats within that you know but for centuries and centuries and it's still a new technology in in Nigeria and I think so when it when it discusses as a failed state I think by which you measure and stick by what is you know how and I think we'll get it right to just take some time unfortunately the hundreds of thousands of people dying because of how much time it's taken and how much bloodshed etc but we'll get there in the end for me it's it's it's time and it's interesting that you say democracy or the independence or democracy you say started in 1999 not in 1960 when we gained independence no it was just conflict that was just yeah yeah okay I still think we're the giants of Africa I mean I don't care what anyone says they are more of us than they're more of us than there are of anybody else by that standard alone we're the giants of Africa I mean look at any of the this is an example look at any of the literary competitions if there are 10 people eight of them in Nigeria do we work that way you will you know it might be just a matter of numbers as in they're more of us but that's the whole point I think that I think that like Inwa says we we're only just starting you know and we're going from a system that was mostly let's face it it's it's patrimonial politics you know we're we're trying to tell people that the way that we have always worked where we do ballet for like the the eldest person you know we kind of Jennifer exactly Jennifer like for the oldest person and they're the authority by virtue of being the oldest person we're trying to tell people now that that's not how it's supposed to work that just because you're old doesn't mean you're the best person for the job which is what we find in other in other countries and it's a really difficult thing to it's a really difficult mindset to shift because we grew up with it our parents grew up with it their parents grew up with it and going back it's only these Gen Z people that want to burn things for no reason they just want to burn things you know yeah hold on a minute the Gen Z will say that they are the ones taking action I agree people of my generation that will say I agree with you to yourself yeah I agree I agree see my generation we're the millennials everybody just wants to pick on us they hate us because they're like oh you're very very complacent and then when we do like oh you're doing you know these Gen Z people I believe that it's now that we're going to start to see changes because they just came out like agents of chaos from the womb you know marches in one hand heroes in the other hand they're like we want to burn shit now you know so I think that it's going to take some time but already the time is nigh you know we're seeing it now and unfortunately what our generation avoided which was we avoided conflict because we were largely brow-beating by our parents in every sense of the word is what they are not taking you know when when the examples are there for you to see when we talk about queer Nigerians now being vocal we had queer Nigerians when I was growing up when I was 10 we knew all of them you know we were we were all like friends with them the ones that were you know that were even the trans a lot of trans and people in our body schools we knew them the authorities knew them but they had to be underground because nobody wanted it to kind of like make noise and they didn't want to make noise either versus the Gen Z quiz that we see now which is you must acknowledge my existence and yes why not so I will own my millennial hood of being respectful and polite in society but I will also buy kerosene for any of the Gen Z people to burn shit because we didn't we didn't make it work we couldn't make it work it's very hard to make it work when you're within that system it's hard to dismantle things when you've been raised within that system and it's not a physical thing it's a mindset thing I'm only just beginning now to be more like this you know whereas if I'm like oh auntie good afternoon but it has to be said not every Gen Z or millennial and not every Gen Z wants to burn everyone down either obviously you know it is it is also a case of that phrase that you used which I quite liked within reach of hope people felt and even felt that maybe ensal's was within reach of hope if I can just read a quick question here from somebody called Trish thank you very much Trish she sent this question online she said sorry I couldn't be there today I would really like to buy the book is it available to buy online somewhere thank you and just to remind you if you're here in the theatre you can buy it outside in the foyer but Trish sorry Nancy how can people buy the book if they want to see as you're here please answer Trish's question oh sorry the mic is coming okay it's available online so from bookshop.org you can support independent booksellers but it's also available on Amazon as well thank you very much if you want to support an evil coppery and if it's all sorts we're not we're done discriminating and also if you're here and especially if you're staying for the events later on today and we have you know the fantastic one about an hour later here at the British Library there's also food in between so it's an all day event but there's Senegalese caterers who are also providing food there in the courtyard Little Baobab is the name of the restaurant so you can grab lunch before 2.30 yeah so or yes before the 2.30 discussion which is wild imperfections that some of you may also be attending so any other questions from here in the in the hall this gentleman here and please remember you can introduce yourself hello yeah it's been really fascinating I've read the book I've been asked to come along here by Brittle Paper who you've probably heard about so I'm going to be doing a rise-up for them there's obviously very strong connections with Nigeria there from reading the book to me I've kept picking up on the contrasts and the hope but also the disappointment and the self-criticism but also throughout the book for me also there is incredible condemnation of the British and colonialism which I fully understand I guess my question is what kind of model might you see for Nigeria you talk about Nigeria as a young country but certainly Britain now can't be a model because we have corruption too we have problems with class divide wealth disparity so if you're a young country what are you aiming to get towards because Britain certainly hasn't got it right now just as we didn't have it right in the past thank you very much for that question this is the this is simply what I was going to add to what you were saying about buying kerosene for the Gen C generation I think I think it can only survive it can only come from deeper conversation and trying to figure out a way to actually talk to each other because what you said for instance about the generational politics is a real issue but there were elements of that which were so glorious and served us for centuries you know when you knew the roles you played in a community and it was demarcated by how old you were there were certain responsibilities you took on in the village and that worked for then you know until all of it was destroyed and those socialist structures were eradicated in place with capitalism and patriot and deeper patriarch patriarchal ones linked to money which you know just turned everything so for me we can find a third path or something that works that that serves both I don't know what it is yet I'm not a politician I think it's led by women absolutely I think it definitely is led by women this is exactly the play that I'm writing which is set in the north anyway I carry on I think it's led by women I think it's led by women I think that what's missing is in what you're talking about is the an arena for women because if everybody carried their own weight then the job will be easier but what it is now is we've had a system that's coming like I remember reading sorry all these Victorian things I used to read when I was little because I read a lot my gosh and it was always the women would come in with their clothes and they had to be accomplished and what was accomplished you had to play an instrument you had to be able to hold decent conversation you had to be what's that all you had to speak more than English so you had to speak another language and they would have like these cards where you know they had like the purse thing with the bag and you'd have the card where of acceptable conversation you know what you could talk about and like you had to be beautiful or at least well put together and you had to be charming and laugh I suppose all that stuff and what it did was the missionaries took that and put that on our women whereas we had women that would take a machete and cut off Queen Amina if you went back centuries you know and so it was it's the idea of womanhood that has changed and with it the role of womanhood so we now have a system sorry see why I didn't want the water so we now have a system that has tied our women up in these laces that they didn't come with before so whereas we had women and their own avenues so they would say for instance like I remember saying to my like we still joke about it in my family if my brother I only have one brother right so we know he's going to inherit everything and so anytime he wants to act like a like a brother and be like we say to him yeah but we can say we're not going to we're not accepting your bride and you can't do anything we can say li-li this wedding is not happening or you'll die you know and so it's that or you'll die that we are missing we don't have women in a lot of our political structures and so the power and the might and experience because it's a difference fear it's a different way of doing things that is we don't have that is it that we don't have the women I think we do have the women it's just that they're not given the space look at Dr. Obi is visibly look at Queen Amina going back into our into our history even I'm thinking in my generation when you're talking about you as millennial I remember my peers were the ones who were here who set up Radio Kudirat after you know the M.K. Uab Yola's wife who was assassinated in the 1990s women were the forefront of the pro-democracy movement it's always the systems that have come and as you say they inherited from the colonial regime but the systems which have always managed to quieten these women yeah and also the society structure that we still have that the way that we attack women and I say we because even women are sometimes those who attack other women who are standing wanting to stand when you just talk about the abuse that some of our women receive when they stand to be MPs to be councillors to be senators and that form of you know it's just unbelievable how even in 2021 it still happens even with the Gen Z generation yeah but as the systems are not geared towards supporting the way that women lead not rule because that's not what we do you know a lot of women are leaders natural leaders and so the system doesn't support that that kind of leadership you know it's basically we're fitting a lot of people in who are war time rulers you know they don't know what to do in peacetime apart from war we can't put them in there and expect them to to lead you know I'd love to I was just gonna we just have five more minutes so if anybody has a question from the audience oh yeah you have a good reading oh yes oh my god that's true so before we have another question can we quickly have to get to these yes I do apologize came all the way from the citizens and everybody please please remember what question you want to pose hopefully I wonder if the organisers can give us maybe five minutes more because this is a wonderful book that has so many issues that we want to discuss and it would be a shame if so please could you give us five more minutes Marcel okay my essay is called life is a marketplace the language of the market was not always verbal and its mind fields confounded me I know how to speak Igbo but the expressions of the marketplace were self assured confident adult and rapid there was a dance of how much and how much the theatre that is pretending to walk off the dramatic pleading to stay both seller and buyer matching step for step come now and see smoothing your vexing and fine haggle with me then followed by fast mental maths working out what increments in price stop short of insulting both goods and trader feeling with hands reading your rivals every expression a suppressed sigh or a suppressed hiss or sigh a downturned mouth how chatty or taciturn was your face bad for market or was it just how they did an overly cheerful expression could disclose a trader's disposition or could conceal faulty wares the desire to offload quickly finally hammered last price before everything is settled still watching the hands to make sure there's no last minute switch no dented measuring cup and the money is exchanged examined for wear and tear before it goes in its place mainly at the end of a wrapper tucked into the waist onto the next the aim of the interaction for both parties however is not just the one contact but repeat custom in the market the ideal trader and the buyer are treated equally to the ultimate endearment of customer goods are gendered men sell food crops like yam and cassava tubers portions of beef bloody and buzzing with flies livestock leather goods frozen fish and hawks of iced bird parts like turkey thighs and chicken drumsticks women do dried fish and crayfish grains and legumes stew and soup ingredients like tatashi onions vegetables and cooking oils one will be forgiving for assuming that women will be in charge of beauty products but their jurisdiction in beauty is mostly limited to baby soaps and lotions clothing and accessories men surprisingly own the beauty and jewelry sections all genders are responsible for rows of cloth but once it becomes contemporary clothing like denim trousers t-shirts and handbags favored by the young adults and university students the arrow points towards the men folk again second hand clothing and lingerie women my dislike for markets was not helped by the fact that we rarely visited the fun parts the baking supply shops where my schoolmates said one could earn pinches of raisins from shopkeepers for greeting properly keeping stum and not fidgeting so they could try to take most of our mother's money unless there was a special occasion shopping with my mother obiageli comprised bulk buys and uniforms stockfish tomatoes for blending and boiling down into crimson pastes ready to magic into stew checkered blue cloth by the yard and white socks retailed by women who bought their children's names as their own prefixed proudly by the mama title at christmas my mother might visit the ready-made quarters with shiny man-made fabric and netting conjured into puffy dresses with matching wristbags or cosmetics suffused with perfumed mists and floral chemical scents the shops are packed manned by beautiful bleached boys with guy names like edu brazil and chisco and inno short for innocent as a child i wondered why this the holiest of female holies remained the domain of fine boys right to the marketplace and i love the way you portrayed those market women because that just took me back and i think anybody who's been to not just in nigeria but any market in any african city i think it's the same thing and and they can spot you a mile away if they know you're kind of a bit unsure about my god you're the price and they'll swindle you swindle you no matter where you are whether you're in Nairobi, lusaka or what have you three things popped into mind on your reading one is um in um professor Wallace Schrodinger's play um death and the king's horseman there's a whole contingent of the play just happens in the marketplace and it's just the most vibrant part it's just it's just gorgeous well thank you i shall take that as a compliment um the second is the amount of power that Felakuti's mother, Femilie and the Felakuti wielded through the market women in Abel Kutah was incredible that you know 10 000 strong protests that she'd she'd lead against the British government and colonial powers was incredible and the third thing that it reminded me of is um when i last visited Legos i went to Osho the market i was wearing a t-shirt eh the t-shirt i purposely hadn't washed it in like three or four days Oshoki you know i hadn't combed my beard so i tried to look you know yes still they called me oh you're both boy it's the most empowering thing in my whole life yeah so those guys they know yeah what skin was too fresh yeah too fresh oh wonderful we've been given an extra five minutes it is lovely so does anybody have another question oh this gentleman here thank you hi um thanks for the conversation um just wanted to ask a quick question i'm a teacher i teach in north london and i've noticed i noticed this over the 15 years i've been working with children anyway but especially my last four classes virtually all the children that i teach either their grandparents or their parents come from somewhere else other than england and but one thing i noticed is that a lot of other communities do but the children from particularly a nigerian or congolese background tend to be the children that don't speak their languages so the reason why i'm asking is considering you just mentioned something about language do you think that as an african diaspora are we doing these children a disservice by not teaching them their languages or if you do have children or children in your family how do you maintain that legacy because literally every other community even those that have their parents were born in this country you tell them to translate for somebody they're like but most of the children from an african background unfortunately and i would include the caribbean because people think that languages are not in the caribbean but they pretty much are like papia mentor and st. lucian krill and those things haven't been particularly passed down so yeah that's really my question who sent you i sent myself which one of our parents sent you because i've been looking at you sitting there like quietly then the minute i speak you want to come and challenge somebody sent you who sent you confess do you know do you know the funny thing is that i was speaking to rachel when remember we have this discussion so i said to rachel rachel is bilingual because she she she and she and viv speak multiple languages and i was saying it's so wonderful that you're bilingual and i said to rachel before we came that i was in the station before we started this forum and i was in having a cup of coffee and a woman was sitting next to me and she was speaking german to her children and just like that the kids switched from german to english and they were saying oh come on mum come on mum then they speak to german and i was just transfixed so i said to the woman i said can i just say i applaud you for what you've done that your children are bilingual and my daughter's going to kill me because she's sitting here but i did talk about her and she is the only one of my three kids who really has embraced speaking yuba and understanding yuba and sometimes i'm scared about the things we say at home because i'm scared that she'll actually understand and pretend she doesn't whereas my elder daughter's twin and my youngest who's 13 don't speak it as much though now the younger one is picking up and i think it's because of people that she's at school with so excuse me people that she's at school with that you know they speak not just the slang and even non-nigerian kids i think because from some of the music as well afro beats we have a lot to thank the afro beat musicians for because the words are coming into the vocab so you know i was saying to this woman how wonderful it is she said it's because her husband is english and she's german so she and her husband speak german in the house to the kids but as soon as the kids are at school they speak english and that's how they're bilingual but i agree with you 100% when i was growing up i grew up both here and in nigeria in nigeria my yuba was fine then when i came here it was kind of you know rusty at least i'm certainly not fluent don't give him back the microphone but i know but i know tell me because you've got young kids yeah i've got young kids i have i have two children there's six years between the both of them and i don't know what i did with the second one because she doesn't really speak at all you know she only understands commands and when i speak in the imperative like go and wash your hands and go to sleep you know and and um my son i spoke to in ibo continuously like from when he was born as soon as he slid out of me and that's because i forced him to yes that image will live on but as soon as he came out i forced myself to speak in ibo because i didn't actually learn ibo from when i was little because my parents spoke english to me and then i got back home to nigeria and got properly bullied by kids who didn't even speak a word of english and in your second year school were you allowed to speak vernacular because at one stage we weren't allowed to allowed to speak vernacular but i learned i spoke to anika my son in ibo constantly you know and when he went to school he learned english in school so i think a lot of the time is two things right my partner at the time didn't speak ibo right but i made it i i i spoke ibo to anika constantly right and the difficulty was that he only got one side of the conversation so if he wanted to ask me for water he wouldn't say may i please have some water he would say do you want to drink some water okay and now he understands ibo perfectly but he doesn't really speak anymore because he's the only one and i'm the only one in the house so i think that is partly my failing in that i seized speaking to him in ibo constantly because it was only me in the house speaking ibo whereas my sister is with another sister and she has a group of 200 strong anambra state not just ordinary not just any other ibo group anambra state people and they're all like all the time so they're much better off so i think being able to see yourself in the community reflected definitely helps with the kids who speak ibo now but i think for our generation it wasn't something that we were taught to take pride in they didn't want you to speak ibo they wanted you to speak english and to speak it even better than the queen does you know i think yeah there are a number of things that play one is most of the government colleges i went to federal government colleges the willy for instance a lot of them constructed after the civil war did away with with speaking vernacular so the teachers weren't allowed to teach us nigerian languages so parents who grew up in that subsequently grew up with that mentality and didn't speak to the kids in that my parents were from different parts of nigeria between them they speak maybe five by six nigerian languages but at home the only language they spoke in common was english so i grew up speaking that so i think part of it is because of how transient we became and how much we mixed and then in trying to find common ground a common ground we just settled for the colonizers tongue and with that i'm really really sad to say that we've had to we have to now bring our session to a close but i have to say it's been wonderful moderating such an exciting and interesting and powerful discussion i'm very funny you need to you need to stand up you need to stand up he's putting on his coat to go away yeah despite you didn't give me your name either hey he's putting on his coat to go away so but i'd like to thank all of you for being our audience here in the theater it's been wonderful having you here at the british library in the knowledge center at the british library special thanks to all of you who watched online do remember you can get the book if you go to not just the amazon is it half bookshop.org thank you i didn't say the other name and i do hope you enjoyed the discussion as much as i enjoyed moderating it thanks to chikadili and also to you know thank you very much and thank you thank you very much thank you and um and once again a reminder that if you want to give feedback do visit the link on the screen or scan the qr code outside feedback is really really invaluable so please do you know both the organizers the africa rights and royal africa society but also those of us here on the stage would love to hear your feedback good bad ugly we'd like to hear it and if you'd like to support by donating please do consider joining the royal africa society which will help ensure that africa rights continues and also can i say a big thank you to oren lancy for this wonderful for beautiful thank you