 Good evening, everyone, and thank you all for joining us for this special SUA Centenary lecture. I am Professor Mushu Badari, Professor of Law at SUA's here. I'm chair of the Center of African Studies here at SUA's. It is an absolute honor for me to be welcoming the Nobel Prize winning poet and playwright to the Seoul issue you got to SUA's for our special centenary lecture, which also doubles as the 2016 Center of African Studies annual lecture. I mean, personally, I've always been intrigued by Professor Schrodinger's literary works, some of which I read as a undergraduate law student in Nigeria to improve my use of English, I mean, in the local context. I remember reading his Death of the King's Horseman, which I understood and enjoyed very much, but his mad men and specialists, I struggled to understand them, but still enjoyed or pretended to enjoy all the same. As a pioneer Nigerian academic, who has inspired many Nigerian academics of my generation, I would like to use this rare opportunity to put on it to him in his native Yoruba language. We say, Mudubaga-san. Professor Schrodinger was awarded an honorary fellowship by SUA's in 2002 for his contributions as an internationally renowned writer and a political and human rights activist. He has received several accolades, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first writer of African descent to be so honored. His life began as a scholar at the University of Ibadan and continued at the University of Leeds. In 1960, thanks to a Rupfela Bostra, he returned to Nigeria to study traditional African drama. He later taught at the universities of Ibadan, Lagos and Ife, as lecturer and senior lecturer during the turbulent time for Nigeria, which culminated in civil war. For his opposition to the war, he was held a political prisoner for 26 months, 22 of which he spent in solitary confinement. Following his release in 1969, he took up position as head of department of theater arts at the University of Ibadan. He became professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife in 1975. He has also held academic posts at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard, amongst others. Tonight, I'm pleased to say, Professor Shoyankah will be in conversation with our SUA's director, Baroness, one of you may know, joined as director of SUA's in September 2015. From 2010, she served as undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations. She has also served in a number of roles in the public sector, including in local government and as chief executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Valerie was an advisor to the Mandela government on leadership, change, management, and strategy issues between 1994 and 1998. In June 2016, she was made a companion of honor in the Queens-Bedley Honours List. Before I say a little bit on tonight's conversation, I would like to call and introduce Professor Shoyankah and our director, Baroness Valerie, in this case. Thank you. Tonight's conversation promises to offer us insights ranging from the impact and legacy of Wallace Nguyen in the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature. Nigerian politics arts and political trade and thoughts on returning to Britain and the state of the nation today. I can certainly say this promises to be a simulation and thought-provoking discussion. As this evening's event is in celebration of SUA's 100 years, I'd like to say a few words about our history. Some of you may have seen, coming in today, the first in its entire exhibition titled Academic Agents and Activists, the History of SUA's, 1916 to 2016, currently in SUA's Brunei Gallery. If you haven't visited, I am worried you to do so. The exhibition presents the history of SUA's from a human perspective and highlights SUA's wider impact on world history, scholarship, cultural innovation, politics, social development, and the arts. Indeed, this pleasure series of lectures of which we are all part this evening is also in recognition of our extraordinary 100-year history. Next month, we shall also be hosting Artist and Social Activists for the Swedish Academy and also the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohammed N. Baraday, and the food right-hand author, Claudia Rodin, as part of the series. In my mind, this demonstrates what an important space SUA provides for debates, discussion, and asking the questions that matter. And this is why for our 100-year year, we have launched the Questions World asking so that our students and academics can keep on asking and also answering today's most important questions. We ask, is there a solution to the world's refugee crisis? What happens after war? Should we all speak the same language? What makes a global citizen? And would there ever be equality? For 100 years, we have been asking certain questions and through this campaign, we hope to seek so forth for scholarships and student experience initiatives, academic projects, and endowed posts, and also transforming the SUA's history. You can learn more about this campaign on our website, SUA.ac.uk, I will encourage you all to take a look. Finally, before I take my exit, I will ask that you please check your phones and see that they are on silent. And if you are cheating, which you very much hope that you will do, please use hashtag SUA's 100, hashtag SUA's 100. Thank you, and I shall now pass you over to Valerie Anemoff, Valerie Anemoff, I hope you all enjoyed this evening's discussion. Thank you very much. So much indeed for that introduction. And Professor Stalinga, welcome again to SUA's. It's a huge pleasure to have you with us. When I said to my nieces and nephews that I was having this conversation with you, they said that he's a legend. So welcome to a legend to SUA's. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. Questions from our audience. It's not a huge amount of time, given the extraordinary life we've had and continue to have. And I wanted to ask who became a student in Britain from that experience, both in terms of your experience in the classroom, but also outside. What was put in your life then? I was largely experiences and counters in the university atmosphere, very different from, let's say, when I skipped in for me to get used to the language when I spoke in. One thing which stood out to have their own is sort of the political time. I think they were just the outside of the, they were just the Africans. What is that? That's what's been smogged even in the summer. How do you answer that? Well, first of all, I wanna experience the first winter last minute. I'm so perfect crying. Just walking along the street and falling down dead. In the room, perhaps falling down dead. So one thing which I did, which I mentioned in my, was that I said, well, there seem to be human beings in this place. And some of them actually appear to go to the right old age. I said, that has to be due to something which was in for one solid year. I had a breakfast with the so-called IT discipline, which I've never matched in anything. At the end of one year, I said, now I dropped it and I never went back to English food again. Anything but, even if it's just bread and butter, which is universal, I just stuck it in this. I think that's why I survived. Travel has huge amount. Even in the last couple of weeks, we've been in the United States. We've been, as I've already done, we've been in Italy. What's different? We're similarly not the people of today. First of all, Britain has become more international political student. There was perhaps one single espresso machine, coffee machine. But let's say I was here during the harvest year, and this is where we mostly went to eat. When the first tandoori shop was open in Soho. I'm a masochist because the line, which was in Soho, I can still show you the shop where the first tandoori shop was open. And these people who thought all of England cuisine was sweet and sour, and they were chewing all around the square into they've never tested anything so good in their lives. And that's why I was quite correct about my assessment. If you check out the period of Magrassato, of course, when there was a kind of regression, like with our, I think, the witness. Because we're very regions about a global perspective. And we're concerned about the impact of the referendum, as I said, to leave the European Union, but also the openness that we've seen in Britain in the past is closing down. For example, in the United States, what's happening in other parts of Europe, in terms of what they're saying about refugees and closing borders. Is this something that you think our world is going to have to live with, or is this something that is short lived that we're going to be able to overcome? Also nationalism, I get in a wiff of some temperaments, some collective temperaments if you like, the national characteristics. Oh, well, especially, I don't like very much, something is very, it's a kind of fear, a loss of identity. Sort of saying to the rest of the world, all right, we're talking about your identity, we're talking about ours. There's also the economic factor. There's fear of lots of jobs, of standard of living, there's expression that you're taking this kind of one-to-one. European countries forget very often that they expanded and they expanded against the will of many countries, all over the world, which we call colonies today. The instinct towards expansion, I think it's a very human one, and it means nations looking to their own history to find that they also took up space outside. And so, if things now turn difficult in other areas, they must expect a return journey, seems to me, a law of nature. Then, of course, there is a balance side of the Turks in Germany, or you're talking about capitalism, because it accepts our intolerance on one side, which is why it left us into drawing inwards and saying, ours is ours, not us protect ours. But then the world itself has changed, and a fairly progressive outlook is to recognize that and to stay on the side of openness, because it's inevitable. So it's been an outspoken critic who contributes to it in a positive way, and to be critical of abuses as you see them. A new question. There's a friendly side of serious resentment in me. It's no question at all, because I know what I would rather be doing. I said, don't laugh. I mean, there'll be some citizens, but the festival here, I think, lectures on yoga, cosmology, somewhere, Google sermons, exercising what is supposed to be a commercial protocol. So it's best to outdo... It's given us and to the world. We're used to inspiring you. It's not just the laziness, as you describe it, and wanting to get through these social issues quickly so that you can get into other things. There must be other things that inspire me about Nigeria, in particular, and what are others? Oh, as an exile post. In exile, I always had to pretend to myself that there was a lot of new expressions, like, I'm not a political sabbatical, over and be absolved in your place. And so I missed it, but another quite funny thing from even distorted films. How can an outsider can see? I mean, he hikes Nigeria's here. The thing they've left Nigeria, but Nigeria has never... Back to some of this on the political side, but if I may, I'd like to get to your writing. I know, for instance, when I was in prison detention, it was as if my jailer was in this, so they made sure they deprived me of my typewriter, their part, and so on and so forth. And they do so. Well, that experience alone, I can say quite honestly, just that by both my parents and my early teachers, I was in advertisements. I read them, I said, they were litigants. And so, sooner or later, I suppose it was inevitable I would also try my hand at something that, one reason or the other, Nigeria. Did I have such a career? And Nigeria rule was indiscipline. No, it was expectation for everything. You mean just a fair price. Yes, yes, yes. We know you went there. Why aren't you coming here? I said, there's only one of me to the question. Let's come into that line. Pause for a moment and take some questions from our audience. Who'd like to ask a question against students here? And you wrote the West African students, you wrote it all over your memoirs. And I just wondered if you could... Could you speak a little bit? I have a problem. Okay, on a page, do you think the West Africans, today, if you had any kind of further reflections, the West African students union? What's up with you? Yeah, that's where we used to plot the liberation of Africa. And do you feel you succeeded? Do you feel you succeeded? Oh, no, that was a very nice agreement. The election, who's had a history, that's the West African students union, that you joined the Puyallup Assignor to go to Spain, come from the United States, so this year, Paul Lopeson was the frequenter of that place. I'm not sure if Martin's got to be actually related to this time, but you have... I want to tell you, as someone who was born in Guyana, very much relies herself to the Caribbean. So the stereotype in the Caribbean is that Jamaicans are descendants of Nigerians. So the best fighters, so... I think I can believe that. Questions? We have a question. Can you write at the front about being an avid reader? A particular literature were you fond of, were there any particular writers or genres? Even today, a adolescent Niger, a small Niger, we sort of trust, often in the border lines. But the state media, as far as I remember, is over and over again. Okay, very fond of, we saw that, and the exotica, the Bible also, right, for me, the Bible is one of the greatest works of literature. Most of it, literature, of course, like all scriptures, and Colin Revelations did the like for me. And just literature, you know. And there was someone immediately behind you. My old question is just of all... I know you said it before, I don't like commenting on your books, but which one is really your favorite book among the books you're reading? It depends on my son, which I'll read over and over again, because I couldn't get my hands on this book of literature. So that's sort of compensated and kind of... Right, so that will happen to him as well. No, it depends on my son. I've no favorite style at all. I'm so glad you said that, because you would have offended those people who had a particular book that they were fond of, which was different to the one you said. And does a lady write for that? She misses Nigeria. She says you're right, because she misses Nigeria. Oh, there's one on the... Okay. I'm sorry. It's in itself. It's how it's applied. How it's been applied. So in that sense, it's been a test, most especially because you took care of it, you took thoughts about it. You turned us into a mono product. Your writing is so closely intertwined with political events. Intertwined? Intertwined with political events. And we talked a little bit about some of the challenges that we're seeing today across the world. What do you see as the role of literature and the writers in fomenting dissent? I did very, very poor attention for what just changed. There is also what I call shogun literature, which would detonate and so on. And there used to be three... It's not in the first stage now. And later things happened in society and that kind of literature triggered that, triggered that as themselves. Maybe for the first time in the literature that was created, the rest of it was also not all literature. That kind of literature is self-involved. That kind of language, it's getting into certain radical literature, which sometimes it just regurgitates. Anything better for it? One of the things that some writers say about being current, particularly with the development of a language that's completely associated with social media, that this is destroying... Do you share that view? Illegence of language and listening to passages over and over again. Do you think that that's in any way being destroyed by the language of social media? The short hand of social media. People tweet, actually. They snap tracks and Facebooks them. I think people like me tweet, but they don't take any notice of it. I think we have nips, my children, when they say... When I say, oh... Four questions. I'm going to come over here. My question to you, Professor Schoenker, is, as a year about a month myself, I want to, you know, preserve the language and pass it on to my children. What are your feelings about the second generation of Nigerians living in the UK? How can we preserve our heritage and our language and pass it on to our children, without still being British or being Nigerian at the same time? Europe, in particular? The first thing is to make them understand that they're missing something. I was hearing noises from my son's bedroom. It was good. And they're attacked. I dashed his bedroom and there he was, one of these video games. No, no, no. Are you in pain? He was absolutely playing with somebody in the Ukraine. They were screaming at each other and chatting with each other at the same time. He was so absorbed in it. So that's why I say it's... I was about to say that language, this language we're talking about, is tied, is tied to useful or useless over these opportunities like this to try and interpret. Most advanced technology, one of these days you have to write your thesis, or you have to write a bookshelf of the label, what I consider is more universal language. Maybe your children will survive without this language. But for now, as long as those bookstops are there, as long as this is always being recorded, etc., It's an issue. Soon after you won your Nobel Prize and went to Cuba, and you were working in Yoruba, you said that saved the classical Yoruba. I couldn't have said that. The classical Yoruba language. Hard to say the classical Yoruba language. You say that in Havana. I think this is your country, and many of us have been visiting your countries or the part of Africa. But I really would like to ask you, what do you think would you be able to do African people in African countries about us in the diaspora in order to preserve what we really think is very precious and very precious to us? Thank you. A typical question, it's a kind of question which is debated even for internal, is on the continent. The solution which a number of us came to was that we should adopt. So those words are accessible. The recipe or in this side there will be the study. The tools, the tools, whichever, some tools household, some tools Yoruba, some tools Kiswahili, the only African language which existed, we'll have to correct that. It's a question of will. It's still spoken in parts of Brazil, for instance, where the purity of the language they got, especially the liturgical language. So then you'll even understand what it means themselves and so on. So outside the regular school curriculum, they're not seriously as disciplined in their own right in some colonies, especially in the States. In the Caribbean, I'm not sure, but community college is measures we decided upon, kind of a cycle. These days, of course, in the French... And to ask you to write poetry, and what if you're disciplined when you write poetry? That's why you didn't hear it. I mean, anyway, in this poetry, I'm talking about traditional poetry also, what we call the Ijala. It is principally, sometimes, of course, the best art of poems. That is the same thing with the other forms of literature, performance, and so outside my head, so much in the environment. Traditional grammar, masquerades, the secular masquerades also, with their board deed. It's something that just happens to one... I think the form, the principal form in which one works, eventually chooses one, rather than the other way around. I'm going to take one final question. Oh, dear. It's got to be from somebody out external to serve, the education that I've received here, and with all the division that's going on, I'm Jamaican. No, this is the one occasion when I'm delighted that the question is addressed to you, professor. Tell us the truth anyway. But to make it speculate into the relationship of different groups, certainly groups, individuals, families, etc. It takes place all the time, imperceptibly. It's not only when we have the African congresses, not to say for instance that after they've been from the one side, and the secretarians, I don't intend to say that that is the death of an Africanism. No. An Africanism just as people have a consciousness of it. I don't know if you know the history of this particular congress talking about that, but it can move in the essence of it. Sometimes I'm tempted to say this because that is my front time in exile. Next one, actually, next president, the earlier one spoke to some of his officials who are part of the prevention and shows squad who are still not to speak anyway in groups and so on and so forth. So it was taken away from us from the people themselves. As I said, the name of the bill was dealt to it. They might not use the word pan-Africanism, but they're very, very strong. Young people do that. Oh, that's what I can say. Keep up that spirit. Deliver together our needs. Not a hero, first of all, for instance. That's what I mean by pan-Africanism in so many forms. Reignite the sense of cultural living which you have brought to outside the country. Like cultural life, the values, positive values which you brought from over there with your parents. When I went to Western West Indies, I had there for the first time a certain place called the Kuta. The Kuta in West Milan County, in Jubilee County. I said the Kuta, that sounds familiar. So, the next time the first thing I want to do is visit West Milan County and find this Kuta. It's long enough, we drove there and there was this small settlement of escaped slaves. There are slave owners who didn't catch it there. But also because it reminded them of the rock hills. The dances, keeping the masquerades, the costumes year after year coming up. I wanted to ask you why the sense of the mystic and some of your answers came along the way to try and ensure that people just wanted to read one of them and I quote, trust the same vehicles will be shot and eaten. I wanted to ask you why is it so important that sense of peace and serenity one of those Tiki ones who followed it around the island was the one I said, that's a lie and it was said after the Nobel Prize one day or something my first person to look for the land would be isolated, completely isolated until fortunately I was still having a family and I decided to turn Canada and that's when I was still on the bone trust my same vehicles would be shot and I don't have to think I want to be a safari hunter. Thank you for a wonderful celebration.