An argument for Libraries, Book Clubs and More - Amatesiro Dore writing in The Scoop:
More hereThe class of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka are British created minds. Achebe produced works in Nigeria as a paid employee of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation with a house in Ikoyi. Soyinka received pre-independence government education and his works were produced by the British pounds. Buchi Emecheta couldn’t have produced a single line of literature, in Nigeria, with five children and a missing husband. We killed Christopher Okigbo during the Civil War and successive military regimes got rid of the rest by firing squad, poverty, fake drugs, bad roads or self-imposed exile. They sentenced Soyinka to solitary confinement and crippled Achebe’s legs. Chimamanda Adichie went abroad before they could get her at Nsukka. But her generation of Nigerian writers-in-diaspora have been coming and going for several seasons like a gang of abikus. Our book pirates are sucking them dry and Nigerian publishers can’t afford to publish Ghana Must Go, Open City and other books by the class of Adichie.
image via Twitter
Yet there is a class of writers in Nigeria that are not interested in living abroad, citizens without pride in being the only Black in a room of scholars, who just want to read and write in a room of their own. But my father can no longer tolerate an “intellectual” under his roof and my mother is irritated by “a man typing on a laptop” in her home during working hours. Though married to a Nollywood pioneer scriptwriter & director, veteran journalist and celebrated poet, my mother is not Vera Nabokov and didn’t envision her first child adopting the miseries of writing. So I need a room to read and write.
But there are no public libraries in Lagos. The first time I saw a library was in Matilda, the movie adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel. It was one of those movies we watched on repeat whenever there was electricity at my mother’s home in Oshodi-Isolo Local Government Area. That was when I began hankering for a library—a vast collection of multilingual minds and published imaginations, an ancient and evolving container of knowledge, an eternal organ of learning. It may be a cave of preserved scrolls or a computer with a million books. But it should contain the elementary and most sophisticated knowledge of the times. An outdated collection of books is not a library but a museum of data.
