The Nigeria Prize for Literature, sponsored by the Nigeria LNG Limited, has become that big African prize – African prize in the sense that none is worth more than it in prize money. Also, what the Nigeria NLG commits to running it and promoting writers on the longlist and the shortlist is unmatchable of all the existing African prizes. Winning this prize opens doors for you as a writer.
It also provides monetary compensation capable of establishing you as an individual and assisting your writing projects. Writers from other African countries have been campaigning for it to be a pan-African prize, but I think it should remain a Nigerian prize. Big companies in these African countries should also invest in literature like NLNG has done.
Winning this prize is not a dog’s breakfast. It’s one of the most competitive prizes in the world. It attracts many of the best writers in the land each year, and the number keeps increasing.
Making the longlist is not always easy. This year, if you know the calibre of writers who missed out on the longlist, it would shock you – some of the biggest names in African literature from Nigeria. That shows you the standard of the Nigeria Prize for Literature is higher than we thought.
We should be grateful as Nigerian writers that it still exists. We need more like this for the literary enterprise. I was lucky to have a solid book background.
Even before I was born, my dad had already stocked the house with books and newspapers. We grew up seeing books around, so we cultivated that culture of reading very early in life. If you are a good reader, there is a high tendency you can make a good writer.
Also, my experience as a JS 1 student being introduced to literaturein-English was amazing. We read many interesting books in those days. I wanted to replicate that.
I had a younger brother and cousins in primary school I was assisting in evening lessons. In a bid to create a story book that would fit into their level, I wrote my first storybook, illustrated it myself, for I could also draw as an artist. But it was in university that I exploded in writing.
By the time I was leaving the university, I had written four full length novels, four plays and over a hundred poems. Unfortunately, I lost all the prose and drama manuscripts during a communal crisis, for I didn’t take them with me to Lagos. Only the poems survived till date, because I travelled with the manuscript.
The prose and drama works were typed and left behind in the village after graduation. I couldn’t recover from that shock. Years after as a professional journalist, the first thing I started writing after that harrowing experience was the novel, ‘Prodigals in Paradise’, which was a runner-up for the 2006 ANA Prose Prize, and a number of children’s book, the first being ‘Little Wizard of Okokomaiko’, which won the ANA/ Lantern Books Prize for Children’s Fiction in 2009 as a manuscript.
It is a book that dwells on child abuse and forced labour and migration. To change the mindset of the new and older generations towards the disabled, there is an urgent need for reorientation. If you look around us, the disabled constitute a high percentage of beggars and downtrodden in the society.
Some of them are relatively young, some old. To be a disabled is not supposed to translate into suffering perpetual privation and being discriminated against. I feel they should be given a sense of belonging like any other human deserving of it.
I was inspired to write Mighty Mite and Golden Jewel because of what I had witnessed overtime in our society. Many times, I have come across disabled people on wheelchairs or crawling, including children, soliciting for alms. One day, I suggested to our newspaper, The Sun, to explore the world of the disabled.
I was the assistant editor of Saturday Sun then. Part of my duties was to initiate cover story ideas with a human angle touch for the features page. As I sat down reflecting, disabled people came to my mind.
I told the editor that we should investigate what it meant to be disabled in Nigeria. What are they passing through? Are there success stories to celebrate? Then, we dispatched some reporters to talk to many disabled in Nigeria, and I knocked the story together. That story opened my eyes to what many disabled Nigerians were going through daily, from stigmatisation, hatred by society and lack of infrastructure and incentives to help them.
These people are wrongly portrayed as not normal humans and we have clung to superstitious beliefs about them. Also, if you look at literature, movies and other forms of entertainment, disabled characters are often stereotyped. They are either mysterious medicine men, evil spirits, beggars or clowns in circus shows.
It’s hard to find positive archetypes. I then took it upon myself to rewrite their story by drawing attention to their plights and creating heroes out of them in a bid to make readers and society see them in a different light. We have Paralympics Games for people like them.
Why can’t we integrate them fully into mainstream society, show them more love and support them to become something in life? I have been writing for children for a long while. I have published four novels for children – ‘Little Wizard of Okokomaiko’, ‘Adventures of Bingo and Bomboi’, ‘Vershima and the Missing Cow’, and ‘Mighty Mite and Golden Jewel’. In all this, I have learnt to blend serious issues with thrills.
The children’s audience is not like ours. You don’t have to make the issues too obvious; otherwise, you bore them. What I do is to create interesting characters they can easily relate with, add mystery into it and blend it with adventure and ensure that there are twists in the stories too.
From my experience, adventures and twists in a story whet their appetites. They keep them reading until the end. Why do children watch Tom and Jerry all day? It’s because of the enticing storyline chiefly.
What I also do is to share the manuscript with children before publishing it. They are my first critics. Their feedback always helps me so much.
More than any other time in history, the internet has broken many barriers. What we thought was impossible years ago have become realities. As kids, our only access to the world was through books, radio and television.
But not every kid was exposed to the television, for it was a big luxury for most homes. Some of us were lucky to have that access but not on a regular basis. Things are different now.
There are video games and television in many homes. With the internet, you can access any kind of information with the click of the button. This has both advantages and disadvantages.
Social media, for instance, can make or mar a child. Unguided children can easily watch X-rated movies and learn internet scams secretly or with peers. Of course, you know Nigeria is one of the leading countries in internet scams globally.
This is disturbing, because this is a highly intelligent and creative society that ought to have talents channeled to positive things and competing with the super powers. Also, many kids are online fighting internet battles with their contemporaries from those places, instead of making good use of their time online. While writing this book, I felt it was imperative to work the positive side of social media into the plot using creativity as a launchpad.
Skitmakers are becoming entertainment forces to reckon with. Yeah, this is also another big issue in Nigeria at the moment. From the Northeast to the Middle Belt and Southeast, insecurity has been ravaging the land.
There are many communities where schools have closed down permanently and the students have fled their ancestral homes for no fault of theirs. This has swelled the population of out-of-school children in the country to an embarrassing level. This novel mildly calls attention to their plights.
But I also realised that violence was a sensitive matter for the young readers. So I tried as much as possible not to make the kid characters participate as fighters. We must not also, as writers, shun away from highlighting the dark side of our lives.
Every schoolchild in Nigeria must have heard about what happened to the Chibok and Dapchi girls. It’s the sad reality we live in. Pretending it doesn’t exist is living in denial.
We can only tone it down to the barest minimum in fiction meant for the young. Literature never forgets. It shapes our lives by pointing out our failings to affect a change.
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