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1. Whether as living humans or as mythological figures, ancestors have always played an important role in the African popular and literary imagination. Sometimes, as in Amos Tutuola’s famous short novels, they directly influence events. More often, as in the works of Chinua Achebe, both living and dead ancestors are sages offering valuable advice.
2. I hear a good song and I start thinking, ‘Oh shoot. You know there’s a story that can be told to this,’ and whatnot.
3. I think ‘Beasts of No Nation’ is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.
4. I’m not a propaganda machine. I tell things how I see them. When I say, for example, that corruption is not the only thing the West should think about when they think about Nigeria, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist but that people have the complete wrong focus. There’s music, there’s art, there’s culture.
5. Sensationalism only works for so long. Think of something like the Kony 2012 campaign. Its sensationalized, viral language got people all hot and bothered, but at the end of the day, there was so much it got wrong about the situation, and that did more damage to their cause than what they got right.
6. Lagos is a fascinatingly infuriating place that its residents love — and love to hate. Licence plates on cars here proudly display the state motto, ‘Centre of Excellence,’ in what often seems a sarcastic swipe at the place we live in.
7. We are not living in the same world we were immediately after the Cold War, when there seemed to be a greater belief in the universality of human rights and there was enough prosperity to make us question why we had not committed more resources to upholding the values we claimed to hold most dear.
8. I think the more complex your idea of who someone is or who a particular group is, the less able you are to separate ‘we’ and ‘outside’ or ‘us and them.’ I think that that’s something that we really, really need to pay attention to.
9. There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.
10. ‘Talking Peace’ is one of the few books from childhood that I still keep prominently displayed on my bookshelf.
11. I find the sort of unwitting European American outsider who wants to come to Africa to help is a very problematic construction. It’s problematic because you don’t want to tell people don’t aid, don’t help, when people feel a need to.
12. Nigeria is a difficult place. It is not a country for the faint of heart. On a good day, when our larger cities such as Abuja, Lagos, and Kano are filled with the teeming masses going in so many different directions, flogged by the heat and sun, bumping down uneven roads all in the name of ‘the hustle,’ it can appear chaotic.
13. Nigeria shed the last of a succession of brutal military dictatorships in 1997 and adopted a democratic form of government only in 1999. Our elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011 were complicated and fraught with tension, but each one has shown remarkable progress.
14. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic first appeared, a lot of the reaction was that it’s not happening here. It doesn’t exist. It’s not on the continent of Africa. Then we moved into this other phase, in which it was kind of like, it’s everywhere.
15. Like all things, cities must change — even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.
16. Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth.
17. Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.
18. Right after undergrad, I started doing low-level work on health issues in sub-Saharan Africa, and what struck me was the disconnect between how people in New York would speak about some of the issues people were facing. At the time, 2006-ish, there were a number of big media campaigns to raise awareness about HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
19. Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.
20. There are multiple levels of ‘we’ and multiple groups that can constitute this idea of who we are. We need to be aware of who we are including and excluding.