Akin Adesokan is unbreakable. This mild-mannered leviathan of letters used to prowl the stark streets of Lagos, clutching a book, chasing a scoop, or simply seeking that elevated conversation. As a journalist, he was hunted around those same streets, accused along with the democratic resistance in Nigeria, of defying military dictatorships. He was jailed by the General Sanni Abacha junta. Unbreakable.
Currently, he is a Professor of Comparative Literature/Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author of two critically acclaimed novels; Roots In The Sky (Festac Books, 2004), and South Side (Parresia, 2025). A recipient of multiple awards, including: the ANA (Association of Nigerian Authors) Prize for Fiction in 1996; the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award; the Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett Human Rights Award, etc., he attended the University of Ibadan (BA), and Cornel University for his MA and Ph.D.
Adesokan’s other works include Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, Everything Is Sampled: Digital and Print Mediations in African Arts and Letters, The Age of the White Rulers (the English translation of Isaac Delano’s Yoruba novel, Aye Daiye Oyinbo), etc. He also co-edited Celebrating D.O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History with Prof. Adeleke Adeeko. His published research interests cut across Cultural Theory, Writing, Black/Postcolonial Artistic and Intellectual Traditions, Globalization and Film, African Cinema, Intersections of Print and Electronic Media, and Nigeria’s burgeoning film industry, Nollywood. He has been extensively featured in peer-reviewed journals, and his essays and articles have appeared in Chimurenga, AGNI, Africa is a Country, etc. The Editor-in-Chief of Black Camera can be found on X as @iwalesino.
This chat with Sola Osofisan has been edited and condensed.
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A healthy literary culture isn’t always about prestige and showbiz… Prof. Akin Adesokan
SOLA OSOFISAN: It’s been a few months since South Side hit the bookshelves. Are you happy with the reception so far?
AKIN ADESOKAN: The reception has been wonderful, and much of it is due to my publisher’s total commitment to pushing the book within and outside Nigeria. Azafi Ọmọluabi has done an excellent job with South Side. Within the first three months, there were at least five, maybe six, reviews in Nigeria newspapers, in print and online. When it became available on Amazon, international attention gained ground and several people went out of their way to purchase copies, as I discovered. Earlier this year, another review appeared in Wasafiri, a UK-based journal of new writing. All of this is exciting, I must say, and I’m quite satisfied.
SOLA OSOFISAN: For me, opening lines and sentences are like doors welcoming you into the private world of a story. They set me in the right frame of mind and propel me into a book. Your opening in South Side is striking and musical; “Short, short-sighted and short-tempered, the mastermind settled in with an attitude of self-importance.” The one in Roots in the Sky, your previous novel, is no slouch either; “He came back a sick man.” What do openings mean to you, and how much wrestling goes on to get them right?
AKIN ADESOKAN: I’m a stickler for arresting opening lines! I used to memorize them and would sometimes fool around with friends, in playful contests. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember the distant afternoon…” (One Hundred Years of Solitude), “Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes…” (The Interpreters), “They shoot the white girl first…” (Paradise), “I got my things and left…” (The House of Hunger). Because of this habit, I have developed a non-negotiable interest in opening lines, and I work extra-hard to hone them. Usually, I know how things will start, the drama or initial scene-setting, but the words themselves, the imageries, the poetry of the circumstance, those require rehearsals. Once I settle on one, the rest is carpentry, so to speak, and there’s no going back.
SOLA OSOFISAN: The short story reportedly the foundation of South Side… What was it about the story that made you think it had legs and could go further? Why revisit what’s already written, when you probably have a ton of other ideas all struggling to be born?
AKIN ADESOKAN: That’s a question some people have asked, and in similar ways. The short story, “The Master,” was published in Farafina in 2006, in a special issue guest-edited by Ọlajide Bello. It occurred to me a few months after that story came out that the writer in the story, Atom Dankor, must have a backstory. He sounds too much like a fascinating person not to have one, and I just set about inventing that. In that story, he is living with his wife in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. And thinking about that location one day, I said to me, what if we imagine something about how he gets there? My own location also comes into play. I’m not living in the country where I was born, and while there are other ideas as you say, writing about a life made out of peripatetic existence seemed attractive, and I went for it.
SOLA OSOFISAN: While researching for a screenplay, I came across the phrase “Foreign Service brat,” children of diplomats who grow up traveling, dropping and picking up pieces of themselves wherever their parents roam. I was glad to read that you had encountered such stories too. Did they inform the creation of Abel in any way? The parallel probably unravels when one realizes the children at least have a country to root them, while Dankor inherited complete dislocation by birth.
AKIN ADESOKAN: Yes, at the time I started writing the novel in earnest, I interacted with a German scholar whose boyfriend was a child of diplomats. We got along quite a bit, and we were going to be playing recreational soccer if I had the time. I was fascinated by this guy who, quite frankly, had no commitment to any country. I never asked him which country his parent served as ambassador, although I remember he had an American accent. It was his attitude that fascinated me. He was always at ease, spoke frankly but with due consideration, and he had about him an air of worldliness that was genuine. I wanted to try and capture that in Abel’s character because in an important sense, his condition of statelessness also helped him to cultivate a certain ease. Because you can’t really be turning people off if you’re a habitual squatter in other spaces. There’s something of a paradox in this, of course, because that ease is due largely to the fact that he has no country to claim. Making him a writer, rather than an ordinary character, is a way to reflect on that paradox, or at least make the reader aware of it.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Can one ever truly feel at home in an adopted country, though, even after naturalizing and attaining the much-desired citizenship? Or is there a likelihood of one becoming measured, guarded, so as not to offend? Even the current administration here in the US is stripping people of their citizenship, something once considered extreme.
AKIN ADESOKAN: Those who first settled in the US from Europe never thought of returning, so they had that unusual fortune of not needing to worry about what they left behind. Or it could be misfortune, depending on how some of them viewed their new home. I know that the first time I came to the US, I had no intention of staying for long, and after a while, I did experience homesickness. Overall, though, personal circumstances like having a family, holding certain kinds of jobs, realities of relocation, these have a way of grounding you and increasingly you see yourself as an integral part of the new landscape, despite the hostilities. Speaking for me, I haven’t thought much about my presence anywhere as anything to apologize for, or that I’m giving offense to anyone. It’s about personal disposition. Instead, I tend to think of how much the suffering Black people have experienced in the US for so many centuries sort of paved the way for our current ability as Africans to settle and make something of our lives in this country.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Are you at peace with your productivity as a writer of fiction, seemingly publishing a novel every 10yrs? A short attention span is purportedly the reality of the times; don’t you need to stay in the public’s consciousness to cultivate a large readership?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Well, that’s an interesting question! I wish I could come up with a novel every three to four years, but that’s not my reality, for several reasons. As you know, for writers of our generation, writing is about the easiest part of the task. Getting published is a big hurdle that we have got to scale anew every time, and it’s only in the past decade or so that we have become a bit more imaginative about our options. I spent over a decade trying to find an agent and I have receipts, as we say! I learnt a few things from that adventure. Secondly, it takes me some time to find the appropriate tone for my work—it’s not so much a matter of struggling to get it right as it is of not being easily satisfied. I wrote three drafts of South Side before I decided that it was what I wanted. That’s a lot. Third, I do other kinds of writing, as you know. Not just the academic books and articles that my day job requires, but the nonfiction stuff, the occasional journalism, the collaborations, my curatorial work in cinema, Nollywood, the literary activism and other editorial tasks. All of this is writing. The novels must try to find their space in this crowded desk, but for me there’s never a question of what to do. Only that of finding the time, the peace of mind, to write what I truly like. I do all I can, daily, to appease the Muse and I will continue to honor Her. Frankly, I’m not too anxious about readers’ attention because my real duty is to honor the Muse.
A writer like Adichie is a product of a complex process of marketing of postcolonial writers… Prof. Akin Adesokan
SOLA OSOFISAN: I wonder if, as a scholar-novelist writing fiction, you struggle to restrain yourself from over-researching, over-layering, over-analyzing, and over-complicating your ideas and writing? How does a professor of comparative literature get past his inner critic to assuredly usher a manuscript to publication? Or is this where your journalism background kicks in?
AKIN ADESOKAN: That’s something I’ve never worried about. I approach everything I do with a writer’s sensibilities. I self-trained as a writer long before I decided to go to graduate school and looking back, I can see that most people might not have understood what I was going through. I did have a few truly supportive friends, though. Once, someone said to me, “I hope we’re not working with wrong ideas about what you’re trying to do.” That was incredibly reassuring, just to hear such a sensitive comment. Yes, my journalism helps in the sense that it provides the training, the discipline, to write, because you always have a deadline and you must produce a copy. The tension between the scholar and the artist is easy to manage because for me, everything is material, and you can get story ideas from unusual places. You just need to develop the consciousness, the kind of eye that sees stories in those supposedly arcane writings. In the opening page of South Side, you find distilled ideas from academic works but which, through an understanding of how to make fictions, you massage so carefully that all the academic stuff yields stories. I listened to the American actor Gregory Peck talking about how he met his wife, or I read in a book about Latin America that Bertrand Russell’s private secretary was in Cuba in the wake of the revolution and somehow, I felt that I could use those things in my novel.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You wrote some time ago that we haven’t yet taken proper measure of the violence that was/is military rule. Has your position on that shifted over the years, considering all the work that has since been done on the subject?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Not really. In fact, I’m now inclined to go further by turning to how, in the aftermath of the civil war in Nigeria, the military ethos was effectively domesticated in at least two ways. The mindset of might-is-right became part of the national psyche. We noticed the rise of the worship of Ogun across Nigeria. It was perhaps an intensification, not just the rise, since the orisa was being worshipped across the southwestern and midwestern parts of the country long before we became independent. But certainly, there was something close to an upswing. I’m intuiting possible connections between the hardening of will among the soldiers, victorious or not, and the upswing in celebrating the deity of war. There may be something worth exploring in this phenomenon. One other thing that I’m curious about is the position of women, how they were viewed and treated, as a consequence of the power that returning soldiers felt they had acquired from fighting. Sometime ago, I read a book, a memoir, by a woman whose husband was a high-ranking military officer during the Nigerian civil war, and I came away with the impression that the man’s loving attitude toward this woman took a turn for the worse after the war. I’m ready to speculate that the subjection of women during the war when the vulnerable ones—women, children, the aged—were fair game, and conversely women’s tendency to glorify powerful men in such situations, has a hand in that change of attitude. I’d like to write something about that…
SOLA OSOFISAN: What transpires in your mind when you observe that many of the issues that led to your incarceration years ago are still with us today in Nigeria; bad governance, corruption, poverty, instability, police brutality…
AKIN ADESOKAN: I completed my first novel, Roots in the Sky, at least half a decade before the return to civilian rule. Our late colleague, Lynn Chukwurah, pointed out during a public event that the novel’s ending was pessimistic. I understood that to mean that the reader was being warned against taking anything at face value. I suppose what I’m saying is that I was not disappointed. In fact, one reason I opted for graduate school after the return to democracy was that I didn’t think I could function well in the new dispensation. In a sense, as an artist, I have not been disappointed, although as a citizen, I’m very, very sad. There is a new low, now and again, and we just sink deeper and deeper, and one needs an inhuman kind of faith to see a way out. That faith exists in the realm of imagination.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Given your experiences under military rule in Nigeria, it’s natural that your work has taken on a more political tone, perhaps as a way to help shape political discourse or inspire social change. Do you ever find yourself resisting the instinct to write about those issues? How do you keep them from overshadowing your creative work?
AKIN ADESOKAN: There are several impulses out of which one creates art, and there’s hardly any correlation between actual events in society, in one’s life, and what comes through in a given work. It is true that politics is a favorite topic in African literature and we mostly cut our teeth on it, as it were. But speaking directly to your question, yes, one can make a deliberate decision to opt out of writing about a topic viewed as overly political. I think that a good number of the writers whose work I’m following are interested in other topics, and oftentimes they do it extremely well. They prioritize desire, pleasure, food and other intangibles of human life. For example, not long ago I read Diana Evans’s recent novel, A House for Alice (2023). I think the deeper concerns in that novel are with parenting, matrimonial harmony or disharmony in general, but it takes on something we might think of as political, which is the 2017 tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in the UK. Personally, I wish that that subplot was better integrated into the narrative, but one cannot fail to see the connection between the social negligence that resulted in that tragedy and the character Alice’s resolve to build her own house in Nigeria and leave England. I’d like to think that the fundamental issues in South Side are psychological and aesthetic—how to live imaginatively despite constricting realities. The protagonist gets embroiled in political matters because his mentor is targeted in a political rivalry, and his best friend and confidant is a politician who gets into trouble. But the choice of having those two individuals in his life is ultimately an aesthetic one, that is, to create characters who aren’t quite like him in their social concerns. It’s up to the reader to decide how well that works out.
I think we must be careful about the unfelt idealism of thinking to forsake political topics because we live in a world of staggering inequalities. It’s a world where inequality grows by the second and an American CEO earns about $42, 000.00 dollars in a day whereas a fast-food joint worker doesn’t make up to a hundred. Toni Morrison once said in an interview that art should be political, representational and irrevocably beautiful. I often thought there was nothing to add to that, until I read another interview where she said that art becomes mere soap-box not because it is too political but because the artist isn’t any good at what he’s doing. To that I have nothing to add!
SOLA OSOFISAN: Everyone seems to have a voice now; with traditional media, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, social media… If you have something to say, you can be heard. In fact, we may be having so much speaking and too little listening. “Information overload compels filtering,” to quote Edi Lawani. Is there anything like too much discourse? It seems the more we speak, the less we hear each other, and the more polarized we become…
AKIN ADESOKAN: I think it’s a good thing, when you examine it closely. Let a thousand flowers bloom, as the great Chairman Mao once implored. Everyone has the right to speak, but no one will have the right to exclusive speech, be you a billionaire or a hobo. A multipolar world is preferrable to a world of monopolies, and who knows but that we’re getting there little by little. The pharaohs in old Egypt were never to be seen because their existence was shrouded in mysteries. But now, we get to hear when a member of a royal family catches a disease. They are human, after all, not divine. I prefer to think about the proliferation of information in this way; a slow-moving train to a more democratic future. The more concerning issues are the damaging disinformation; these are deliberate, and they take advantage of impressionable people or those with axes to grind. Even there, water will find its level. There’s that proverb about a child who is determined to prevent his mother from sleeping. In addition to disinformation, from where I sit as a scholar, I see lack of access to information as a major concern. You see an interesting article or book or video but it’s behind the paywall. What to do? You could make a one-time purchase if you had the means, but the platform is asking you to buy a monthly subscription. You can cancel it yes, please, but your credit card is already cloned and will probably end up in some spot of the dark web! These are serious issues with implications for ownership and intellectual property, and I think that that Shakespearean line, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” is ever timely. There are other equally timely lines in Wọle Ṣoyinka’s Opera Wonyosi: “Who gains? Who really accumulates and exercises power over others?”
SOLA OSOFISAN: In Everything is Sampled, you viewed what you call the “digitality” of African cultural products as just another rung on a progressing ladder of change. Since you published that book, there’s been an explosion in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with its push-pull, love-hate, debates. Where does A.I. fit on your divination board? Are you working on an updated edition of the book?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Yes, I’m returning to some of the themes in that book, but not as an updated edition. Everything Is Sampled took a while to research and complete, and there are other things coming up. With the good fortunes of health and a steady sense of wonder, it would be interesting to investigate ideas about authorship and intellectual property which came up in a speculative form toward the end of Everything Is Sampled but have become more pressing with the explosion in Artificial Intelligence, as you observed. As with the previous response about disinformation, A.I. is a forward, progressive step, and while I don’t consciously seek direction from it, I see its hands everywhere near me. Nearly all personal computers now come pre-programmed with A.I. tools. My approach, however, is to relate these changes to established ones in the field of African arts, such as the oral tradition, where we get the notion of intellectual ideas as commonly held, as communal property. These are always problematic notions, but they are worth examining afresh because in the world we live in, everything has an owner and all the authors whose work we study and teach are self-conscious creators making authorial choices.
SOLA OSOFISAN: It’s your job to nurture a new generation of thinkers. Are your themes, voice, writing and overall scholarship influenced in any way by the constant interaction between you and this fluid pool of often younger minds? Do you imagine you had a similar effect on your teachers once upon a time?
AKIN ADESOKAN: To some extent, yes. But in an interesting way. My students often come up with thoughts and areas of research I hadn’t paid sufficient mind, or that my thinking had moved away from. For example, I just supervised a successful doctoral thesis on conspiracy theory that started with the writings of the late-Roman author, Tacitus. Maybe I read bits of Tacitus in the past, but I’ve learnt an enormous lot from reading that thesis, not just about the topic of conspiracy theory but also about how the classical authors viewed their writings, about the connections between fiction and history, propaganda, truth and so on. Another student is currently completing a thesis on the notion of work and its relationship to what are called non-cathartic emotions, like boredom. And she’s introducing to me writers and critics I would ordinarily not go looking for, due to other demands. Yet another student, from China, has written about the cooperative railway system between China and Tanzania during the Cold War, and that research brought to me a certain clarity to China’s current involvements across the African continent. So, in that sense, I’m learning much from my students, and these students are not necessarily interested in postcolonial studies, which might be thought of as one of my primary areas of interest. The question about whether I had a similar effect on my teachers is a lot harder to answer, because it’s their place to make such an assessment. I do remember clearly that until I discussed with my professor, the late Biodun Jeyifo, the influence that Alaafin of Ọyọ, Ṣiyanbọla Ladigbolu (d. 1944), had with the colonial Resident William Ross during the institutionalization of Indirect Rule in Western Nigeria, he was not aware of that story. And Professor Jeyifo had read and thought deeply about an immense amount of things.
Language is an organic thing, and it thrives best when its users use it imaginatively… Prof. Akin Adesokan
SOLA OSOFISAN: In a parallel universe, you’re a filmmaker, aren’t you? Or is your well-known romance with African cinema purely academic?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Oh, my friend the Senegalese filmmaker and writer Joseph Ramaka asked last year if I’d consider making films. I replied that I was already doing many other things. Besides, I know from associating with filmmakers that it is not easy to make films. I know I can write screenplays, and I wrote and had a few produced (for television) during my national service. But frankly, that is an area that I haven’t bothered to explore. But you are making great strides in that area and I’m very pleased with your work, which I continue to teach. This is how I think about these things: when someone I know and respect is doing something very well, that is a sign that I don’t have to worry about that thing.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Are you following news of the retreat of Netflix Africa, Prime Video and Showmax from Africa? The issues appear to be limited subscriber growth and weakness of the local currencies. Is there any hope of a home-grown effort capable of filling the lacuna being left behind, considering the overwhelming cost of such an endeavor, and the failure of the early birds like Iroko?
AKIN ADESOKAN: As a matter of fact, I just guest-edited a section of the Journal of the African Literature Association where scholarly articles touched upon this very topic. It’s the classic attitude of capital—follow the money! Go where the market is. And once demand falters, pack up shop and go elsewhere. I don’t know how the numbers are crunched but it is mistaken to use the subscription stats from Nigeria to determine the size of the market. I don’t live in Nigeria, but I subscribe to Netflix primarily because of Nollywood films. I assume you do as well, and I know about half a dozen of my Nigerian friends and acquaintances who watch Nollywood films on Netflix. Do the operators take these kinds of subscription base into account? Secondly, it’s not easy to do online marketing from African countries, considering our position in relation to the world at large in that sphere. It’s the same problem encountered by Nigeria-based online distributors or retailers like Konga, Jumia, and the rest. I hope that Nigerian or African businesses are able to fill this gap, but we know it won’t be easy. There are environmental and institutional hurdles to scale. Perhaps in partial response to the way those American platforms have operated in Nigeria, there seems to be an increased move to YouTube. A good many Nollywood actors and producers are creating their own YouTube channels and putting their work out that way. It’s not a safe-proof solution, but I can understand why people go for that option. It’s out of a similar mentality that Nollywood developed, when you think about it.
SOLA OSOFISAN: The African films you find running the international festival circuits almost never have a popular audience. Often art-house works, they tend to be different from the populist fare that you can find to watch in the local cinema houses, and that are often snubbed by critics and academia. What do you imagine this dichotomy reveals? Any hope that a template will emerge to bridge the divide?
AKIN ADESOKAN: So, there’s an old notion that rests upon the opposition of so-called highbrow, high art to the lowbrow. It came mainly from nineteenth-century British and French cultural institutions, and there were also quite strong attempts to raise so-called popular forms to the level of serious scholarly attention. That’s how what we know as cultural studies developed, in postwar England. That old division is a hardy notion, nonetheless, and it remains in force for several reasons, and this may not be the place to list them. There is the fact that art, whether populist or elitist, is a matter of taste. Some people don’t like horror films; others will binge on mystery or psychological thriller. Taking African cinema as an example of so-called arthouse cinema, yes, the way African cinema developed meant that issues of representation, issues relating to correcting the racist distortions of African historical experiences meant a lot to the pioneer filmmakers like Ousmane Sembene, Sarah Maldoror, Med Hondo and others. They didn’t focus sufficiently, in fact, maybe not at all, on the personal dimensions of life, and comedies were there but they were few and not produced in a sustained manner.
That said, it is still a false dichotomy, and it has long shown a tendency to crumble. In my own work, I haven’t respected that dichotomy at all. In fact, I have done a fair bit, following in the footsteps of scholars like Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan, to develop ideas about how to go beyond the dichotomy. For example, I’d say Sembene’s film Emitaï (1971) adopts an ideologically focused critique of French colonial oppression in the Casamance region during World War II and also say that Tunde Kelani’s Saworoidẹ (1999) does the same with the Sani Abacha dictatorship in Nigeria. However, I’d add that Kelani’s approach is allegorical, drawn from the Yoruba discursive practice of using parables to comment on a social issue, and he doesn’t have to be frontal in his critique because of the associated dangers of attacking military rule in 1998, but more importantly because that discursive practice already makes clear that politics is an aspect of society. That is why the music of Ayinde Barrister cannot be as edgy as that of Fẹla Anikulapo-Kuti but you can hear both musicians commenting on the political shenanigans of the Second Republic in Nigeria (1979-1983). And when we consider the fact that both Fuji and Afrobeat are popular music, that dichotomy breaks down totally.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Are the Africans making films in the diaspora making African films? What do you think?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Yes, quite a lot. In fact, outside of Nollywood, much of what counts as African filmmaking, not all, but much of it, is done by expatriated Africans. Think about Alain Gomis’s Felicité (2017), made by a Senegal-identified director but set in the DRC. Or the Malian-Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako’s latest film, Black Tea (2024), set in both Ivory Coast and China. It is not always easy to know what citizenship a given director claims, but the protocols of commissioning and funding major productions would often include stipulations about national origins. That is why Felicité would end up as Senegal’s submission for the Oscars. Now, according to what standards, is a given film to be described as “African”? That’s usually not a helpful question, but much ink has been spilled on account of it. Is Eyimofe (2021) a Nollywood film? I would say Yes, and it’s more besides. Is Black Tea an African film, even though only about the first five minutes of the story unfolds in Ivory Coast? Well, I have taught it as an African film.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You’ve examined closely the works of people like Ousmane Sembene, Tunde Kelani, and Souleymane Cisse. Where do you stand in the debate on making films in indigenous languages?
AKIN ADESOKAN: For the most part, African filmmakers work with indigenous languages. Due to funding requirements, some would make the obligatory use of French in the opening credits, but the films of Sembene, Cissé, Gaston Kaboré (from Burkina Faso) are almost always in the respective languages of the directors. And then they’re subtitled in English! Although I imagine that for European television where some of the funding originated there will always be tracks in French or German. To their credit, African directors have won that battle. Except in one or two cases, all of Sembene’s films are titled in Wolof and Moré (in the case of Moolaade, his final film.) The same goes for Tunde Kelani, although he doesn’t seem too interested in that aspect, preferring to suggest linguistic associations through images, such as the talking drum, the gong or evocative names even when English is used. Compared to writers, filmmakers are not trapped in the language question. It’s a triumph of a kind because, as you know, Sembene turned to filmmaking as a way of reaching a wider audience, which he didn’t think was feasible for a writer using French in a society where the majority didn’t speak the language. It’s a triumph, and it is best seen as a quiet revolution whose impact should be felt for a very long time, if we are conscious of its significance.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Roots in the Sky is one of the books in the Nigeria section of my small library, in the company of Uche Nduka’s Flower Child, Idzia Ahmad’s A Shout Across the Wall, Esiaba Irobi’s Cotyledons, among others. Unfortunately, your book is turning off-color like many of my other books published in Nigeria 20+ years ago. Many of these precious titles are out of print, with the publishers defunct. Which sentimental titles from that era do you have greying in your library, and how do you preserve them?
AKIN ADESOKAN: I bought a copy of Ben Okri’s first novel, Flowers and Shadows, from a bookstore inside the old Ikoyi Hotel sometime in 1991. I still have it; I think it’s a first edition. But I don’t have any of the Update poets that you’re lucky to have kept. I also have a copy of D. O. Fagunwa’s Irinkerindo Ninu Igbo Elegbeje. It’s a reprint of the original edition, but it’s from 1961, meaning it was reprinted seven years after the original edition. It is old, the spine is all but gone, and I have been thinking of seeing paper preservers if there’s anything I can do to keep it in decent condition.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You wrote a weekly short story for Tempo magazine, I believe, back in the day? Where are they? Are we going to see them edited and collected someday?
AKIN ADESOKAN: The story column, “Here and Now,” served its purpose. I kept the paper copies of the issues in which they appeared. I wrote those stories in the moment, never revised them, and I think my style has so evolved that it won’t serve to return to them. But there is one in particular, titled “Mama Abacha” which my friend Ebenezer Ọbadare likes a lot and which I might include in a book I’m working on.
Compared to writers, filmmakers are not trapped in the language question… Prof. Akin Adesokan
SOLA OSOFISAN: How about the poetry of Akin Adesokan? Or since you once said to Tope Adeboboye in an interview, “For most writers, poetry is a form of apprenticeship,” we have to make do with the “tremendous poetic undertones” in your fiction and discard any hope of meeting Adesokan, the poet?
AKIN ADESOKAN: I do write poems occasionally, and I have a file of them. Mostly short, whimsical verses, but nothing strained. At some point, I sensed that poetry no longer seized me as it used to, except when I had an intense experience. That’s partly the reason for what I said to BenTop in that interview. Last year, for instance, I read this incredible book about Giordano Bruno, possibly the first Italian philosopher, who was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1600, during the Inquisition. That book impressed me a great deal. The author, Ingrid Rowland, makes the arresting observation that the members of the Inquisition who condemned Bruno probably did not understand his ideas. She also asserted that though he had a temper and struck another person once, Bruno’s real crime might be that he spoke his mind. That touched me immensely, being so invested in the idea of the freedom of speech. It seems like a miscarriage of justice to condemn someone whose ideas are too complex for one’s limited understanding. That’s the kind of experience that brings out the poet in me. When the conditions are right, I might submit some of these verses to a poetry magazine.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You got an early introduction to Yoruba literature by reading Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode. You’ve gone on to translate a popular Yoruba book, Aiye D’aiye Oyinbo, by Isaac Delano, into English. Yoruba was your official introduction to written literature, and you have mastered the language, as you have English. So, do you secretly write in Yoruba? Are we going to see a book someday?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Yes, I write in Yoruba. It’s a fact that European languages have so far dominated our critical and creative productions as African intellectuals, but Yoruba remains a vibrant language of artistic production, following Swahili, Hausa and a few others. At any point, I have a Yoruba text that I’m reading. But these are mostly old books because, regrettably, there are not many high-quality writings in the language at the present. It seems as if the best-achieved books stopped coming out in the mid-1980s, but it is probably also the case that I’m not caught up enough with what is being written and published. And reading motivates writing. I can’t say for sure if I’d publish a book in Yoruba because there are so many competing priorities. But it is an enticing idea, and for a start I have considered translating one of my favorite Nigerian novels into Yoruba.
SOLA OSOFISAN: All around Yorubaland lately, it seems everyone communicates in English, even if it hobbles along on crutches. The market women, the iya alata, they all speak English to their children now, perhaps to give them a headstart in the world. We are slowly throttling our African languages. The gatekeepers and curators of traditions are dying off and not being replaced at the same pace. What are the implications of this growing loss? Do you envisage a future where all of us would speak only English, and only a handful of languages will survive?
AKIN ADESOKAN: No, I’m not overly worried about that. Although I’m something of an aesthete when it comes to the product of a language I know, I don’t have a purist attitude toward the language itself. (A few years ago, I bought a CD of supposedly Yoruba poetry, and within ten seconds, I tuned off and I have never returned to it.) In the first place, language is an organic thing, and it thrives best when its users use it imaginatively. I think those whose desire it is to use a language will adapt it to their socio-cultural conditions. The Yoruba with which Bishop Crowther and his colleagues translated the Bible isn’t the Yoruba that Afọlabi Ọlabimtan, Adebayọ Faleti, or Ọladẹjo Okediji used to create their fictions and poetries. It’s the same for contemporary users of the language, and this is the second point I’d like to make. Those who are actively using African languages, say Swahili, Xhosa, or Wolof, are doing so within the media of expression that are available to them, and we see this a lot on social media. The products are not so much novels and dramas but films, TikTok videos, and other kinds of digital content. It’s somewhat worrisome that attempts to promote a language or support its ecology tend to come across as xenophobia, but even there, water will find its level. A third point is that some self-conscious African authors are proactively safeguarding their indigenous languages. A good example is the Senegalese writer Boris Boubacar Diop, who wrote a novel in Wolof, his mother tongue, then translated it into French, and his son, Moustapha Diop, again translated it into English. I wish we could have more of this, but it is a good start.
SOLA OSOFISAN: You went through college rubbing minds with the finest professors; Adelugba, Osundare, Osofisan, Sowande… Many of the products of that period like you are now scholars in institutions abroad, doing great things, no doubt. Still, it means you’re not back in Nigeria grooming the next generation. Can you talk briefly about what the migration of gifted intellectuals like you does to mentorship and the literary conversation on the ground back home?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Ah, but if I had not left when I did, would I have been as intellectually alive as I have been? Frankly, while planning to return to Nigeria from the US in 1999, I knew that an adventure in graduate school was on the cards. I could continue in journalism, but the permutations weren’t particularly appealing. I’m not making excuses, trust me. I think that I have become more useful to Nigeria, a country in which I have strong faith in spite of everything, by staying away. It’s a costly move, and one loses much in the process. But there are also gains, and I have had the incredible fortune of being sought out by mentees, most but not all, from Nigeria, and a good number not studying directly with me. In addition, whenever possible I participate voluntarily as a guest lecturer at the annual Ifẹ Institute for Advanced Studies, established by Professor Jacob Olupọna (of Harvard University), assisting young scholars with everything from theoretical ideas relevant to African conditions to reviewing dissertation chapters. And it’s not only me. My friends Maik Nwosu, Lade Adunbi, Obi Nwakanma, have similar stories. Sometimes, you must stay away from home, turn your back on what you love, honor it by “hating it properly.”
SOLA OSOFISAN: The professors who inspired and encouraged you back then to “do the work” and finish what you had started academically… When you meet them now as a professor in your own right, what is that like? What do they say?
AKIN ADESOKAN: Oh, we get along extremely well! I call Professor Ọṣọfisan frequently to greet him and joke with him, and if you eavesdropped on a phone conversation between me and Professor Ọṣundare, you’d think we were agemates! That’s a most lively human being, perpetually youthful and in total command of his creative hunches. The same thing with “Malam” Olufẹmi Taiwo, the philosopher. I wasn’t his student in a formal sense, but I have learnt more from him than one typically learns from an academic advisor. I still respect and defer to them; there’s something in the water about respect. In fact, it was a Caribbean scholar who, watching Professor Jeyifo and I interact, observed that despite sharp critical exchanges, we still related to each other with respect and affection. And Professor Jeyifo replied that it was like that between him and Ṣoyinka.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Ever wondered why our generation never produced a celebrity talent like Chimamanda Adichie? Or is there one that I’m unaware of and I require schooling? Olu Oguibe maybe? Ben Okri? Chris Abani?
AKIN ADESOKAN: No, not to my knowledge. Ben Okri is technically not in our generation; he inspired us in a way. I remember myself and Sanya Osha dissecting pages of The Famished Road as soon as copies became available in Nigeria around 1992. Yes, Olu Oguibe is up there, since we interacted with him or were in conversation with him back in the early 1990s. But I won’t consider him a writer in the mold of a celebrity. Chris Abani also came out of the left field, so to speak, since he didn’t quite come into our orbit until the publication of GraceLand. But a writer like Adichie is a product of a complex process of marketing of postcolonial writers. There’s a bit in there of Western corporate publishers giving priority to women’s writings, and you can see evidence of this in the way that women’s writings have exploded in a fantastic manner across the Black world. There’s also something going for having a perspective for which the world at large seems ready. Nothing too critical or abrasive. In my opinion, Adichie is very fortunate to fit this bill, but she is first and foremost very, very good. A very good, first-rate writer.
But let me try to understand the why of your question in this way: Starting out, we were acutely aware of the possibility of an audience, if not the actual existence of one. An audience, but not yet a market, because literary publishing was heading to the doldrums just as our imaginations caught fire under specific conditions—Ṣoyinka’s Nobel prize, Achebe’s Booker shortlist, Okri’s actual win, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, all winning the Nobel prize in quick succession. So we imagined an audience, but the kind of attention we aimed for was possible only if that audience also became a market, if what we wrote sold in such numbers as to sustain the publishing sector to continue to reproduce our kind. I mean, think about it. You won two of three ANA prizes in 1990. Ọmọwunmi Ṣegun and Chuks Okoye the following year, followed by Olu Oguibe, followed by Ogaga Ifowodo, followed by Nengi Ilagha, and so forth. That was amazing. Every year a prizeworthy piece of writing, usually in manuscript form. What Odia Ofeimun did with the Update poets in the 1980s could have been replicated for fiction writers but it didn’t happen; publishers were no longer interested in risk-taking. The literary culture we inhabited didn’t necessarily have to produce celebrities, because a healthy literary culture isn’t always about prestige and showbiz. Hollywood and Nollywood are better suited for that. But it could at least be self-sustaining. I think that the audience and the market are coinciding finally, slowly, because of improved business climate. Maybe not in exactly the way we envisioned it, but it is a good thing and we’re still here, productive in our different ways. The durability of a literary culture is not owed to the celebrity status of a few writers, or solely to the standards of genius of one or two artists. It endures largely due to additional factors, including the resilience of many, many others, whose books or paintings aren’t going to bring in a lot of money, but whose consistence, productivity, their self-renewing senses of tradition, keep the fire burning.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Still on that generation of Nigerian writers, how often do you stay in touch with the Lagos-Ibadan crowd, your gang?
AKIN ADESOKAN: I’m in touch with everyone as much as possible, although the initial platoon is scattered. Harry Garuba, our arrowhead, died at just over sixty on the cusp of the pandemic. Pius Adesanmi went before him, also tragically. But (Sanya) Osha and I have kept in touch. Uche Nduka, the same. He writes these beautiful one-liners about poetry on Twitter and I think he should have enough to make a book by now. Amatoritsero (“Ama”) Ede sends me DMs nearly every day. Kọle Ade Odutọla does likewise with WhatsApp. I recently “rediscovered” Unoma Azuah. Rẹmi Raji is now a mọgaji (clan head) in Ibadan, but his common touch hasn’t left him, as far as I can tell, and he still writes poetry. Lookman Sanusi would occasionally crash into my WhatsApp like a meteor, always for good reason. I was excited to have a copy of Bunmi Oyinsan’s latest novel, A Ladder of Bones. Lọla Shonẹyin is visible everywhere, doing fantastic job with Ouidah Books and Ake Festival. Ogaga is in Abuja; he sought to run for office, but he’s learning a few things about Naija politics in the Fourth Republic! Ike Okonta is likewise in Abuja; he’s managed to stay out of politics, which is very wise of him. Nduka Otiono I don’t hear from that often, but it is a matter of trying. But there’s a slightly later, not to say younger, crop of Ibadan poets, like Rotimi Babatunde, Tade Ipadeọla, Niran Okewọle, Benson Eluma; I get along with them very well and we still exchange writings for feedback. Niran’s third collection of poems, Joliba, just came out of Parrésia, my publisher. It is these relationships nurtured in close to forty years, that have continued to sustain me, despite that I’m no longer living in Nigeria and that I don’t see these people as often as before.
SOLA OSOFISAN: Sorry to hear about the loss of Prof. Biodun Jeyifo. I know he meant a lot to you… Reflect on the friends we have lost; Sesan Ajayi, Nike Adesuyi, Idzia Ahmad Carlos, Harry Garuba, Pius Adesanmi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Hakeem Shitta, many others… I know they have all collectively impacted your life and career.
AKIN ADESOKAN: Ah, Professor BJ’s death caught me by total surprise. He had an expression that he would often use to put me at ease whenever I inquired after his health, “Kòsí’kú lójú mi,” meaning “There’s no death in my visage.” I have written about what he meant to me, and there’s more to come. It’s only in the past month or so that I finally came to terms with his death. As fate would have it, during my last phone conversation with Harry Garuba about a week before his death, he wanted to know if I could send him a copy of a lecture that BJ just delivered at a symposium I co-organized. This was in February 2020. Harry’s death was painful, painful, as he’d been through a lot a few years prior. Being away from Nigeria had been great for his career and he was very productive with pathbreaking essays, like the one on animist materialism, which has remained very influential, and a republishing of his old essay on the postcolonial impasse. He was working on a big project on textual forms in postcolonial literature and he seemed to be making headway with it when he described it to me at our last meeting in Cape Town in 2018. A most generous and gentle soul, completely without attitude, though he had read just about everything.
Ṣẹsan Ajayi’s death I saw as a kind of cheating. I thought highly of him as a critic, and knowing how brutal he could be, I always wanted my writing to please him, I think. I can’t forget how shaken we all were by his death, and it was a very sad day for us at his resting place at Sango Cemetery in Ibadan. When I learnt of Nikẹ Adesuyi’s death via a tweet around October 2016, I contacted Harry, Rẹmi, and Ama asking for details. Here’s a quote from Harry’s response, which just about summed up what kind of person Nikẹ was: “…I wish, I hope, one day, for her sake, for the sake of those of us who knew her, that I can really, truly believe in an afterlife beyond genes and the private and social memories that make us human…” Nikẹ was ever solicitous; with the hurricane season arriving, she would send emails to a group of us if we’d heard from Professor Ọṣundare and his family, considering what they went through during Katrina. She was also one for total probity. For two years, she kept a small amount that should have gone to Simon Berete, a friend from our Ibadan days. Simon was from Ivory Coast, but somehow, he was stranded in Burkina Faso and in need of support. Nikẹ wanted to send the money back because she couldn’t find a way to get it to him. Eventually, after nearly three years, the money got to him. Izzia Ahmad’s death occurred just as we started connecting via Krazitivity, the Yahoogroup you created. I hadn’t heard from him in a long while. We tried, you, Obiwu, his sister, and me, to put out his pending book of poems, and it’s always frustrating when the best efforts yielded nothing. I hope his poems are not forgotten, and I wish his attempts at recording them as songs had succeeded because that would have conferred a measure of permanence on them.
Hakeem Shitta was an unusual spirit, a true artist. Working so bravely through that serious illness. I remember the fundraising event we had for him at the National Theater where, being so ill, he still brought his printer and was typing and hand-correcting the program notes. Jahman (Anikulapo), myself, Toyin (Akinoso) and a lady whose name I forgot visited Mrs. Ajọkẹ Muhammed, the late General Murtala Muhammed’s widow, somewhere on the way to Ẹpẹ, to ask for financial support. He fought hard but that illness got the better of him, unfortunately. Pius’s death was most tragic, not just because of the way it happened, but also because he was riding high, traveling frequently and making meaningful impact with the African Grads Lounge. He had found a niche that suited his scholarly temperament, and he had a lifetime ahead of him. And Ken Saro-Wiwa, what a life! He was such a presence at Lagos ANA even while he was the National President. His office near Tẹjuosho Market in Surulere was a great meeting place, and on a good day you would find Ṣẹsan, Uche, Afam and Izzia there. Although he was a big man in our parlance, he bonded easily with everyone and he would say something like, Call me Ken, if you tried to address him formally. I was with him in Accra when he received the Fonlon-Nichols Award from the African Literature Association in April 1994. I think his arrest occurred about a month after that, and he was never seen in public again.
All in all, this was a most exciting period and I’m fortunate to be part of it. We were brought together by a passion for writing and the interest, the camaraderie, was genuine. I’ve often wished to write about the period, and I made a tentative attempt when your third collection of stories, Blood Will Call, appeared in 2012 or thereabouts.
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Photos courtesy interview subject