UFG 2011/1

I'm a storyteller. […] When I began to write at about the age of 7 […], I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, they talked about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now this, despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria, I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangos, and we never talked about the weather because there was no need to. […] Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Well, things changed when I discovered African books. […] I realized that people like me, girls with skin the colour of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form pony tails could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. […] African books saved me from a single story.