By Kevin Lambert

Freedom of speech is in great health in Akwa Ibom. At a recent literary event, an extremely prominent journalist started the festivities by running down a list of quotes, all of which were insults against African leaders. They were the kind of remarks that, in other countries, would get you a quick five to ten.

The literary event was a Nigerian publishing event called a book launch. In principle, it is not dissimilar to a CD launch, but a Nigerian book launch attracts the most prominent people in the community, and invites them to announce how much they will pay to help a book along.
The book in the spotlight was The Age of Videots, a collection of stories by Udeme Nana. The printed word, in Africa, has never reached the stratospheric levels of artistry as their sculpture or music, but Nigerians – by far the most prolific black African writers of English – are certainly trying to change that.

Author Udeme Nana

Most books in Nigerian are self-published – what we in America would call vanity press – where the writers pay the publishers. There is no shame in this, as it is based upon necessity; the Nigerian publishing industry doesn’t pay advances or anything else. Neither are there grants or fellowships for writers. So the writers pony up the money and try and convince prominent people to kick in with a contribution toward the writer’s well being and the mental health of the nation. If the book has a good buzz, there could even be a bidding war.

"If you have a successful launch, as we did today, it’s some kind of investment for the survival of the author," says Nduka Otiono, a Lagos-based writer/editor at large, who is also chairman of the Nigerian Association of Writers.

"There are also various forms of launchings, depending of the levels of sophistication," he says. "The launcher is the person presenting cash. We encourage people to buy copies and give them to libraries. A book launch is one way to free the writer from the workaday problems."
Still, if the writer is the one that has to hire the hall and the band and print the flyers. It is a lot closer to a business gamble than art.

Udeme Nana is a young, serious fellow, massively educated, who wrote a business column at the Pioneer, a division of Akwa Ibom Newspapers Limited. He is presently the senior special assistant to Governor Attah.

Quite a few people came up and pledged various amounts of money, the smallest amount being NGN10,000, or about $77. (A bus ticket from Lagos to Abuja costs NGN1,000.)
Nana got up and talked. Instead of the kind of talks authors give here, discoursing wittily on cheapskate publishers and tone-deaf editors and philistine readers, Nigerian authors treat it more like an award ceremony.

Mr. Nana thanked his wife and friends and family. He especially praised his parents for his upbringing. "I was brought up on books. And that is why, if I am different, it’s because of my parents. They did not let the video bring me up."

The title piece holds that electronic entertainment is destroying the fabric of society and that we should read more. Not a novel idea, but an excellent one, and one that apparently needs to be repeated a whole lot.

He talked, as many thoughtful Africans do, about the earlier times, when "moonlight stories were [a] regular pastime of every homestead. The elderly, parents and grown-ups would sit in semi-circles and recount folktales."

One folktale described an orphan who had to fend for herself until she would be taken to the land of ghosts as a housemaid. There she acquitted herself with honesty and good conduct for seven years and was heralded home with fanfare and wealth to the envy of [those who had despised her in the past.]
The video, by contrast, offers "Inhumanly theatricals, and has brought dresses and hairstyles which have made it difficult to separate sane people from the insane."

The rest of the essays cover and wail about nearly every aspect of Nigerian life, starting with the favorite national topic: mismanagement and corruption, which are talked about with more fervor than soccer scores. His other topics ran from college cults to yam festivals to the Nsidung Beach Market to encouraging indigenous scientists.

He thanked everyone present and pocketed – well, this writer, whose first book netted around $600 and no fellowship whatsoever – went into a fit of bitter jealousy and stopped counting.
The last word, as it often does in Africa, fell to the boss, Governor Victor Attah. Since these last of these essays was written in 1997, long before he assumed office, it cannot be said that he had a political agenda to pursue. He shared a Nigerian folk tale:

"There are very positive aspects to video, but you find that the stories on the videos remind me of the story of how you cook a frog. If you want to get the best taste, you put it in tepid water. It is so comfortable that it completely relaxes. Then you turn up the temperature. By the time the frog is being cooked it is so relaxed that it hasn’t got the ability to jump out of the hot water. The video has unfortunately become the cooking sauce that is luring us into a state of idiocy that we really have to jump out of before we find, like that frog, that we are cooked.

"Most Hollywood movies are taken from stories that have already been published as books, but in Nigeria we run away from publishing those stories. We go straight into the movie. Why do we not publish more?"

The answers are well known, but the muse continues to seep out. We will explore this further in another issue.