Fela Meets Abba; or With (Nigerian) Love from Uppsala - tolu ogunlesi

New e-ddress

2009-06-02T04:22:00.000-07:00

I have moved to http://toluogunlesi.wordpress.com/

New Tolu Ogunlesi BLOG

New Blog @ NEXT

2009-01-16T11:26:00.001-08:00

Happy Nu Yr!

Breaking News: This writer has now officially moved! :-)

It's been a pleasure hovering around, eavesdropping on the 'meeting' between Fela and Abba...

I'm now blogging at NEXT

NEXT is the exciting new paper from Nigeria, published by the Pulitzer-winning journalist Dele Olojede, the first African-born winner of the Prize. Read about NEXT's launch here

I'll be writing a weekly blog for NEXT's website.

Tolu Ogunlesi NEXT Blog 5 - You're invited to my party
Tolu Ogunlesi NEXT Blog 4 - Song of a goat
Tolu Ogunlesi NEXT Blog 3 - The melanin-spangled banner
Tolu Ogunlesi NEXT Blog 2 - National distraction commission
Tolu Ogunlesi NEXT Blog 1 - H.O.P.E Alliance

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T04:47:00.000-08:00

As the year comes to an end, enjoy a (very brief) selection of memorable (in my judgement, thank you!) photos taken by me in Scandinavia between September and November 2008 (my own imitation of a TIME Magazine Photos of the Year edition)

[PS. The Accenture photo, taken in Helsinki, is there 'cos I used to work with the Nigerian office of Accenture, I left in January 2008 to take up my current job in a mobile phone company...]

All images by Tolu Ogunlesi, (c) 2008

All images by Tolu Ogunlesi, (c) 2008

Sly's Stockholm Sunset...

2008-12-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Notes from Uppsala [10] - To be continued...

2008-12-09T11:29:00.000-08:00

Published in The Guardian Life Magazine (Sunday, December 07, 2008)

This will be the last of the Notes from Uppsala.
The varied wanderings – physical and mental – of the last three months have now come to an end, and it is time to embrace the life that I let go. Time to readmit the life of sweat and of cold baths and repudiate the one of snow, steaming breath and hot baths.
*
Wherever two or three Nigerians are gathered (outside Nigeria), ‘Nigeria’ insists on being in their midst – in their words, in the perplexed tenor of voices, the involuntary wringing of hands and shaking of heads – the silent listener provoking speech, the unacknowledged protagonist of all stories, the overbearing waka-pass in an impromptu (& purely absurdist) plot.
I spent my final Sunday evening as guest of a Nigerian family. The second Nigerian family to invite me to dinner in Uppsala. Away from home it is the closest one can get to home; sitting across a table from people who know – or knew – Nigeria from the inside; who despite packing their bags and leaving at some point, still allow themselves to face and to feel the wayward homeland.
At every such gathering of fatherlanders it is impossible to resist dwelling on the great African territory that owes its famous name to a British Dame.
A land that inspires, constructs, destroys and re-invents stories. All sorts of stories – the surreal, the merely comic, the tragic, the nostalgic, the brashly magical. As Nigerians we congregate in far-away lands to speak of (failed) politics, corruption, migration, of encounters with new cultures and new languages, of the negotiations of disparate (and often violent) forces that play in the many vacant spaces of the exiled mind. The recently-arrived are expected to regularly update their ‘seniors’ on the state of the green-and-white union.
There is plenty to laugh about, and to shake the head about. There is the air of undeclared contest – my story is bigger than yours!
And there is of course the food – the mention of pepper or an apology for its absence; the delight at seeing that garri and/or ogbono are not averse to exile; the possibility of abandoning fork and knife and settling for the flawlessness of painstakingly-washed fingers.
*
I spent the day before the Nigerian dinner enjoying another dinner. My Nigerian colleague (at the institute) and I were invited by another colleague (a Sri Lankan whose husband is Swedish) for dinner at their home in the Stockholm archipelago, about 15 minutes from the city centre. The area is what you might call the ‘Banana Island’ of Stockholm, with generously-gardened houses priced in the tens of millions of Swedish crowns. On the drive to her house she pointed out the houses of famous persons. Tiger Woods (whose wife is Swedish) has got a summer residence there. On a tiny island all by itself lies the home of one of the members of the famous Swedish musical group ABBA.
In the thick of winter, the sea, which lies only metres away from the twisting road, freezes over several inches and becomes a giant skating rink.
*
Someday, when I do a ‘Highlights of a Scandinavian Tour’ piece, certain experiences will stand out, one of which will be this:
Walking through the Uppsala cemetery one evening, in the dark, trying to see which tombs were Viking tombs amidst the sprawl of concrete slabs. The only available light was the weak, ghostly (no pun intended) one from the lanterns that burnt on some of the tombs (it was a few days after ‘All Saints Day’). It was so calm, so peaceful, that before my eyes ‘Requiescat In Pace’ seized for itself new meaning (or perhaps merely reclaimed the purity of its original meaning).
*
Perhaps I should just do a Top 5, or Top 6 countdown of most exciting experiences in Scandinavia:
Top on the list should be the 17-hour ferry trip from Finland (Helsinki) to Sweden (Stockholm).
Then there would be my guided tour of Oslo, worth every cent of the cost – starting from the Oslo City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded annually, to the Holmenkollen ski resort, to the Vigeland Sculpture Park to the Kon Tiki Museum to the Viking Ship Museum, and finally the newly-built glass wonder, the Oslo Opera House.
There would be Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s ‘Old City’, with its imposing entrance and quaint air and narrow walkways and tiny shops.
How can I forget Helsinki, wet, windy, gray city, with its bloody history and Stone Church (which played a role in the Biafran War) and colossal bookstore and a language so generous with vowels you can’t but wonder if consonants are not being victimised for some disguised complicity in the Swedish and Russian conquest of the country.
Oslo, hands folded in a gesture of perpetual apology; a plea for understanding, for being so self-effacing in the midst of so much wealth.
Copenhagen, city of bikers, joggers, and artificial lakes. And an elusive Little Mermaid.
Last but not least, Uppsala, the oversized University campus, suffocated by designer shops and famous graves, and watched over by the oldest church in the whole of Scandinavia.
Thank you for not swallowing me. Or at least for not forgetting to spew me out again.

Three Months Up North...

2008-12-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

My short essay/ mini-travelogue Three months up North... has just appeared on the website of the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, my 'office'/Host Institution from September 1 to November 28, 2008.

You can read a similar end-of-residency essay by the Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, inaugural Guest Writer (2001) at the Institute, here (Pages 40 and 41 of the pdf file)

Notes from Uppsala [9] - Nigerianitis

2008-12-02T04:44:00.000-08:00

Published in The Guardian (Lagos) Life Magazine (Sunday, November 30, 2008)

As I spend my (final) days trying to psychologically disengage from Sweden – it’s for my own good that I do this before I return to Lagos – I find myself thinking again and again about the life I left behind, and to which I will be returning in less than a week.
*
Accents are baggages that we carry on through life, unable to drop.
Actually, that wasn’t supposed to be an attempt at philosophical profundity. It was meant simply as an ordinary observation, open to rigorous questioning.
*
I think the statement is true in some ways and untrue in others. True in the sense that everyone has got an accent; as in, everyone has got to have an accent. Compulsory. Every time we step outside our ‘linguistic comfort zones’ our accents tag along, with or without our permission, compelling us to sometimes repeat words for the benefit of people who are not used to our ways of pronouncing (certain) words.
*
Untrue in the sense that people sometimes deliberately cultivate (i.e. drop and pick up at will) accents – at great personal cost of course. Or what else would you say to the case of a Nigerian who has never been outside the country for longer than 2 weeks at a time, but insists on speaking ‘American’ – or at least his/her idea of ‘American’ – and has to maintain the unintentionally comical (sometimes sickening) charade at all times. Chances are that if you turn on the radio in Nigeria, especially to one of those stations in love with phone-in programmes targeted at a young (hip) audience, you will hear all sorts of strange ‘Vocal Variations on a Theme of Americana’.
*
A few years ago I was asked by a Ugandan why I don’t/didn’t speak like a Nigerian? Whenever I get around to compiling the most baffling questions I have ever been asked, this will take a Top-10 position. How could anyone imagine that I do not speak like a Nigerian! I, who grew up in Abeokuta and Ibadan, archetypal Yoruba cities, and not in no-man’s-Land Lagos where one might assume that a ‘wannabe’ mentality reigns, the land where Money Talks, and where People-Talk-Like-Money. It took a while for me to realise what the Ugandan meant. It was all about Nollywood. As you are all aware, Nollywood is one of our greatest exports to the world, especially to other African countries. Kenyans, Ugandans, Ghanaians, South Africans, Zambians all adore our Omotolas and Genevieves and Ramsey Noahs as much as – if not more than – we do. The bulk of what these people therefore know about Nigeria comes from television; impressions piped in through Africa Magic and itinerant VCDs.
In this case the Ugandan had come to a conclusion that there is such a thing as a Nigerian Accent, and had approximated the voices he heard in our home videos into a ‘Nigerian Accent’.
*
There’s nothing wrong with thinking that way, or making such approximations!
Well, not exactly. There is a small problem, and it is this: Nollywood (I’m straying into potentially dangerous territory here) – at least the version of it that travels the farthest; the ones originally shot/recorded in English – is typically an Igbo phenomenon, set in Igboland or around Igbo characters, families, culture and customs. And (Achebean) proverbs.
This is where the Ugandan must have got it wrong. What he had approximated into a Nigerian accent was no more than the Igbo Nigerian accent. There is of course the Yoruba Nigerian accent, and the Hausa one, amongst many others – don’t we all know how many Naija comedians would go out of business if a ban were to be placed on Hausa-Yoruba-Igbo accent jokes?
*
I have just finished watching (on YouTube of course, where else?) a series of comedy sketches by the British-Iranian comedian Omid Djalili, on a phenomenon newly discovered by him, called “Nigerianitis”.
He defines Nigerianitis as follows:
1. “It’s when you feel slightly emotional, and a Nigerian voice just shoots out of you involuntarily”
2. “A [Nigerian] voice that shoots out of [you] for no reason”
By these definitions it is obvious that Nigerianitis is not an syndrome that afflicts/affects Nigerians. Only non-Nigerians are at risk of contracting it.
Omid singles out “Nigerian Traffic Wardens” (in England) as a set of people who inspire (rouse, arouse, instigate) demonstrations of (the symptoms of) Nigerianitis in foreigners. He talks of the wardens speaking in “unnecessarily eloquent language” (“unnecessary” because they are traffic wardens, not University Professors), and advises that in dealing with them it is important for non-Nigerians to “shout back” (and hiss and make noises like ‘Aha!’) at them in the most Nigerian accent they can muster.
*
Snow has finally reared its frozen head. The last few days have seen non-stop snowing that has left a layer of shin-high soft white ‘powder’ everywhere. Temperatures hover around minus-five degrees centigrade, but I’ve been told that in the past they have gone as low as minus-twenty.
I’ll be out of here (and languishing in temperatures of 30+ degrees) before that happens!

View photos and leave comments at http://www.felameetsabba.blogspot.com/

Lunch Poetry @ Uppsala Missionskyrka (Thur, 27 Nov, 2008)

2008-11-26T08:55:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow (Thursday) at lunch hour (12 noon) I will be hosted by a gathering of Uppsala poets who meet weekly at the Missionskyrka (Mission Church), located at the intersection of Dragarbrunnsgatan and St Olofsgatan. Bernt Jonsson will be reading Swedish translations of two of my poems, while I will read in English, as well as share with the audience some 'deep spiritual stuff' from Fela's oeuvre.

Lunch poetry with Tolu Ogunlesi

Images from Helsinki - Temppeliaukio Church / Temppeliaukion Kirkko (BIAFRA'S CHURCH)

2008-11-26T00:42:00.000-08:00

Temppeliaukio Church is the ‘stone church’ (it was hewn out of solid rock) in Helsinki on whose wall the word B-I-A-F-R-A was graffitied (during its construction in the late 1960s) by young Finns trying to draw the world’s attention to the horrendous starvation that characterised the Nigerian Civil War (more famously known as the Biafra War).

NB. The close-up shots of rock below (3rd and 4th photos from the top) show where the slogans of BIAFRA were spray-painted.

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from Oslo - Opera House

2008-11-24T04:29:00.000-08:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

In Helsinki Times...

2008-11-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

Helsinki Times is the first weekly English language newspaper in Finland. My article - A VISIT TO FINLAND - appears in the latest edition, in the "EXPAT VIEW" column. It's online here

I was in Helsinki in late October for the 2008 Helsinki Book Fair

A debt to Uppsala...

2008-11-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

As I prepare to leave (these days I somehow manage to start every sentence of mine with that phrase), I think I ought to give something back to Uppsala for all generous love it has given to me, and for the sun and snow it has so selfishly withheld.

Perhaps I will have to return to Lagos first, to put enough distance betwixt myself and this lovely city that has been home for 3 months, before I can attempt to embark on any such creative 'philanthropy'...

While I muse over what Uppsala has meant to me, and while I pray desperately that I shall not have to pay for overweight luggage at the airport when I leave in a little over a week from now, I will share a poem... my gift to Paris after a (forced) 24 hour sojourn there in February 2005...

* 'forced' because Paris was not meant to host me... I was there only to catch a connecting flight to Lagos. I ended up missing the flight, ended up having to spend a night...

PARIS

You look at one another with
measured smiles, pursed lips
or Absolute Hesitations

and speak with your eyes
above the din of your skins
in conversations of many frequencies.

there's the disappointment
that comes when French falls
through the teeth of a kinsman

and you think –
another nigger down.
And there's the Enlightenment

of discovering
that not every black man is
from the country

you left behind.
you glance at one another
in rituals of Suspicion

wondering who's legal
and who smells
of impending deportation

Paris is the City
where you speak the slowest,
like a stammerer,

to avoid tangling your tongue.
the City where
you find your way

around the fastest
despite their speaking
in tongues.

Tolu Ogunlesi (c) 2006

Originally published in Sentinel Poetry #49 (4th Anniversary Issue), here

Things Fall Apart @ 50 in Uppsala, Sweden

2008-11-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala invites you to a discussion on

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a milestone in African literature, and the 50 years’ anniversary since its publication has been the topic of many conferences and seminars. Now the turn has come to Uppsala. Both Africa and African literature has undergone many changes since 1958, but this book still hangs on as the classic number one. It has been translated to 50 languages, for thousands and thousands of African school children it has been prescribed reading, it has not once been out of print. We will discuss such questions as why is this book about the meeting between the Igbo people and the colonisers still a classic? What did the book mean for the African novel? What does it mean today for writers and readers in Nigeria? Why has it not yet been translated to Igbo?

These and other questions will be discussed by Stefan Helgesson, literature scholar and literature critic, and Tolu Ogunlesi, a young Nigerian writer, presently ending his 3-month grant as African guest writer at the Nordic Africa Institute.
The event is part of the series “The Writers’ Africa”.

Welcome!
Venue: The Nordic Africa Institute (Library), Kungsgatan 38, Uppsala
Date and time: Thursday 20 November 2008, 18.00-20.00. (Note the library is open until 18.00, welcome to browse!)

Mai PalmbergCoordinator for the ”Cultural Images in and of Africa” research programme
Nordic Africa Institute

Images from Oslo - Viking Ship Museum

2008-11-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Op-Ed - We Must Set Forth At Midnight

2008-11-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

My article We Must Set Forth At Midnight (title borrowed from Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's memoir, YOU MUST SET FORTH AT DAWN appears in The Guardian (Nigeria) - Sunday November 16 - here.

* Apologies for the dodgy formatting (creative line breaks) of the piece - 'website devil' it must be...

Notes from Uppsala [8] - Counting Down

2008-11-16T07:38:00.000-08:00

Published in The Guardian (Lagos) Life Magazine (Sunday, November 16, 2008)

***

My days in Uppsala are slowly grinding to an end (slightly faster however than the wheels of justice). There are many things I’ll miss about this University Town of about 200,000 residents.
*
The only thing I’ll be fortunate to miss (very narrowly) will be the worst of winter. It has snowed once, one Friday evening, a few weeks ago. Perhaps it will snow again before I leave. But the dark days are here, nightfall at 4pm, which has not been as disorienting as I’d assumed it’s be. The mind always gets fooled of course, but there is always the clock to give my sense of chronological balance a helpful jolt.
I’ll miss the forty-minute train ride to and from Stockholm for sightseeing – a lot of my time in Stockholm is actually spent no farther than the Central Station, wandering through the intimidating array of magazines stocked at Pressbyran or browsing through paperbacks at the Pocket Shop.
*
“Sweden is a lovely place with a strong work/life balance culture”
That’s from an email someone sent to me on learning that I was in Sweden.
Many companies (multinationals especially) in Nigeria like to go on and on in a nebulous manner about “work-life balance.” They need to come over to Sweden to see that “work-life balance” is a “life”, not a discussion topic; an “end” and not merely a means to an end.
*
Alas, three months here will not be enough to convert me to the “Lunch at Noon, Dinner at 5pm” religion.
*
I don’t look forward very much to returning to the crazy traffic, the noisy generators, the utter impossibility of anonymity (the kind that I have so nicely settled into here). But go back I will, to the life I know best, the one I have spent the longest experiencing.
*
In the two weeks or so I have my work cut out. Shopping. And more shopping. Or perhaps it will merely be window-shopping.
I have two readings in my last week, one at a gathering of Uppsala poets who meet once a week at the Mission Church, the other at the English Bookstore in Uppsala.
And then there is a last bout of sightseeing to be done.
Tentative plans: A boat trip to the Swedish archipelago, a visit to Swedish furniture giant IKEA, and then to Uppsala’s museums.
Perhaps a night club outing (hoping to God that the songs are in English!). But I know that, on the premise of Newton’s fourth Law of Motion – “White Men Can’t Dance” – I’ll feel far more comfortable flailing my arms and twisting my ankles in a Swedish club than in a Nigerian one.
*
There will be the list of regrets (hopefully not “highway long”) – I’d have loved to travel more around Sweden, away from the Big Cities and University Cities, to get a feel of rural Swedish Life.
I haven’t yet had a taste of Glögg and aquavit, traditional Swedish liquor.
I had hoped to visit a Volvo factory, but that doesn’t look likely any more.
I keep forgetting that I have been meaning to rent a bike.
The much dreamed about photo-shoot with the Swedish Royal Family doesn’t look too feasible anymore.
*
I will miss the Chinese Garden, where I spend the occasional afternoon tucking into an inexpensive (by Nigerian standards) buffet, musing on the fact that Chinese restaurants in Lagos are typically elitist establishments, meant as markers and maintainers of class in a society where people like to entrench separateness between themselves and other people on the basis of the expenses they make.
*
The anonymity is for me the most appealing thing. But it is a strange form of anonymity, a felt (internalised) anonymity – on the basis of skin color alone it is the farthest thing from anonymity; nothing stands out more than the color black in a world of white skins and pristine snow – but unless you are an illegal immigrant there is a feeling that in this strange land no one knows you, there is no one to offer unsolicited advice, no obligatory aso-ebis to buy.
Uppsala I assume is one of those few places left on the face of the earth where a Nigerian can still feel fairly anonymous. You try that in London!

Images from Oslo [2]

2008-11-11T13:33:00.001-08:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Notes from Uppsala [7] - Mixing Races

2008-11-09T19:57:00.000-08:00

Written before the historic Elections that brought Barack Obama to power, and published in the Guardian Life magazine (Sunday, November 9, 2008),

By the time you read this, the United States of America will have a new President. I believe it will be Barack Obama Jr., son of a Kenyan father and an American mother. Barack Obama Sr. left home and family behind to travel to America in search of an education, perhaps a new life. He met Ann Dunham at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, while they were both students there. Not long after, Sen. Obama was born.
*
It is a story that many will be familiar with. In the forties and fifties shiploads of Nigerians regularly set sail from Lagos, headed for colonial Britain’s Universities (and to a lesser extent America – Nnamdi Azikiwe being one of the more famous examples of Nigerian students in America). In the sixties and seventies Russia, Hungary, Poland and other Communist (Eastern European) countries joined the list of destination countries for young Nigerians seeking certificates for a better life. These opportunities were the fallout of the Cold War; it must have dawned on the Imperial Powers that the Cold War was not merely a battle for military supremacy, it was also a battle for the minds of men and women, and Africa was virgin ground, waiting to be taken. So that they turned on Africa and lavished it with scholarships and exchange programs.
*
It was inevitable that many of the young Nigerians who left would fall in love with women from their host countries – like Barack Obama Sr. Some came back home with their (new) families. Others chose to stay behind. Today, in and out of Nigeria there are sizeable communities of “half-castes” (that word is now ‘Politically Incorrect’) of Nigerian origin.
*
Many Ghanaians moved to Nigerians in the seventies and early eighties escaping political and economic turmoil in their country. By the early eighties there was a sizeable Ghanaian population in Nigeria, working at all sorts of jobs, from blue collar jobs ones like shoe-mending to white collar ones like teaching. Most of my primary school teachers were Ghanaians, and they were such excellent teachers it seemed like God had created them specially for that purpose. In 1983 we asked them to leave (see Ghana-must-go). They did. But I’d like to imagine that in the years they spent here, they fell in love with and/or married Nigerian women, and had children, and that there is a sizeable population of Ghanaian-Nigerians, or Nigerian-Ghanaians (take your pick) scattered between Nigeria (those who stayed) and Ghana (those who left).
Interestingly, years before we asked the Ghanaians to leave, they asked us to. In 1969 Ghana deported 50,000 Nigerian migrants, for “economic reasons.” And today, Nigerians are again moving in droves to Ghana, to take advantage of a country where things work better, where there are more possibilities than the one they left behind.
*
A significant number of Koreans moved to Japan during the 2nd World War, and have lived there since (even though they still remain largely as second-class citizens, due to the fact that Japan is (in the words of the New York Times) a “homogenous and insular nation… notoriously unwelcoming to immigrants…”
But once upon a time even the “notoriously unwelcoming’ Japanese had to “move”. I was surprised to discover that the largest Japanese population outside of Japan is found not in a neighbouring Asian country, not even in America –“Home to Everyone” (where there are about 1.2 million Japanese – 2005 figures) – but in Brazil. There are an estimated 1.5 million people of Japanese descent living in Brazil, descendants of the thousands of Japanese who have been traveling to Japan since the Brazil-Japan Immigration Treaty of 1907 permitted the Japanese to seek work on Brazil’s coffee plantations – the same plantations to which millions of Africans were forcefully shipped during the transatlantic Slave Trade.
*
About 6% of Finland’s current population is made up of people known as “Swedish-speaking Finns”, (the percentage has actually fallen to this figure over the centuries) their origins can be traced to the time when Finland used to be a part of Sweden, before the Russian conquest of 1809.
*
A while ago I wrote about the following exchange between myself and an American postgraduate student that I met here in Uppsala:
Him: "Did you know that in Liberia Nigerians are treated as God?"
Me: “Yeah, ECOMOG...”
Him: “And did you know that there is a village (in Liberia) full of half-Liberian half-Nigerian children…”
Me: [laughing] “Yeah... “
It’s a joke even in Nigeria, about the sizeable number of Nigerian-Liberian children in Liberia, whose fathers happen to be Nigerian soldiers.
*
I can’t help ending the way I started, with Barack Obama.
In 2006, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, he said: "Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations... I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher... we've got it all."

On Religion and Soccer (for lack of a better title)

2008-11-06T16:37:00.000-08:00

Update (07 November)
Thanks Waffy for 'reminding' me that actually, Lagos is no longer the capital of Nigeria.

Hey, folks, that was a (Freudian?) slip. I take all the responsibility for it.

Lagos stopped being the administrative capital of Nigeria in 1991, when the then President Babangida moved the seat of Government to Abuja (wiki)

But in a sense it remains the defacto commercial capital, and of course the most populated. And it's where I live. The (personal) question I get asked the most here is "So where in Nigeria do you live?" to which I answer, LAGOS. So somehow I must have answered the Kebab guy below with the same confidence, without thinking about what exactly it was he was asking me.
And then I went ahead to blog, still without thinking about it (Note to self: Do Not, Ever Again, Blog After Midnight!).

This error suddenly makes me feel like I'm Sarah Palin...

For the purposes of this blog, I think I might leave the exchange below as it is. But please, for the purposes of history and history lessons, Lagos is no longer the capital of Nigeria. It is only where I live...

I'm off to find the Kebab guy to admit my error...

***

I'm on the last lap of my tour of duty...
I don't want to think about it, about how much I'll miss this life, these cities, quaint Uppsala, big city Stockholm, how I'll miss getting lost in the midst of these people whose language I cannot speak, miss stopping people to ask for directions and having to quickly say "English, English" when they start talking to me in Swedish, miss the kebab joints and 'Chinese garden' and being stuck with BBC world...

But now's not the time to dwell on memories...

Yesterday evening I went to a kebab place. The guy at the counter, of Middle Eastern origin started to speak Swedish to me.
"English, English" I said. He complied. I made my order. Then he asked me where I was from.
Nigeria, I told him.
The capital of Nigeria is what?
Lagos.* (see Update)
Ah, Lah-gos...

*
...so are there both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria?
Yes.
In equal numbers?
Well, there seem to be more Muslims than Christians, I say. (At least that's what I think)
But all your football players are Christian, eh?
Well... most...

*

(I want to explain that most of Nigeria's soccer superstars are Igbos, from South Eastern Nigeria, and that the Igbo are mostly Christians - Catholics to be precise. I want to further explain that I can't recall having ever met a Muslim Igbo, even though I'm sure they exist...)

But this is not seminar session on 'Religion, Geography and Soccer in Nigeria: A critical appraisal'

Then he starts to reel out names of Nigerian soccer players:
The usual suspects - Kanu Nwankwo, JJ Okocha ("the guy at Bolton" is what he says as he tries to recall the name), Julius Aghahowa, Sunday Oliseh, "Uche" (he's forgotten the surname)...

When he says 'Uche' I suggest 'Uche Okafor', which I think he hears as 'Kuffour' because he immediately tells me that Kuffour is from Ghana.

I marvel at his knowledge of Nigerian players, and he tells me that he's a fanatic, and even apologises that his knowledge has diminished over time...

It's somewhat refreshing to be away from literary circles for once, where the first question I am asked always has something to do with Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka.

*

Just before I leave (after eating) I walk up to him to ask where he's from.
He hesitates for a moment, then speaks.

"Let's talk later" he says "It's complicated"

Complicated? I leave almost scratching my head. How complicated can it be? As complicated as the "it's complicated" of Facebook?

I guess he's right. The Identity Question always manages to be one of the most complicated in the world... ask Barack Obama for further details...

How to write (books) about Africa: A Guide for the Aspiring Westerner

2008-11-05T18:13:00.000-08:00

by Tolu Ogunlesi

This was inspired by the now-famous Binyavanga Wainaina (wiki) article, How to Write About Africa, originally published in Granta

1. Join the Peace Corps. In all honesty, this is enough. Join the Peace Corps, and you will write about Africa. Whether you’d really like to, or not. There’s something about the Peace Corps that makes you suspect that it’s an undercover MFA program, haunted by muses and sundry writing spirits

But then, here’s more specific guidance on what to do after you join the Peace Corps:
Spend 1 year in a lost village. This is the "100% Proven and Guaranteed" way to get inspiration for a book on Africa. Visit the city, or even a small town at your own peril; there you will waste your mornings at the local Starbucks and your evenings fighting obesity and gorging on greasy McDonald’s fare and Heineken six packs, almost like you were back home in Minnesota or Idaho. Another drawback, one year in an African City is a sure way to go back home without setting eyes on even one African beast.

Examples of existing "peace-corps books":
· The Village of Waiting (1988) by George Packer
· Black Papyrus: A Year in the Life of an African Village (2003)
· Why the Sky Is Far Away: A Folktale from Nigeria, Retold by Mary-Joan Gerson (1974)
· In Bikole: Eight Modern Stories of Life in a West African Village, illustrated by Monica Vachula, 1978
· State of Decay: An Oubangui Chronicle; A Novel of African Adventure (2001)
· The Children of Mauritania: Days in the Desert and by the River Shore (1993)

2. Make sure your book title has at least one of the following "buzz-words" –
Tribe, Genocide, Slave, Hills, AIDS, Scramble, Matchete, Village or Grave.
These words help magnify searchability on Amazon and Google, and standoutability in crowded bookstore shelves, and rumors have it that Amazon actually preferentially ranks such books e.g.

· Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village (Henry Holt, 2003)
· The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa (Basic Books, 2001).
· Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
· My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989).

Also very importantly, try to make sure that the word Africa appears in the title. See Rule 1 for more examples.

3. Still on titles. "Farther is better" is the Golden Rule.
The farther your title is from ordinariness, and the closer it is to the Exotic and/or Fantastical, the better:
· When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa (Little, Brown, 2007)
· We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

4. Get blurbs from at least 2 of the following:
– the latest African-baby-adopting white celebrity diva
– the latest celebrity African ex-child-soldier
– a Chinese Government official extolling the "rich" virtues of the continent (caveat: this might not go down well with the US State Department, and will therefore invariably affect your chances of getting a US Publisher)
– one of the growing numbers of African hawker-or-herdsgirl-turned-new-york-supermodel...
– Bono

5. Last but not the least. Your cover photo. You certainly need to get this right. Instead of the hackneyed (Conradian) images you’d find in The Economist (No. 1 Suspect) – fly-covered, potbellied children, an AK-47 clutching "rebel", a family posing outside a hut, cows, a queue of black-skinned humans clutching bowls and smiling) – Be Positively Different
It's now called CSR - Continental Social Responsibility. Use a toothless, smiling, saggy-breasted black-skinned African "Ma" clutching Coca Cola in one hand, and an iPod in the other.
It's a globalised world after all…

Images from Stockholm [5]

2008-11-05T08:53:00.000-08:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from Stockholm [4]

2008-11-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Meet Adorna and Desiderus...

2008-11-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

I'd like to introduce you to two new friends, ADORNA and DESIDERUS... both of whom have just started blogging.

It's a crazy blogworld out there, millions of blogs, as ANON, that most famous of writers puts it, "NEVER BEFORE IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE BEEN TALKING TO SO FEW."

Show them some love ok, every new blogger needs all the support and encouragement they can get.

Especially when these two bloggers promise to offer you more excitement than you might be able to handle... (keep your blood pressure gauges nearby is what that means I guess...

Show some love...

Uppsala Notes: Finland, Nokia & Other Stories

2008-11-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

POSTCARD FROM FINLAND
Expanded version published in the Guardian Life magazine (Sunday, November 2, 2008)

I arrived Helsinki’s Vantaa airport at 3pm on Friday, 24th October eager to see how the country would differentiate itself from its Scandinavian neighbours.
*
Nokia. Sauna. Guns. Ice hockey. Crayfish. Vodka. Reindeer meat.
What do the above all share in common?
Finland.
I think it’s fair to say that there is no mobilephone-owning Nigerian who does not currently own – or has not at one time or the other owned – a Nokia phone. It’s always seemed that there are two kinds of mobile phones: Nokia, and The Rest. Many are the jokes about the durability of the Nokia phone, so that if you see any Nigerian who’s owned the same phone for a few years, it’s more likely than not to be a Nokia. (It doesn’t seem to occur to Nokia that manufacturing phones that last for eternity is a bad way to do business. How will people buy new phones if the old ones don’t go kaput?)
*
The Finns are mighty proud of their Nokia. You can’t blame them. If you’re a country of five million people (a third of Lagos State), yet own such a global brand like Nokia (it is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones, and a major pillar of the Finnish economy; in Business Week’s 2008 ranking of the ‘Best Global Brands’, it is Number 5), you are entitled to be super-proud, arrogant even.
Think how nice it’d be if Nigeria had even one “Nokia” of its own. I keep arguing that while it’s good to have super-banks, and Super Eagles, Nigeria will not become a great economic power (i.e. Vision 2020) without becoming a visible player on the global technological field. The road to Vision 2020 is not paved with good intentions, and it is certainly not paved with Chinese generators and Korean automobiles.
*
‘Nokia’ is originally the name of a town in Western Finland, and the original Nokia Company was a wood-pulp mill established in 1865, which later merged a rubber factory. (Today there are still Wellington boots in Finland known as “Nokia boots.”)
*
I have been taking lessons in Finnish history since I arrived. It's all so colourful and varied that I want to learn more, and write about it. Finland appears to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – one is Russia, the other is Sweden (Don't ask me which is which, I don't know), and both once fought a bloody battle over Finland.
*
Brief History Lesson: Finland used to be a part of Sweden. The Russians eyed it, and wanted it. Russia and Sweden fought over it (1808 – 1809). Russia won, and Finland became Russian territory. (Apparently the Finns got greater autonomy under Russia than under 'brotherly' Sweden). The Russian Revolution (1917) freed Finland to emerge as a nation on its own.
*
In the past I have had cause to complain about Language. And Food. And Food. And Currency Confusions.
Now, let me add something else to the Gripe List.
Time.
At 4a.m. on Sunday the 26th of October the Finns altered Time. One hour backwards.
My brilliant conclusion was this: "This time machine business is beginning to get annoying." Arriving Finland from Sweden on Friday, time changed (Sweden is one hour behind Finland). I left Stockholm at 1pm, on a one-hour flight and landed in Helsinki at 3pm local time, losing one hour for flying a mere one hour.
Now just as I was settling down here I was being told we had to reverse the earlier decision. As though some Cosmic Powers could not make up their minds on what they wanted the Time to be.
I was going to insist on not changing any Time. At a point I was trapped between three different Time 'Zones'. My laptop bore my Nigerian Time. My phone bore Swedish Time. And my hotel room clock bore Finnish Time.
*
My conclusion: The Portrait of Time as an unsettling Trinity.

Images from the Uppsala International Guitar Festival [16-19 October 2008]

2008-10-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

Website here
[I didn't really attend the Festival, only found time to pop in on a Saturday morning to take a few photos...]

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from The Helsinki Book Fair 2008

2008-10-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Notes from Uppsala [6] - Question 18

2008-10-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

As published in the Guardian Life magazine (Sunday, October 26, 2008)

Last week I stood before a class of Swedish High School Students (Rosendalsschool) to sing the Nigerian National Anthem. I was invited to come and speak about my writing, and about life in Nigeria to 2 classes (“juniors” and “seniors”) of about 60 students each. Which, if you ask me is the most difficult task in the whole world. Imagine trying to “explain” Nigeria – a country of more than two hundred ethnic groups, as many as five hundred languages / dialects and one hundred and forty million people – in about ONE hour. (Even my dear Lagos alone holds more people than the entire Sweden!)
*
But I had all the fun in the world. Pictures, they say, speak louder than words. So I showed some pictures I took months back in Lagos, just to give an idea of the city. But I was also eager to point out that it would be impossible to know a city only by seeing photos. If it were that easy, then there would be no need for anyone to travel.
*
True, images are very helpful. I have never been to America, but I am no stranger to America. In the images that Hollywood exports, in the music videos, in the American brands (fashion, magazines, fast food, automobiles, computer technology) that colonise business districts everywhere from Stockholm to Lagos Island, in the Presidential Debates that have found massive audiences around the world. I have come to know the Statue of Liberty, I have met Joe the Plumber and Joe Six Pack and Joe Biden; I know that the American Dream is simply a Star-Spangled version of The Universal Dream.
But I know that all of these second-hand images will pale into insignificance the day I step foot on the soil of God’s Own Country, and (as I put it in an essay for Farafina Magazine) “high-five the Statue of Liberty’s upraised torch-bearing arm.”
*
Which is the same with Nigeria. You may see images of RPG-wielding Niger delta militants on CNN, turn to the BBC to see an unflattering profile of Lagos’ iconic danfos, and then gorge on Wikipedia statistics that tell you how many Nigerians live below the poverty line or what Nigeria’s foreign reserves are; you may open the Financial Times to see a full-page advert by one of Nigeria’s Super Banks, or your email to see another “PLEASE HELP ME TO GET THIS FUND INTO YOUR ACCOUNT” message from “Ibrahim Sani Yakubu Obasanjo”; you may run into a band of Lagos-bound Nigerian woman at an airport in Nairobbery or Dubai, laden with mountains of duty-free shopping bags that MUST all find space in the overhead compartment of a perplexed plane; all of that notwithstanding, the real truth is this: Nothing, absolutely nothing, matches the experience of landing in person at Murtala Mohammed International Airport (or wherever else you come in through) and seeing Nigeria for yourself: breathing in the air, sweating the sweat, disintegrating slowly in the traffic jams, getting swept up in the gaily-dressed Saturday owambe crowd, getting lost in the crowded corridors of The Palms or the crowded (aboveground-)catacombs of Oyingbo or Ogbeogonogo or Kuto markets…
*
The senior class of Rosendals will be visiting Malawi later this year. Alas there is little that I told – or showed – them about Nigeria that will prepare them for Malawi. It will take far more than the ‘Africa’ they share in their names for Southern Africa and West Africa (or East and West) to become similar. The difference, as my childhood friend Fido Dido would say, is clear.
*
Right here in front of me as I write this is a book titled “Meanwhile, Back in Zambia”, a travelogue produced by the Swedish communications consultancy Global Reporting, after a visit by their staff to Zambia in 2006. One of the sections is a Frequently Asked Questions page, where they list the questions team members most regularly raised during the trip. They are all quite funny. Question 8: Can you eat the salad at restaurants?
This makes me laugh because it is something I can identify with; many are the Nigerians who have been forced to spend entire Sundays crouched on their toilet bowls after trying salad at an owambe the day before.
*
But the question that interested me the most was Question Number 18: Why do Zambians drive so slowly? It is a question I have had to ask myself before, not about Zambians though, but about Ugandans. I spent a few days in Kampala in 2005 and was shocked by how reluctant they were to use their car horns. Same with the Ghanaians. To one from a country where not even motorcycles are hesitant about borrowing truck (Mercedes Benz 911) horns, the Ugandans and Ghanaians seemed like a people trapped in a time warp (with the power switch turned to OFF).
The answer to Question 18 in “Meanwhile, Back in Zambia” is: "Neither the cars nor the drivers are in a condition to go any faster."
Hilarious stuff. But wrong.
They should come to Nigeria and see rattling, doorless danfos travelling on the 3rd Mainland Bridge at speeds that would make Formula 1 races look like slow motion.
Moral of the Story: It is not about the condition of the car or the driver. It is about the power of the human spirit.
*
Back to the Anthem. I remembered the words of the Nigerian National Anthem. I was so proud of myself. I even got a sitting ovation afterwards. And got so excited that I almost found myself doing a special rendition of “Nigeria We Hail Thee”. I stopped myself just in time…

Sailing...

2008-10-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

At the moment I'm sailing back to Sweden (Stockholm) from Helsinki... on the Silja Line which runs a daily service between the two cities. We left Helsinki at 5pm (Finnish time).
I forgot - or refused - to get sea-sickness medicine (I was advised to), so here's hoping I won't succumb...
No, I won't.
I've got a cute little cabin (with toilet and bath) with a great view of a - wait for this - Life Boat.
Ain't I lucky? Just outside my window is one of the ship's boats. I feel safe...
It's a 17 hour ride on the stretch of sea that separates Sweden from Finland, arrival time is 9am Swedish Time tomorrow...

See you on the other side of the sea...

My Interview (and poem) in the UNT (Upsala Nya Tidning)

2008-10-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

My interview (along with a poem in Swedish translation) appears in the Saturday, October 25, 2008 edition of Uppsala's daily paper, the UNT. It's online, here

It's in Swedish, so don't beat yourself over the head if you can't read it. I can't myself :-)))
(Google does a horrible English translation, but I'll spare you that.

PS. This is however an incentive for you, dear non-Swedish speaking reader, to finally learn that Swedish you've been putting off for ages...

UNT homepage, here

Postcard from Helsinki [3] - Common Sense, Time and Other Stories

2008-10-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

I'm blogging because I have decided to stop being foolish and start using my brain a little bit more. Therefore (i.e. in line with this new spirit), this afternoon I went shopping for a wireless USB adaptor for my wireless-less laptop. I got it, not very expensive too (at about 12 Euros), and it's working fine. Means I can browse from the hotel lobby (which is where the wireless connection is).
I wonder why it never occured to me before now to do it that way. In Copenhagen two weeks ago I was forced to use the hotel lobby computer (a Mac, which I had never used in my life, and which was so unfamiliar I felt like I was handling the controls of a spaceship) - yet there was wireless in the reception, and I had my laptop with me. But no wireless adaptor.
God knows what else I need to get to make my life easier (a credit card, an iPod, a private jet...)
*
Early tomorrow morning (Sun) the Finns are going to alter their Time. One hour backwards. All clocks must abide by this. This time machine business is getting annoying. Arriving Finland from Sweden on Friday, time changed (one hour forward). I left Stockholm at 1pm, on a one-hour flight (during which the hostess skipped me whilst serving refreshments simply because I had taken a quick nap! Why couldn't she wake me???), and landed in Helsinki at 3pm. Now I am being told that we will go back an hour again.
My solution - I'm not changing any Time. When their minds are made up about what they want the time to be they can let me know! My laptop still bears my Nigerian Time. My phone bears Swedish Time. My hotel room clock bears Finnish Time.

Time as an unsettling Trinity.

Tomorrow, Finnish Time will become Swedish Time.
Very soon, Swedish Time will also go under the knife. What it will emerge as I know not. Not yet.
*
Miracles still happen. My phone network, which refused to be useful to me in Copenhagen and Oslo ("emergency calls only"), has come alive in Helsinki. One moment I was cut off in a strange city, without internet access and a working mobile, the next moment I emerged (seamlessly) in the 'flat' world, a world where my passport does not matter, neither does my accent :-)
I am in touch. Again.
That includes Facebook! Damn it!

Postcard from Helsinki [2] - Helsinki Book Fair

2008-10-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

This morning at 10.30 I was interviewed by Finnish editor and translator, Marianne Bargum, as part of the Helsinki Book Fair. The interview took place in 'Kirjakahvila' (The Book Cafe) within the Book Fair grounds.
*
I have been taking lessons in Finnish history since I arrived. It's all so colourful and varied that I want to learn more, and write about it. Finland appears to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea - one is Russia, the other is Sweden :-) (Don't ask me which is which, I don't know), and both once fought a bloody battle over Finland.
Brief Summary: Finland used to be a part of Sweden. The Russians eyed it, and wanted it. Russia and Sweden fought over it. Russia won, and Finland became Russian territory, sometime in the early 1800s (apparently the Finns had greater autonomy under Russia than under 'brotherly' Sweden). The Russian revolution in 1917 freed Finland to emerge as a nation on its own.
(More details later)
*
The Helsinki Book Fair is smaller than Goteborg's, but is nonetheless an impressive event. As at yesterday (Fri) 17,000 people had attended, and it only started on Thursday.
Unlike the sprawling Goteborg Book Fair (the largest in Scandinavia), where I kept getting lost (my not very healthy sense of direction finally gave up the ghost, thanks to the cavernous exhibition grounds on at least 2 floors), and where there were a mindboggling number of concurrent events at any point in time, the Helsinki Book Fair seemed more manageable (speaking from the POV of a visitor). But from the book hunger evident in the visitors, no difference. People everywhere, reading, listening, stacking books up in their arms, paying for books, eating (plenty of that). You can't imagine how much I wish the Lagos International Book Fair would be that exciting.
(Note: The Population of Lagos (the City) alone would be roughly equal to that of Sweden PLUS Finland).
*
Heard there was an appearance by another Nigerian writer at the Fair yesterday.
*
The largest book store (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa) in the Nordic Region is in Helsinki. It was the first place I visited after my Hotel. I bought a collection of short stories by a well-known Finnish writer and visual artist, Rosa Liksom. Here's some info I got from WSOY's (Finnish publisher) website:

Rosa Liksom ranks among the most acclaimed and controversial writers of contemporary Finnish literature. Employing a pen name and shunning interviews, she launched her career in the mid-1980s by penning numerous collections of prose miniatures. The writing in such collections as Yhden yön pysäkki (1985;One-night Stands, 1990) and Unohdettu vartti (1986; The forgotten sentry) consists of only one or two short narratives; they resemble short stories from which either the beginning or end, and sometimes both - in other words, the unessential - has been cut.

I'm eager to read the book...
Better still, I'm OFF to read the book...

Postcard from Helsinki [1]

2008-10-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

I arrived Finland’s airport at 3pm [Friday, 24th Oct] eager to see how the country would differentiate itself from its Scandinavian neighbours. As the plane landed what struck me first was that I seemed to be the only black person on the plane. Which is unusual, anytime I made such assumptions in the past I always found them short-lived.
These thoughts occupied my mind as I walked to the arrival lounge, dragging my bag along. All of a sudden I found myself sandwiched between two white men. In that instant I realised they were immigration officers. They guided me into their nearby office, where a big black bored dog lay on the floor.
Do you speak Finnish?
No. English.
One of them asked for my passport. I heard him say the word “Nigeria” aloud, as he walked into an inner office.
They wanted to know where I was coming from, what I was doing there.
I told them.
They wanted evidence that I was at the Nordic Africa Institute.
I gave them my collection of poems, and a sheet of paper with biographical information.
He smiled. “Poems?”
Yes.
He gave them back to me and bade me goodbye.

Images from Oslo [1]

2008-10-23T04:27:00.001-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Notes from Uppsala [5] - Money Changers Inc.

2008-10-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

As published in the Guardian Life magazine (Sunday, October 19, 2008)

Interesting, isn’t it, how the Nigerian brain/soul/mind turns into one giant currency converter the moment it steps past the Murtala Mohammed International Airport or Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport or Aminu Kano Airport or even Seme Border. Last year I visited Ghana for the first time, and travelled by road, which meant that in one journey I ‘conquered’ at least three countries at once (and of course got my passport disfigured with endless stamping). At one of those seemingly endless border points where you have to leave the bus and cross the barrier on foot there were the ubiquitous traders and hawkers of everything from underwear to currency notes. What preoccupied my mind of course was

1. Finding out the current conversion rate between CFA Francs and Naira
2. Utilising that conversion rate from that moment on to weigh every purchasing consideration.

*
It’s the annoying thing about crossing borders. The Europeans have by and large gone to great lengths to mitigate that annoying scenario, with the adoption of the Euro by the European Common Markets. Norway has however stubbornly refused to join the European Union, and of the trio of Sweden, Denmark and Finland that are members, only Finland has adopted the Euro. Meaning that Norway, Denmark and Sweden stubbornly hold on to their Krone (plural: Kroner; NOK), Krone (plural Kroner; DKK) and Krona (plural: Kronor; SEK) respectively, and will not even accept one another’s currencies. Annoying stuff, if I must tell you.
*
Because of the ‘one-Scandinavia’ umbrella I unconsciously constructed for all these countries I travelled to Oslo (Norway) a few weeks ago without it occurring to me that I would have to change money in order to possess purchasing power in Norway. By the time I realised this I was already in Oslo, and it was night. I had to wait until morning to change money, and even then it was at a rip-off rate (Rule 1: Always endeavour to change money before you get to your destination country. Appendix 1: This Rule has yet to be verified, so it remains an opinion for now).
*
After my brief sojourn in Oslo, I returned to Uppsala, with a handful of Norwegian coins – useless in Sweden. No complaints. Then, last week the wind blew me to Copenhagen, Denmark. Once bitten, twice shy, they say. So before leaving Uppsala I had changed Swedish Kronor to Danish Kroner.
Note: I returned from Denmark with Kroner in cash and in coins. (I can change the cash back to SEK, but not the coins)
*
So, here I am, back again in Uppsala. In my possession I have Norwegian coins, Danish coins and notes, and Swedish coins and notes (which of course form the useful currency to me at the moment). And then I have the Euro in coins and notes – product of a money-changing deed at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, on the day that I arrived in Europe (that seems an eternity ago, but it’s only been six weeks). I changed American dollars (which was the only foreign currency I left Nigeria with) into Euros, in order to be able to grab a meal at Schiphol and check my email at the airport café. I didn’t use up all the Euro.
So, in my possession: Kroner, Kroner, Euro, Kronor. And then of course the “Greenback”, also known and addressed as the United States Dollar (if you’ve never heard of the dollar then it means you haven’t listened to Osuofia’s hit song “I go chop your dollar”)
*
And last but certainly not the least – the Almighty Naira. In the spirit of nationalism and patriotism no Nigerian must allow himself of herself to be found anywhere in the world without the Naira. Never. It is our second passport. So that when they ask you – “In Nigeria, do you have lions?” or “Do you still live on trees?” you can laugh at them (the way God laughs at his enemies in Psalm 2 vs. 4) and say “Look at you ignoramus! In Nigeria we even spend REAL money!”
And then you whip out the naira notes and launch into a history lesson, using as a starting point the historical figures on the naira (Awo, Murtala, Zik, Aliyu Mai-Bornu, Clement Isong, Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, Alvan Ikoku). Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Babangida also on one of the naira notes, or have I been away from Nigeria that long?
And then you can move into an economics lesson from there, explaining to your audience/interrogators that unlike the Zimbabwean currency which as at July 2008 had a hundred billion dollar denomination (yes, a ZWD 100,000,000,000 note) – which on the day of release could only purchase 3 eggs i.e. one egg cost 35 billion ZWD – the Naira is a well-fed currency, with the highest denomination being only 1,000 Naira.
*
Back to the main point. At the moment I am a walking bureau de change. Before the end of October I’m due to visit Helsinki (Finland). That would have made currency number what? Thankfully they spend the Euro in Finland. But between now and then I have to sort out all my Kronor and Kroner(s). Everything is mixed up in my pockets and in my coin-calabashes. It is not a task I look forward to in any way. Every coin, every note has to be held up against a decent source of light to check if it is a “Nor” or a “Ner”.
I’m sure it was because of dabbling into things like this that Jesus Christ whipped the money-changers out of the Temple…

PS. I didn’t even talk about the tortuous mental process of having to constantly convert NOK, SEK and DKK into Naira, every time I come across a price tag
I call it W.W.N.D – What Would Naira Do!

(c) 2008 Tolu Ogunlesi

New Book (& Book Reading) - TO SAINT PATRICK by Eghosa Imasuen

2008-10-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

Kachifo Limited, publishers of the Farafina Imprint, would like to invite you to a book reading and book signing session.

Eghosa Imasuen, author of To Saint Patrick will be reading at Bambuddha Restaurant/Lounge bar, 21 Karimu Kotun Street, Victoria Island, Lagos at 4pm on Saturday, October 18, 2008.

To Saint Patrick and other Farafina publications will be available at the venue. The first five people to arrive the venue will get free copies of the book!

INTRODUCTION
Kachifo Limited, publishers of Farafina Books, Farafina Educational and Farafina Magazine, is proud to announce the release of their latest fictional novel: To Saint Patrick. The novel is a gripping and courageous debut from Eghosa Imasuen, one of the next generation of great Nigerian writers.

SYNOPSIS
It's the year 2003 in an 'alternate Nigeria,' a prominent member of the NPN political party, veteran journalist Chief Johnson, has just been murdered. Two small time crooks are found with a bag full of his bloody clothes. They will take the fall to assuage the public, although some evidence suggests they may just be innocent... Is it politics as usual?

To Saint Patrick rewrites Nigerian political history, presenting the reader with a series of 'what ifs': what if Major-General Murtala Mohammed had survived the 1976 attempt on his life, and had run for a 2nd term?; What if Babangida was simply on the sidelines—an honourable gentleman?; What if our democracy was healthy?

A beautifully written tale of adventure, sci-fi, intrigue, and a dash of love, To Saint Patrick is a must read.

REVIEWS
"To Saint Patrick is a novel that – on the strength of the originality of its premise alone, not to mention the beauty of the telling – has created a new class of Nigerian literature to which will belong all books bold enough to attempt to imaginatively stoke the controversial fire that is Nigerian history."

- Tolu Ogunlesi, Author, Listen to the Geckos Singing from a Balcony

To Saint Patrick is available in major bookstores, and from Farafina at 25 Boyle St, Onikan, or www.kachifo.com. Its recommended retail price is N1000

Images from Uppsala [1] - Rosendalsschool Grounds in October

2008-10-16T01:15:00.001-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

The Writing Life - From the Archives

2008-10-15T13:29:00.001-07:00

I am in Uppsala.
Thousands of miles away from Asaba, Nigeria, where what you are about to read was written.
And thousands of hours away from the time when it was written.

I was a participant in the British Council Literary Mentoring Project, Crossing Borders. My mentor was the British playwright, poet, short story writer, reviewer, broadcaster, theatre historian and musician Michelene Wandor, and my task was to submit six writing assignments (short fiction) over the course of nine months. Michelene encouraged me to document the writing process surrounding each of my assignments. This "commentary" was written to accompany Assignment 4.

I
Friday November 4 2005. 10:15pm

I’m in my room in the pharmacists’ lodge of the Okwe Government Hospital, Asaba, Delta State. I am trying to type out the portion of my Assignment 4 story that I wrote earlier today (around midday) while at work in the pharmacy, but my laptop is very very disagreeable tonight. It has crashed twice. My room is in a mess – the kind of mess I think only I am able to pull off.

On my bed are the following:
An undressed pillow
A torchlight
A black comb
A wristwatch angled like a like a bird – the straps are like the wings
A white towel
A roll of toilet paper
A jotting pad
A new tube of Close-up toothpaste
A Compaq laptop
A sleeveless top
A copy of Wasafiri
A black Bible
A digital camera
Four packs of Indomie noodles
A pile of clothes jumbled together
My elbow
Some plastic bags

Unable to find space on the bed are two identical purple buckets, a pair of black leather sandals, a pair of new rubber slippers (bathroom slippers), a pair of cloth boots, an unzipped traveling box filled with my clothes. I can see three books: I WAS WRONG by Jim Bakker, disgraced televangelist; THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR by Alice Walker, and IMMEDIATE FICTION – A Complete Writing Course by Jerry Cleaver.

What happened to Bakker in the late eighties is like the stuff of fiction. Here was a man who had dined with Ronald Reagan, George Bush Snr, had been aboard Air Force 1 with Jimmy Carter, and headed a multi-million dollar Christian Empire (Television Network, Holiday Resort etc); only to slip into adultery, and then be charged and jailed for financial fraud. His empire was stripped from him, and eventually collapsed, and his wife divorced him. The Temple he once owned and lorded over rapidly became “The Temple of My Unfamiliar”. His amazing accomplishments rapidly became Immediate Fiction – memories that teamed up with prison guards and tabloids to torment him.
But I’m aware that Bakker’s story can only be the stuff of autobiography. It seems too dramatic for fiction. I am apprehensive about this story I am writing. I need to pull it off – 3,000 words of it, and hope I do not end up in a dead end. I don’t want to have to say I WAS WRONG.

II
I have just finished this long overdue story. It is 6:05 pm, Saturday, November 5, 2005. I am sitting on my bed, typing onto my laptop. The music of Enya, the Irish singer is playing on my Media Player. The ballad playing as I write this is one I first grew familiar with on CNN, used as some kind of theme song.
Enya does all the voices on her tracks, no matter how many they are. She lays them on one after the other in a studio, so all those voices you hear are actually the same person. Isn’t that how writers too work? In the studios of their imaginations, laying voice upon voice, emotion upon emotion, building nuance upon nuance, blending character, and hoping to God everything comes out as one unified whole, with no rough edges, no off keys.
Writing is a lonely business, like a lot of Enya’s ballads. They seem to tug at the darkest emotions in you. Writing sometimes brings out the demons in you, and forces you to watch them taunt you on a (blank) page.

Images from Göteborg [2] - More than just a Book Fair

2008-10-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Notes from Uppsala [4]

2008-10-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Published in the Guardian Life magazine (Lagos), Sunday, Oct 05, 2008

TRAINS, HOTELS AND OTHER STORIES

A while ago on my Facebook page I put up a ‘status’ that read something like this: Tolu spent most of last week on trains and in hotel rooms. So what does that make him?
*
I guess that is one of the fringe benefits of being that thing they call a ‘writer’ –whatever it means in practical terms. The chance, occasionally, to sleep in train stations/carriages and airport lounges and strange hotel beds in stranger parts of the world. And usually the good part of this is that you don’t get to know how much those things cost, since you’re not the one paying.
*
For a few years now I’ve had this hobby: photographing hotel bedrooms and ‘conveniences’. It started at The Ambassadors’, a guesthouse in Ikoyi, Lagos, somewhere off Awolowo Road. It must have been my first hotel experience as a writer, and it came courtesy of the British Council. It was 2005, the Crossing Borders literary mentoring project had just kicked off its new phase, and we (participants) had gathered from across the country for the induction ceremony.
It also turned out to be my induction into the hotel room business. Learning unwritten rules and codes that make for a regret-free hotel stay. It’s where I learned that sometimes (depending on who you are) it could be suicidal to take a drink out of a hotel refrigerator, for the simple reason that the economics of hotel goods is not the same as that of supermarket, or streetside-kiosk goods.
Later that year I was in Kampala for a writing conference, also courtesy of the British Council. We stayed at the Sheraton. I returned with a poem, to which the lines below – which reveal a nagging anxiety – belong:

My biggest concerns were how not
To rake up thousands of shillings in needless bills.
Television-internet and dollar-denominated laundry.

“Hello, is that Reception? Kindly help
Me check my account. I fiddled
With the internet buttons on my remote control
And I'm not so sure anymore...”

*
A few weeks ago I was in Oslo, Norway, for a magazine launch. I went by train. All of seven hours in carriages or at train stations changing connections. The journey back was just as long, and a bit more psychologically tasking, perhaps because the novelty had sunk to an all-time low, and because I realised I was due for another round of train-travel the next day. As I sat in the Oslo – Hallsberg train I began to notice something. First it was a girl with a cat. She sat somewhere behind me, but I could glance at her (as often as I wanted) and see her cradling it. Moments later another girl came in, this time with a dog. A big brown dog. She promptly laid out a cloth on the seat next to her and the dog flopped onto it. Moments later, a third girl came in – with a dog, a visibly pampered, frail-looking white one. So there I was surrounded by two dogs and a cat. And then my eyes moved up to the panel at the top of the entrance into the carriage, and I saw the sign: the carriage was meant for animal owners. There had been no one to point that out to me when I was boarding.
*
The moment I discovered I could easily have moved to another carriage. But I thought, what-the-hell, sharing a cabin with a couple of admittedly clean and polite, well-behaved animals on a four-hour journey could not be that bad. So I stayed put. My only concern was this: there were a couple of other people in the carriage, but as far as my naked eyes could tell, they were not accompanied by any animals. I wondered why. Either they were JJCs like me who sat in blissful oblivion, (which was doubtful, they looked like regular travellers) or they were carrying the kind of animals that you can easily hide in a bag – like, uhm, pythons.
*
Life is about learning all those little conventions that make all journeys smoother. That there are animal cabins and non-animal cabins, smoking cabins and lounges and non-smoking ones. That two shops, side-by-side, could get away with selling the same goods at alarmingly different prices. That knowledge is key.
Without a doubt one of the most fascinating experiences for me has been learning about the sometimes-complicated mechanisms by which different hotel bathroom showers and toilets work. Which ones are pull, which ones are push, which ones twist, and which ones activate automatically once they sense a presence beneath them. And this goes for toilet flushing systems as well.
And of course, the room entry systems. Cards vs. old-fashioned keys. With the cards of course the moment you step out the door locks behind you. With the keys you might have to do the locking yourself. If you think keys are out you’re wrong. Try the charming City Hotel (with rooms that are petite in a cosy way, and have got wallpaper in them) in Göteborg. A trial will surely convince you.

(c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

God Bless America, and Nigerian Peacekeepers...

2008-10-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

Scene: McDonald's
City: Uppsala
Time: Lunch (sometime between 4 and 5 I think)

Act 1:
I'm sitting with my colleague from the institute, tucking into my (by-now cliched) standard fare of half-a-doz chicken wings and fries and coke (and burgers that never taste like back home). The place is filled with giggling high-schoolers (so many young people in Uppsala!) - there's two sitting opposite us. And then a guy joins them, more like takes the seat near them, he's older-looking - and I hear him speak what sounds like English, which is rare 'cos everyone speaks Swedish (EVERYONE). From the looks of it I can't tell if he knows the girls or not. They exchange words, the girls keep giggling...

And then I ask him if he's Swedish.

No, he's not. He's American.

Guessed as much. He's got an American kinda confidence, teasing the girls endlessly and making faces.

Where are you from, he asks me.

Nigeria

Oh, Nigeria! Why did you guys lose the Nation’s Cup? I know, Nigeria likes saying: We want to allow other people to share in the glory? But hey, you’ve allowed Egypt to share in the glory like SIX times!

I laugh. Funny guy. He's new in Uppsala, 2 months old, only slighly older than me. He's - wait for this - doing 2 masters simultaneously at Uppsala Uni. He sighs, laments about how tough it is. Before Sweden he was in Liberia, working with the UN. (The 2 masters programmes he's here to do are in those fields that qualify you to work in Africa, y'know what I mean - aid, development bla bla.)

Shame on me. He's busy saving my continent while I sit in Uppsala trying to write the Great Nigerian Novel (FYI tentatively titled "A Moving Portrait of Obasanjo-era Nigeria")

I spend the rest of the time watching him and the girls (by now there are four girls) tease themselves.

The girls speak English (all young people in Swedish, and most old ones can speak English, only that they won't). One of them mentions that another sings (like) Oprah, I'm not quite sure if she meant "opera" or "Oprah", I think it's "Oprah".
The American says his girlfriend's also a singer, her name's Shakira. Yeah right, laughs one of the girls. Very American stuff.

Apparently one of the girls is of Spanish origin. He asks if she speaks Spanish. He says his high school GF was Spanish. It's difficult to know if he's teasing or not.
Another of the girls is of Turkish origin. He asks if she can count to 10 in Turkish. She starts, he stops her, saying she got '1' wrong. Then he recites, breathlessly, 1 - 10 in Turkish (I hope).

I confirm it is when immediately the Turkish girl also recites something that's identical with what he's just recited.

He says he worked for 2 years (or so) in Asia.

I just love Americans. They're so easy to categorise using a single 'line' - binary delineation (ie they can be divided cleanly into TWO according to so MANY criteria!):

1. Those who either have never held an American passport or only just got one in their forties or eighties (e.g fill-in-the-gap) or those for whom the world is their country, saving orphans in Rwanda tonight, and Tsunami victims in Laos tomorrow morning, and catching a front-seat at the NBA finals by evening. Restless, Conquering, Messianic, jolly...
2. Republicans OR Democrats...
3. Apples OR Microsofts...
4. Small-towners OR Washingtonians...
5. Joe Six Packs Married to Hockey Moms OR [need to ask Sarah Palin about this]
6. Drill, drill, drillers OR Drill, Baby, Drillers
7. For Obamans OR Anti Obamans

God Bless America men!

Last thing Mr. America tells me, as I stand up to leave:

"Did you know that in Liberia Nigerians are treated as God?"

Yeah, I say, ECOMOG...

And did you know that there is a village (in Liberia) full of half-Liberian half-Nigerian children…

Yeah, I laugh...

***
It's funny, really. Next to Americans, I love Nigerian Soldiers the most.
They went to Liberia as Deliverers and came back as Daddies!

Copenhagen...

2008-10-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Copenhagen, Denmark on Tuesday for a series of events:

1. A programme at Roskilde University. I will be discussing my writing, with particular emphasis on my story ‘To A Cartoonist’ [which deals with the Danish Cartoon crisis of 2006], written at the 2006 Caine Prize workshop in Kenya, and published in the Caine Anthology OBITUARY TANGO

There will also be discussions on contemporary Nigerian writing, as well as on Nollywood (we'll be watching and discussing a few Nollywood 'blockbusters')

2. The Nordic Africa Days Conference at the University of Copenhagen, theme of which is "Africa on the Move". I will be presenting a paper on The Language Question in African Literature: English versus Indigenous African Languages as part of the 'City Culture, New Culture, but whose Culture?' workshop.

PostScript:
Reviews of Obituary Tango can be found here and here (in Afrikaans)

Images from Stockholm [3]

2008-10-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

The Writing Life - Bathrooms, Boredom & The Business of Perception

2008-10-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

It's a strange world.
Someone once said that we see the world not as it is, but as we are. Which is why there are more ways of seeing the world than there are people in the world (if you take into consideration the fact that we do not even remain "as we are" for long, this moment's "as we are" is not the same as the next's.)

There's another saying on the theme of "seeing" that has stuck to me ever since I first heard it:

You must not only be working; you must BE SEEN to be working (emphasis mine)

I posted a new album on facebook yesterday, titled SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE FACEBOOKER IN A SWEDISH BATHROOM. It consists of a series of photos I took of myself in my hotel room on the morning after the single night I spent in Göteborg at the Book Fair, using the bathroom mirror to make possible the self-portaiture. (My photo on this blog is a product of another session of self-portraiture, this time taken in my hotel room - my home for the 3 months - in Uppsala, not long after my arrival).

In the hours since I posted that album on facebook comments have been rolling in - which in the first place is the whole point of putting pictures on facebook. What is interesting is that all the comments have the same verdict of BOREDOM, and go ahead to sympathise with me, and kindly invite me to abandon my boredom and find my way back to Lagos. I should assume that they are all tongue-in-cheek, but for the purposes of this post :-) I have chosen not to make that assumption.

It's interesting, the human mechanism of perception. I think back to last night's US Vice-Presidential debate (the friggin' event was 3a.m. Swedish Time) (digression - someone said it was a debate for the most powerful office in America, the office of Dick Cheney), and the fact that the whole 'encounter' was constructed to operate almost solely on perception. Which is what politics is all about. It is not who I am, not even who you think I am, it is who I make you think I am, by conscious, unconscious and subconscious acts of commission & omission, delusion & deletion, elocution & evasion.

One and half hours of making you think this is what I am, and making you think this is what my oppponent is.

In a certain sense the BIG point re my Self-Portraiture is not whether I was bored or not. What does it matter? And who's to say boredom is necessarily a bad thing. An IDLE mind, not a BORED one, is the DEVIL'S WORKSHOP :-)))

The BIG(GER) point is that the act (my act) of standing in front of a mirror - which billions of people around the world do everyday - has somehow found itself (yes, the state of helplessness must be emphasized) translated, by onlookers (whose onlooking I sought in the first place, and for which I am grateful) into a 'sensing' of painful state of boredom from which I ought to be redeemed.

And this BIG(GER) point opens the door for a question, thrown out to an 'imaginary' audience - which is greater: the Boredom (1) that pushed me to take a self-portrait, or the Boredom (2) that permitted me to post the photos on Facebook (which by the way must have been envisioned by its founders as an online self-help group for persons suffering from Chronic Boredom)

We might even go ahead and throw everything open (and start from the Beginning) by asking: WHAT EXACTLY IS BOREDOM? Is it the same as IDLENESS?
I doubt.

IDLENESS is merely a state. An atmosphere. Passive. It doesn't necessarily make any demands on its object. It can exist alongside its object, placid, not altering anything. Even TVs and Computers can be IDLE.

BOREDOM on the other hand is a Burden (Burdome?), an active state, requiring a living, feeling, thinking object it can FEED on. It makes demands, it is selfish, cruel even. It asks politically and temperamentally incorrect questions, it is palpable in a way that is more than merely psychic, in a way perhaps comparable to the feeling one will experience in a rapidly-depressurising cabin (never been in one so I can only guess).

Three Points. No, Four

One. You can be idle and satisfied. You cannot be bored AND satisfied.

Two. Idleness rarely extends beyond itself to produce anything of lasting value. It is content with merely being bypassed, or avoided, or endured, or adapted to. Boredom on the other hand is a questioner, a demander, asking WHY and WHY NOT, refusing to sit still and at the same time refusing to move about. Refusing to be involved in any action that will attempt to flatten it into a stable pattern. Boredom will usually push its object out of its 'skin' and create a new object, as well as a completely new (third party) entity (this is where the inventive/entrepreneurial/creative powers of Boredom come in.

Three. Boredom, unlike idleness cannot be lost. It can only be converted from one form to another.

Four. All boredoms are equal, but certainly some must be more equal than others.

***

Back to where I started - the business of Perception
There is actually the possibility of things getting slightly more complicated:

I am not who I think I am.
I am not who you think I am.
I am who I think you think I am

And the Apostle Paul had the most interesting take of all on it: All things to all men.

The Writing Life - Naming Babies & Other Misc...

2008-10-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

A 2nd story draft finished day before yesterday - 5,000 words plus. Interesting how you sometimes start a story hoping to make the 2,000 word mark (ie promising yourself that if this makes 2000 I'll throw a party tonite), and then discovering at that what is meant to be the last bus stop that the distance is only half conquered.

It started out titled "BIRTHDAY BOY", inspired by Birthday Stories, a Haruki Murakami-edited (he made the selections and wrote an intro) anthology of Birthday-themed short stories that I leafed through at the English-fiction section of the Akademibokhandel here in Uppsala. (This is now becoming a ritual - chicken wings, a burger, fries and a coca cola at McDonald's, and then up the escalator to the expansive bookstore to wander around, leafing through books most of which are in Swedish...)

In Birthday Stories are stories by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, William Trevor and Haruki Murakami. Each of the stories in the book happens on a single day. You can read a review of it here

I was tempted to buy it, but no thanks, not yet - I've got a zillion unread books here with me in Sweden (got a wonderful gift of six novels from a friend in the UK this week), and double that back in Lagos and Abeokuta, so...

So then, I leafed through the book, and came back to the office to write my own birthday story. At the end of draft 1 it has suddenly occured to me that what I have in my hands is not really a birthday story... it happens on the narrator's birthday, but it's not about his birthday... which is fine by me, life is sometimes about being cheated, and if my stories cheat me, what-the-hell... I can always pay them all back, each in its own silver-plated coin, at a later date...

So the title has changed, for now it shall be known and addressed simply as "PATIENCE". (I've never been an expert at giving names to stories and poems, wondering if there's any course that would handle that part of the writing life in an MFA? - "Naming Your Babies")

I'm playing with a couple of other story ideas... still haven't reworked the draft of my earlier story, the 4,500 word "EX", but then why look back when you can look ahead :-)

Plus there's a handful of new stories abandoned at and in-between bus-stops (more often than not the 1,000 word mark), and I'm really thinking I should get back to him. Discipline, discipline.

For now there's a paper on Language and African Literature to be prepared for a conference at the University of Copenhagen next week - and there's a bit of reading to be done... in pharmacy school no one alerts you to the existence of concepts like negritude, Poco & Pomo (my current fave words), and all those interesting polemical essays on "African Literature" that appeared in the Transition Magazines et al in the 60s and 70s.

What this means for 'outsiders' (I like that term) like me is that we have to spend our lives catching up. Which in reality is not as bad as it sounds.

New Blogging Project

2008-10-01T03:37:00.000-07:00

Flax Books, the publishing imprint of Litfest has just commissioned Jenn Ashworth and myself to collaborate on a blogging project.

The big idea is to create a fictional blog - we'll be advancing a story over a couple of weeks - focusing on Doppelgängers (Googlegängers maybe :-) ), Identity & Identity Theft, e-Stalking and so on.

We're still in brainstorming stage, throwing ideas back and forth, a creative 'storm in a e-cup'... and you'll see the results of this when the story begins to unfold, and identities begin to go missing...

Like we'd say in H/Nollywood: Coming soon to a BLOG near you, Stay Tuned, Don't touch that Dial, Sit Back, and Enjoy, and of course - GRAB YOUR e-COPY NOW!

More details - the blog address, actors/actresses, as we decide on them.

Jenn's blog is here, and she's got an interactive blogged novel here

Press Statement (will appear in the Litfest festival brochure)

Flax is delighted to have commissioned writers Jenn Ashworth and Tolu Ogunlesi to collaborate on a fictional blog. Jenn, based in the north west of England, and Tolu, currently in Sweden, will create one character, who will take you through the quirks and obsessions of their life, introduce you to new virtual friends, and unravel a fascinating tale of identity theft. The story starts as the festival closes, on Monday 3 November.

Writers and Artists - Hanif Kureishi @ Göteborg Book Fair 2008

2008-09-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hanif Kureishi (CBE) was at the Göteborg Book Fair. His seminar (discussion), hosted by Kristofer Lundström (on Friday 26 Sept; 13.00 - 13.45) was themed SEX, IMMIGRATION and LAUNDRETTES.

Like many writers who have to regularly do book tours and speak to (large) audiences (who hang on somewhat desperately to every word, almost pleading to be made to laugh, or at least chuckle), he had a sardonic, self-deprecating sense of humor, couched in a somewhat detached tone, and he fired off quips and quotable quotes like an elderstatesman comedian (or poet-laureate) on RedBull.

Image (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

I very much enjoyed listening to him talk, and soon found myself feverishly copying his many excellent one-liners (which would of course sound more profound heard than read, as it always happens).
*Interestingly, my email signature, which I set up weeks ago, ends with a Kureishi quote (can't remember where I got it): "I have no education at all. If I've learnt anything, it's through other people."

L-R: Kureishi's Swedish Publisher, Kureishi, Cecilia Gärding (AfroSvenskarna); background, Kristofer Lundström
Image (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Here's what I was able to get down:

On his writing

"I write about my little patch of earth"

On being awarded the CBE by the Queen in the 2008 Honours List:

"The Queen loves me man! She loves me!"

Asked if the CBE Award surprised him:

"Surprised me? I've been waiting for it for ages!"

Asked why there was a lot of sex in one of his books:

"Sex is a good way to bring the characters in a book together... especially an orgy, with an orgy you can bring five, six disparate characters together..."

Still on the CBE (and this of course was meant only tongue-in-cheek!):

"The Queen only gives medals these days to blacks and Asians"

On the "For God and For Empire" inscription on the CBE Medal:

"I can't think of two finer clauses together."

His description of the writerly life:

"Indolence, perversion, uselessness and hanging around"

On Prizes:

"I'm grateful for any kind of prize at all..."

On being fascinated by the idea of people waking up in the morning to go to (a 9-5 style) work:

"...after all many people spend more time working than they do having sex..."

On psychoanalysis:

"... I've had therapy myself... it's been very helpful..."

On Writing:

"It takes probably ten years to learnt to become a writer, and during that time you need grants and support and encouragement..."

On Identity:

"My father wanted me to be a British kid. I grew up wanting to be British and Asian; on The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix - and then I met all these kids who wanted to be Muslim..."

And of course I did manage to get a pic with him :-)
(PS. No, I don't think I'm that tall, I suppose I'm simply standing on a higher step)

Photos from Göteborg [2] - Smokers' Paradise

2008-09-27T04:39:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Photos from Göteborg [1] - Feeding Frenzy

2008-09-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Göteborg - International Book Fair

2008-09-24T15:44:00.001-07:00

The Göteborg International Book Fair, the largest in Scandinavia, kick off tomorrow. It's past midnight, and I've got a train(s) to catch to Goteborg at 7 in the morning, and I have to sleep and ...

I arrived from Oslo less than an hour ago (around midnight Wednesday), but I just had to check my email and see what's been going on on the internet behind my back... 24 hours away feels like an eternity

PS. My head and notebook and camera feel like they want to burst under the weight of Oslo's Experience... I've convinced myself that one day I shall buy a home in that city...

My Göteborg Itinerary

READING & MINI-SEMINAR
From 13.30 - 13.50 on Thursday 25 Sept I will read from my poetry and have a discussion on POETRY with Mai Palmberg.

INTERNATIONAL SQUARE
On Friday 26 Sept, from 10.00 - 10.30 I will be speaking on the theme 'WE HAVE TO WRITE OUR OWN STORIES'. This will be as part of the Internationella Torgets (International Square) programme of the Book Fair

The Seminars programme is available here

About the Göteborg Book Fair
25–28 September 2008 are the dates for Göteborg Book Fair 2008, at the Swedish Exhibition Centre in Göteborg. With over 100,000 visitors this is the largest cultural event in the Nordic region.

Scandinavia and the world meet in Göteborg
The Göteborg Book Fair is the best place to get an overview of the literature from the Scandinavian countries. You will also meet many of the world's most prominent intellectuals who come here to discuss, debate and voice their opinions.

Latvia in focus
This year, Latvia will be the theme country. 24 authors, politicians, historians, translators and many more are taking part in the seminar programme. Take the opportunity to learn more about our Baltic neighbour! The spectacular Latvian stand offers an extensive programme. Latvian music, photography and art vill be at the forefront of events in the city of Göteborg.

-The esthetics of resistance during the Soviet era has evolved into the esthetics of freedom after the restoration of independence. Writers are no longer the spokesmen for their people, but rather individual voices, says Juris Kronbergs, poet, translator and project co-ordinator.

Seminar programme of international class
This year you will also have the opportunity to hear voices from Romania and India. Read more about all the participants in the seminar programme.

The seminar programme contains 442 seminars of which 60 will be held in other languages than the Scandinavian.

Welcome to meet Nobel Prize candidates, well known writers, new names and many other interesting participants at the 24th Göteborg Book Fair!

Book Fair website here

Oslo - X Mag launch...

2008-09-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Oslo [Norway] tomorrow, guest of the Norwegian magazine X. It recently translated my short story, LAWS, originally published in the New StoryTeller into Norwegian as "[an] example of foreign literature not (yet?) translated into Norwegian", and the issue will be launched tomorrow.

I will be reading from the English version of LAWS, and there will also be a panel discussion on the topic:

"Should there be more of literature from the South? How do we get to it, and what are the challenges?"

Fellow discussants are:
Ellen Lange - Theme editor of X
Ika Kaminka - Leader of the Norwegian Translator Association and coordinator of the Flerstemt project
Live Kure Buer - Translator

I shall be speaking on what it means to be a writer in Nigeria - language, publishing opportunities, translations, etc

Notes from Uppsala [3]

2008-09-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

As published in the Guardian Life magazine (Lagos), Sunday, Sept 21, 2008

ON LANGUAGE

I have come to the conclusion that Nigerians – our conquering business sense and general assertiveness (gra-gra) apart – are not really the adventurous people we like to believe we are. No, we cherish the comfort and safety of the familiar; the routine, and will protest when the status quo is upended. Ironically we live in a country where the truism ‘Change is the most constant thing in life’ is super-true. Everything is in a state of flux / uncertainty: electricity, water, fuel queues, life even. Our reaction therefore, in the midst of all these, is to instinctively build patterns and habits that help cushion the psychic impact of the wild swings: the unending cycle of Saturdays spent at owambes, Sunday mornings spent at church and Sunday afternoons spent at home; I-pass-my-neighbour generators that stay on all night even when NEPA has restored power because we know that they might seize it again, etc.
*
Surrounded by so much discomfort, against which we have to daily battle, the last thing we want to do when we leave the country is to have to face another set or series of drastic changes. And who doesn’t know that language is one of the most significant ‘upsetters’ of the settled waters of existence. It is therefore this search for minimal foreign discomfort that explains why we will continue to flood to London and Atlanta, and Houston and Dubai, places where the Nigerian Foot has trod a well-beaten path, where at any point in time there is another Naija within sight to speak vernacular with; and where the aroma of Naija cooking hovers permanently beneath the nostrils.
*
Alas this is not the case with Sweden. It is only two weeks into my stay here but I have resigned myself to the fact that, if I want to taste anything that remotely resembles Nigerian cooking, it will have to come from my own hands (purchased from a Ghanaian-run store in Stockholm). Initially I thought it was a 'Uppsala' thing, perhaps there’d be plenty of Nigerians and Nigerian joints in Stockholm, the capital.
*
I spent Sunday in Stockholm. I went visiting, a Nigerian friend who’s lived in Sweden for years was going to show me round the city. When it was time to find something to eat I asked for a Nigerian joint. I took for granted that there’d be one, knowing that our people’s tentacles are deeply embedded in virtually every country in the world. My friend said she was not aware of anywhere were one could get a Nigerian meal. This is not to say that she was absolutely certain that there was none, but she did not know any. Of course there are loads of Chinese and Indian and Middle-eastern restaurants, and American brands – McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King. We eventually settled for a bustling food court where it seemed as though every continent – except Africa – was represented on the cartes du jour.
*
My brief brainstorming session with my friend on the above-mentioned vexatious matter threw up the following ‘communiqué-style’ conclusion:
Nigerians do not particularly like Sweden, despite its tuition-free tertiary education system, because of the cold weather, and the language barriers. As our people would say it, awoof dey run belle.
*
Language is a key. It turns this way or that, but for the same purpose: to lock. To lock one in, or out.
*
A Nigerian will sooner allow himself to be deported than learn a new language. Exaggeration. But it is true that learning things like that, for which the end result is not a certificate that can be converted directly into money, prestige or a promotion at work, is not something we like to do. How many Nigerians will ever go out of their way to learn something just for the fun of it, especially language? Look at the thousands of youth corpers that criss-cross the length and breadth of the country annually, how many have “learn a new language” on their to-do lists? Of course the NYSC obligatorily hands out relevant language manuals, but who cares about paper booklets? Na language we go chop?
*
If the Nigerian Government said that, starting 2010, there’d be a welfare system for the jobless, but that the condition for qualifying would be fluency in Chinese, I bet it that in a matter of months, even illiterate market women across the country will be speaking fluent Chinese. Students will be answering WAEC English comprehension questions in Chinese.
*
It is not that we cannot do anything we want to do. It is that we cannot be bothered.
*
The weather is not as insurmountable as language I think. Sweden can’t be that much colder than, say, Canada, which has a significant Nigerian population. But of course Canada, like America, is a well-worn path. And they speak English.

(c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from Uppsala's Cultural Night - Sat, Sept 13, 2008

2008-09-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Losing Faith in Food

2008-09-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

The poem below is actually not new, it predates Sweden; it owes a lot of its inspiration to my brief sojourn in Belgium & Holland in 2005, where "nothing ever taste[d] as it look[ed]..."

Sweden has reinforced it... my confidence in food has been irreparably damaged, sigh, somewhere between the plate and my tongue, food conspires to play unkind tricks on me... nothing is plain, everything is a melange... a "Smörgåsbord", which, quite interestingly, Wikipedia defines as "a Swedish word which refers to a type of Scandinavian meal served buffet-style in Swedish cuisine" -I didn't know that before now, had no idea the word had culinary roots...

Now I spend my days haunting McDonald's and Burger King and doing the occasional Chinese buffet (where I stick to rice and prawn crackers and other readily identifiable stuvs), and my nights assembling rice, beans, garri and gizzard. And plenty of pepper.

Photo taken on my return from the inaugural shopping trip to Stockholm in search of Nigerian food (raw materials, that is)...

OUT OF GILDED MENUS
by Tolu Ogunlesi

African tourists all, sitting
At The Quay, filling our mouths
With words as we await the white man's food,
Stiff and flattened between the pepper-less pages
Of a carte du jour.

“I'll be darned if Antwerp’s bland sauces
Haven't wriggled their way
Into the dishes of Ilfracombe.”

“The first culinary commandment of Europe,
For a first time African visitor is this:
Nothing ever tastes as it looks!”

“Every helping of white food tastes
Like it was shaven clean. A distant world
From the spiced afro of African cuisine.”

We shall find no rest here –
Not in these bits that sit glumly
On monogrammed plates.

We will eat,
But it is the memories that will silence
Our rumbling stomachs –
Of Lagos, our Lagos, where Isi-Ewu* nightly sails

On raging streams of fresh beer, tongue-paddled,
Headed for the deep oceans,
From whose depths proverbs and Tales by Moonlight
Rise like the mirthful spirits of distant ancestors.

Throughout the days we have left
On this English soil, our backs shall be turned
To all Palaces of Prandial Pleasures. Our plates
Will have no appetites for food out of gilded menus.

We will content ourselves with the smoke that rises
From Lagos’ open-air kitchens,
Smoke that doesn’t require a visa to visit us here,
Laden with news of Home and Happenings;

Smoke that darkens the visions
Of sleepy African gods
And the sleepless tempers
Of Europe’s Green Garrison.

*Isi-Ewu: Goat-head pepper-soup (A Nigerian delicacy)

(c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from Uppsala [1]

2008-09-16T03:24:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from Stockholm [2]

2008-09-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Images from Stockholm [1]

2008-09-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

All images (c) Tolu Ogunlesi, 2008

Notes from Uppsala [2]

2008-09-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING

Today I visited Stockholm for the first time in my life.

*

There’s a sign in Stockholm declaring that Stockholm is the capital of, wait for it, Scandinavia. Interesting stuff. Think of this: Lagos is the capital of West Africa.
But no one will think of saying that, because while there is something to be gained by a city audaciously positioning itself, Lagos remains a city in which very few people care for any thing beyond personal positioning; the power of bread, butter – and parking space.

*

Life in another man’s land is a tasking endeavor. Especially in a case like mine where my being here is not merely a brief holiday, to be lubricated by a motley band of hosts who have no other duty beyond showing me sights and generally impressing me with their city (or perhaps merely with their knowledge of their city). I have therefore found myself – as Jesus Christ advised – a little child once more, utterly at the mercy of hows and whys and whens too complicated for me. Lagos has to be unlearnt, and Sweden learned. And when you do not even speak the language, the whole conundrum hops one more step up the complexity ratings.

*

It is easy to unlearn Lagos. Very easy. You may find it hard to not miss the city, but you will very quickly unlearn it. You may confirm from all those people you know who have escaped its vice-like grip. You will unlearn all those weird psychological defense mechanisms that your body evolved primarily to keep you primed to tackle LASTMA, Council Boys, Windscreen-cleaning scouts, Anti Highway-Crossing Brigades, Parking Space Warlords (whether at the office or at fast food joints). This is my latest theory: trapped within every Lagosian is a soul desperately seeking to unlearn the City. In my case, for 3 months, I shall be free. And then I shall return. Hopefully they’d have reopened the 3rd Mainland Bridge, and completed the Oyingbo-Iddo road, and perhaps even laid the foundation stones of the 4th Mainland Bridge.

*

What is not easy to do is to learn the ways of the New World. Take this whole fire/security alarms business for instance. Here at the institute where I have my ‘office’, the security alarm automatically comes on at 9pm on weekdays, and stays on all weekend. What this therefore means is that anyone entering the office at these off-hours has to learn how to activate or deactivate them as required. I have been given the code. To lock and unlock. But there is one more code. That is the code that I will dictate to the security company managing the building, on the off chance that by an act of ill-treatment the alarm system goes off and goes ahead to notify the company. In that situation this is what will happen: A (bored, mustachioed) security man will have to come over and find out what the situation is. To dissuade him therefore I shall have to dial a number to speak with him, and supply my ‘open sesame’. It is that (second) 4-digit code that I give him that will stop him from coming over to see things for himself. In other words, that code is “for insiders only.”

*

The hotel which is home also has its own fire alarm. But it also has a kitchenette. So life has to be lived negotiating the high and narrow road between cooking and upsetting the fire alarm. No frying, is rule one. No frying, because, no smoke. And we all know (or have at least been told) there’s never any smoke without a fire. So, no fire, period. And I am left to wonder how any Homo Sapiens in their right minds can be expected to cook without smoke. Let the Europeans come and tell that to their African brethren. Let them come and tell that to all those hungry University students spread across famous male hostels in OAU and UI, for whom the first stage in cooking anything is the chemical conversion of palm oil to groundnut/vegetable oil. By ‘frying’.

Notes from Uppsala [1]

2008-09-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

As published in the Guardian Life magazine (Lagos), Sunday, Sept 7, 2008

STOMACH POWER

I just arrived in Uppsala, a University town forty-five minutes (by train) from Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. I am here to write, strange as that may sound. Yes, write. What does he want to write that he cannot write in Nigeria, you may want to ask. Well, nothing, I have to confess. Nigeria is a tough place to live in, true, but it’s a place that can be lived in and survived in – and written in. PHCN or no PHCN, a half-closed 3rd mainland bridge or not, stories can still be told in our country. In fact it is in the profusion of hardships that stories seem to ferment. Helon Habila after all wrote his award-winning Waiting for an Angel (a.k.a Prison Stories) while a broke, struggling journalist in Lagos. And Ogaga Ifowodo wrote many of his finest poems here. And Toni Kan, and Maik Nwosu, and Lola Shoneyin (Ibadan), and Uche Umez (Owerri) and Eghosa Imasuen (Benin) and many others.
So, I am here not because I cannot in Lagos, but simply because there is an opportunity for a person to come and write in Uppsala, and I have the good fortune of being that person for this year.
*
The above is a (necessary) digression.
The real story for today has to do with migration and the power of the human stomach.
The way to a man’s heart, they say, is through his stomach. (Do wives still think that is true? Let that be an inquest for another day.) I just discovered however that the stomach leads to more than one place. Apart from the heart, there’s also the soul.
The way to the soul of a place is through the stomach.
The best way to discover a strange city at its deepest level is to follow (key word) your stomach. It’s better than following your map, I tell you. Better than following a tour guide. Never underestimate the power of a stomach seeking answers. Think of Lagos, and how much it is a city defined by the vegetables and stockfish and egusi and locust beans and shrimps piled high in its many crazy markets; the colors, smells and perhaps the inexplicable awe inspired by the sight of abundant food in a world characterised by scarcity of many other things.
*
My first major assignment in Uppsala upon arrival was lunch. What were my choices? Well, there was Swedish cuisine, there was a Thai restaurant offering a lunch buffet, and next door to that was McDonalds. Talk about the world being (a) flat (plate). Eventually my team of three – two Nigerians and one ‘Finwede’ (a Finn who’s lived in Sweden for long, my definition), our wonderful hostess, settled for the Thai restaurant.
Post-lunch, we (the Nigerians) were shown a grocery store, where we picked up – or more accurately, considered picking up – fruits, eggs, rice, milk, beans, cooking oil, tomatoes, cereal, etc. Our hotel rooms have attached kitchenettes, so cooking is a possibility that looms large on the horizon.
*
But what fascinated me the most was my countryman’s slight frustration at the grocery store fare, and his insistence on getting ‘Nigerian’ raw materials. Nigerian rice, Nigerian beans, palm oil. None of the canned foods and strange-looking rice grains that hide beneath the word ‘intercontinental’.
His conclusion was this: we needed to find that kind of store fast, something that offered more than the sterile offerings of a supermarket. The next day, our hostess took us to such a place. Owned by immigrants (Lebanese apparently), it’s a ‘supermarket’ with the spirit of an open market, pulsing with raw smells of spices and meats.
The meat (pun not intended) of the matter therefore is this: On these ‘personal’ journeys in search of the kind of food we want to eat, I think we are permitting ourselves to experience Uppsala at a deeper level (turn off the mushymeters please) than if we sat down at a local’s dining table and mindlessly swallowed whatever was pushed our way.
Following the stomach implies taking an active part in solving the problem of food. It means going shopping, it means asking questions, it means experiencing the energy of the marketplaces, it means attempting to cook. It means ‘getting involved’. It is only in this way of course that this premise of finding the ‘way’ into a city through food can hold true.
*
The map of every city in the world is sketched out on its plates. You only need to open your eyes to see. Blessed are they who hunger, for they shall be filled.
*
I spent a year in Asaba not attempting to cook anything more complicated than noodles. I’m tempted to do the same in Uppsala. But I don’t have any plans to give in. No plans to leave this town a three-month old tourist.

The Battle

2008-09-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

I arrived here just before the rains... apparently only hours before 'em.
Now they're here, and here to stay. Wetandcoldandwetandcoldand...

Life is going to be fun here. Already I've just emerged from a bout with a strange fever (malaria I guess), that kept me tossing and turning, nauseous and nightmarish, for more than 48 hours. I must have brought it from Lagos. The way I didn't bring garri, or peppers, or suya. Thankfully I came prepared, son of a father for whom luggage is not luggage without a medicine-box.

You should have seen the nightmares I had. Nightmarathon. Add to that the endless droning of BBC World News, with their endless repititions of programmes, and you get a new definition of nausea. I swear, if I have to watch another edition of Leading Questions featuring Paul Skinner (Chairman of Rio Tinto) again, I'll just throw up (something not even the malaria made me do). In the last 48 hours I must have seen it like 5 or 6 times. Uggh!

I started a short story on Wednesday, my first new short story in months (if not years). I finished draft 1 of it tonight. 4,500 words. Tentatively titled EX. Am i pleased with me? I don't know. Been so long, I sold out doing magazine and newspaper articles in Lagos.

More good things. The Library of the Nordic Africa Institute here's a heaven of african delights. Spent this evening also curled up on a chair there, devouring short stories by Ken Saro Wiwa, Chinua Achebe, Abdulrazaq Gurnah, Ben Okri, etc etc

Life is a nice mix of the nice and not-nice.

With Nigerian Love from Uppsala

2008-09-03T12:20:00.001-07:00

I am Tolu Ogunlesi.
I am originally from Nigeria, and I still am.
I am on Facebook.
In my spare time I write.
I am in Uppsala for 3 months to write, guest of the Nordic Africa Institute. [In other words my next 3 months are spare time]
I arrived straight from crazy Lagos into cold Uppsala two days ago; Uppsala where the weather is cold and the people are warm.

I changed my email signature yesterday to reflect my new status:

Tolu Ogunlesi
Guest Writer
Nordic Africa Institute
Kungsgatan 38, SE-753 21
Uppsala, Sweden

This will be a record of whats and what-nots, muses and musings, travellings and trifling thoughts. Everything and nothing. The only thing(s) I have sworn off are footnotes.

This is not my first incarnation as a blogger. I have been, now I am again: http://omoalagbede.blogspot.com/

And I have a photoblog as well:
http://toluogunlesi.shutterchance.com/

I am a wandering seed of a dead blacksmith, that's what I am (apart from a pharmacist and writer that is).