It begins with colonialism. It always seems to, for the modern African, as many today will complain. “It is not the whole of the thing. Why does it have to be the background of so much that we do and talk about today? It was a long time ago. We should have healed already. Why can’t we move on?” When you crush alligator pepper in your mouth, can you still separate the crushed seeds from your saliva?

Colonialism permeates so much that we do, that we are. It is not the beginning, but it is a beginning. A different beginning, and the paths back to who we were before it may never be found again. Like beach sand washed away by waves of the sea. There is still sand, but it is not the same sand. Instead, we must forge new paths, with the speckled ruins of that in sight, in view, to mark our paths as we chart a new course. Memory is not a weakness, rather it can be a strength, because as they say, a people who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.

The dystopia is an indelible part of us. Our culture, our identity, and to its most intricate part, our language is inextricably mixed with it. So, we must accept it as we journey like Moses in between a red sea of dystopias, plotting a course from colonialism, with the seeds that we now carry, and hope to grow to shade bearing great trees. Language is like a name. It may not have been you who first called it, but it becomes yours when you accept it, claim and use it.

Language was a major casualty of colonialism. Mashing millions of people speaking hundreds of languages into the sinuous, constantly undulating serpent of nation-state and forcing them to operate with, and speak one, as a lingua franca had adverse effects; the resulting socio-political dystopia that followed colonialism 2.0 after ‘independence.’

Formal education that teaches the English language has never been completely accessible to the Nigerian people. My grandfather used to hide in the bushes from colonial tax collectors when they came to collect. My own father was the first person to have formal education in his family. Many Nigerian households face similar impoverishment, in a nation reeling from colonialism and civil war after.

Things have gotten worse since, with Nigeria currently facing its most severe economic crises in a generation, according to The New York Times. Formal education hasn’t always been the greatest priority of the average Nigerian. Survival was. I talk more about some of the woes Nigeria faces in my essay, “Too Dystopian For Whom? A Continental Nigerian Writer’s Perspective.”

We have a literacy rate of 59%. Nigeria also has the largest number of out of school children on earth at eighteen million, more than the entire population of Libya, Liberia and Eritrea combined. In a nation of over two hundred million people now speaking over five hundred languages, let us just say that the English language did not kick off as a lingua franca, as flawlessly as was intended.

As of 2021, according to Statistics, the English language is spoken by sixty million people in Nigeria. That’s about thirty percent of the populace. Seven percent of households spoke English at home. In some regions, like North Eastern Nigeria, according to Translation Without Borders, only one percent of households spoke English. English may be said to be the most widely spoken language on earth, but just how much is it really spoken? Reading meanwhile is a different story altogether. Or a different act at least, if part of the same story.

West African Pidgin English, a cluster of English-based, creole languages, are spoken by up to one hundred and forty million speakers across Nigeria, Gambia, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, and Ghana. In Nigeria, Naija Pidgin has up to one hundred and twelve million speakers, more than half of the country’s entire population, with most of its speakers being people in rural areas, the poor or those who lack formal education.

At the 2024 Ake Festival, the Documenting New Voices panel, hosted by Timo Sanni and including panelists such as Ainehi Edoro of Brittle Paper, Wale Lawal of The Republic, and Taofeek Ayayemi, discussed the problem of language and accessibility of literature. Recently, Onyeka Nwelue, a Nigerian publisher, also lamented the lack of enthusiasm for literature amongst younger Nigerians. He compared it to the unsurprisingly larger one there is for Nigerian music. I believe that the lack of enthusiasm isn’t due to a lack of desire for stories, but due to a problem of disconnect due to language and medium.

Nigerian music oscillates largely between Pidgin English and indigenous languages. This also incidentally happens to be the language the largest number of Nigerians speak. So, there’s a connection to the content and feel of the songs. A connection that Nigerian literature may not have. What we might see as disinterest, may merely be an inability to connect. Of the percentage of Nigerians that speak and read English, only a portion will be interested in reading literature. From that portion, another lesser portion will be interested in a niche or genre of works. Of the number interested in that genre, an even smaller number will be interested in that style the storyteller employs. And out of that small number who enjoy the style, it will be a smaller number who have the purchasing power to obtain the work. It eventually leaves a very small whittled down number, that is then affected by other factors.

This is a problem that has long faced Nigerian writers. I believe we have not yet found a linguistic form or medium that connects with the average or larger portion of Nigerians. Our audience is splintered by language and literacy barriers. Writers are thus left to aim for a foreign audience that have both the purchasing power and requisite literacy and language access to read our literature. This is really unfortunate because there still exists a barrier of language to the west. You see, language carries culture. It carries identity, with bits of both speckled in it. So, there is a disconnect when the average agent, editor, publisher, or reader is consuming a work by writers of a different culture, no matter the claims of interests in and efforts towards representation and diversity. This has always been the limitation of the African writer pipeline, of attain clout and sell to the west.

China Achebe said that until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter. But what if the lion does learn to write, but other lions have no access to the tales of the lions? Then they do not learn of the bravery and the power and majesty of lions. You see, when you control a people’s story, the story of them, and also importantly, the story that they tell of themselves, that they hear of themselves, you control their trajectory. Many students will go into STEM, and sports and various other fields, because of the stories that abound about people who did and utilized knowledge of those fields. To deny them these stories would be to deny them those dreams, possibilities and lives. The west and the rest of the world can only buy so much of us. How many Nigerian or African works are bestsellers abroad? Things Fall Apart is the bestselling African novel. Yet, its twenty million or so copies sold is surpassed by countless other works. This is not just a problem of quantity. In the area of critical acclaim, our works are not being judged as being of the highest quality either.

In Science Fiction/Fantasy, a field that has been giving out awards for going on a century, I was recently the first Black person to win the Asimov’s readers award. I was the first African-born, Black writer/editor to win the Nebula award, the British Fantasy Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. I was the first African and first Black person, jointly with Sheree Renee Thomas, to be nominated for the Hugo award best editor, short form category. I was the first BIPOC to be nominated in the fiction and editing categories of the Hugo Award, in the same year. This has been going on for close to a century, as I said. Most of my awards have been racial/continental firsts. For a bunch of them, I’m still the only continental African to have won/been nominated for them, and I am the most awarded SFF writer, editor and publisher on the African continent. You will find stats like this across the anglophone literary world. There’s a dearth of African-born Black or continental Black Africans excelling either commercially or critically, in the English-speaking literary world.

Whether consciously or not, I believe there’s perhaps an understandable distance between the world, and the work of the African writer. I believe that this disconnect gets broken down with proximity to the west, through migration, MFAs, etc. But I imagine that the process of achieving that proximity breaks down more than just literary distance. Besides the problem of a limited audience that the sell-to-the-west pipeline has, it also leaves the larger base of Nigerians, of Africans, behind. It’s great to export our culture, our literature, and all the other things we do when we sell stories to the west. But there’s more to it.

Stories carry many things. Culture, identity, values, our norms, and gods and spiritualities and religion, and knowledge and wisdom and politics, and prejudices, and dreams, and so much more. They carry the core of who we are, and who we are meant to be. Aeschylus holds that memory is the mother of all wisdom. And memories are stories, stories we tell ourselves, about events that occurred, in the ways that we perceived them. Stories also carry memory. So, when a good portion of our people don’t have access to our own stories, or the stories that we tell do not include them, do not get to them, we do not grow as a people. We remain static, stuck in the moments we were before we had our stories. We can continue to lament the declining reading culture of the youth at panels and on social media. Or we can do something about it.

I’d have won and been nominated for nearly all the prestigious awards in my genre. Any more would not do much more for me. Selling to the west and attaining commercial success also does not hold great wonder for me. I believe that the stories each person can singularly tell are limited, because people are limited in what they know and that after a point we are talking as it were, only to hear the sound of our own voice, and there’s a certain hubris to that. I believe there’s an important responsibility to ensure that our stories are collectively told, by the lot of us, the proliferation of our collective voices. This is what propelled me to go into editing and publishing and promoting the works of others. If all I did was win awards for myself, and have my own stories published, no matter how much critical or commercial success I garnered, I’d consider myself as having failed.

So, I have edited/published hundreds of works, in anthologies, collections, magazine issues, etc. Works I edited/published have won and been nominated for multiple awards, such as the Caine Prize, the NAACP Image Award, the Otherwise Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the Ignyte Award. “A Soul of Small Places,” by Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo, published in the Africa Risen anthology, which I co-edited, made Caine Prize history, as the first co-authored work to win in 2023. They were also the first Senegalese writers to win the award, and were listed in the Forbes Afrique Changemakers list, for it. The anthology it appeared in, Africa Risen, also made Caine Prize history as fifty percent of the shortlisted writers for that year,three out of the six, Mame Bougouma Diene, Woppa Diallo, and Tlotlo Tsamaase were from one book, the Africa Risen anthology.

I’ll have written, edited and published the most award winning/nominated African Science Fiction/Fantasy works in the near century they’ve been giving out awards in the genre. And it’s taken a tall amount of work and sacrifice, doing it from Nigeria, with all its limitations; lack of consistent power, good internet, payment and crowdfunding systems, to name a few. But it’s been worth it. Is it enough though? There’s yet more to be done.

As we lament the decline in reading culture, readers themselves lament the inaccessibility of our own literature. Recently, when Chimamanda Adichie’s new book was announced, there was wide lament by Nigerians in Nigeria on social media about the cost and how out of reach it was for the average Nigerian. And the solution was to wait for a Nigerian publisher to get the rights to publish and sell it in Nigeria. And even when that happens, what about the portion of Nigerians who cannot read? Because that would only be a fix for the number that can read. It might be easier for westerners to get the works of Africans than for Africans to get the works of Africans. And that has dire implications for us.

Though, this is not solely an African problem. An Indian author, Gautam Bhatia, once asked me to do a review of his novel. Even having the funds to purchase it, and being willing to, I was unable, because of payment systems and structures. I, in the end, had to be gifted the work, to read and review. So, even when we are in a position to read and purchase literature, we still might be unable to. In a world where you might have to know the author personally and also have them be willing to forgo payment, not to mention additional accessibility issues, reading culture will surely decline. Fred Harter talks about this same problem Africans face, of lack of accessibility to works by African writers, in this piece in The Guardian.

Meanwhile, some strides have been made with Pidgin English literature. For example, Frank Aig-Imoukhuede’s Pidgin Stew and Sufferhead. Ajibola Tolase has also written poetry in Pidgin. A number of other Nigerians’ usage experimented with the form. We must not also of course, forget Amos Tutuola who employed from very early on, and allowed his writing to display the rhythms of Yoruba oral traditions and vernacular to create what was a very Nigerian English. His boldness is a precursor, something we should learn from. Building more inroads to Nigerian Pidgin English literature will open us to a world brimming with literary excellence and possibilities.

We talk about the enthusiastic response to Nigerian music, that’s absent with Nigerian literature, but said enthusiastic response by Nigerians to Nigerian music wasn’t always there. There was a period more foreign songs were played in the country. This was followed by decades of Nigerian music evolving to a linguistic form that Nigerians could largely connect to, such as the works of King Sunny Ade, Fela, Plantation Boiz, Omawunmi, 2face, Waje, D’banj, Tiwa Savage, Wizkid, Rema. Now Nigerian music is played almost exclusively in clubs, on the radio, at parties, events, restaurants, etc. This didn’t just happen though. There was a period where the music had to evolve, even if it was a period where the commercial value of the music was not as pronounced as it is now. A period in which they built their audience, created and experimented, and arrived at a form that the larger Nigerian base could claim as their own.

I believe that Nigerian literature has to go through that crucible as well. Where our literature evolves to a linguistic and stylistic form that the average Nigerian can connect to. Even if such a period is focused largely on audience building, and not sales and profit of and from the literature. This is a period of sacrifice and growth, that will eventually allow Nigerian literature to sink into the bedrock of our mass consciousness. This audience can now later be harnessed to multiple purposes after it’s built. For profit, it can affect our political consciousness and participation. Music is a tool for that, after all, see the music of Fela. Today, politicians do not overlook musicians because they understand this. Companies are dishing out huge endorsement deals to musicians because they also understand the value of music in reaching and carrying messages, and the masses, along. If Nigerian literature is allowed to evolve thusly, it can reach this place as well.

We decidedly need better, more accessible, systems to disseminate our stories and circulate them amongst ourselves as Africans and people of the global south. In the past, there was Onitsha market literature. More recently, there has been the use of Whatsapp channels as a medium to disseminate stories locally, in African countries like Zimbabwe, where people subscribe and receive parts of the stories periodically. New mediums are being developed to meet our unique literary needs, that make nonsense of our local limitations. It is an attempt to do the same that led me to consider the situation of language and what opportunities may lie there. Nigerian Pidgin English, as the most widely spoken language in Nigeria, presents opportunities. A chance to take the literature to the people, instead of waiting for them to come to meet us. By doing this, we may create a bridge that the complex and failing economy of our nation cannot currently allow with the English language.

I just finished translating Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo’s Caine Prize winning and history making story, “A Soul of Small Places,” to Naija Pidgin English. The story will be published in what I believe will be the first Nigerian Pidgin English fiction magazine and podcast, of which I have created. I have obtained rights to the story, and it will be published in English and Nigerian Pidgin English, on the magazine, OD Ekpeki Reads, domiciled on my website, and narrated on the magazine’s YouTube channel, both of which you can subscribe to and follow. There will also be a call for submissions in the coming days.

“A Soul of Small Places” is a very important story. Apart from making history as the first co-authored story and the first story by a Senegalese person to win the Caine Prize, its content is even more important. It talks about the very real problem of access to education many girls in African countries face, and the ensuring consequences, including all forms of abuse, that they are exposed to by ‘herdsmen’ and other nefarious actors, when they defend their right to a formal education. This I believe is the perfect story to start an endeavor like this with, as it highlights the difficulties many Africans that aren’t affluent, privileged, and who live in rural areas face when they try to access the formal education they need to read in these colonial languages.

While doing the translation of “A Soul of Small Places” to Naija Pidgin English, I took a small trip down memory lane and remembered that back in secondary school, I used to literally get beaten for speaking Pidgin English. Yes, you get beaten or pay a fine, or both, if you are caught speaking Pidgin English or any other vernacular language. And this includes your mother tongue. So, it was with a wistful bittersweetness that I finished the translation, a work that I still deemed important and fulfilling. All of this is part of the collective and portentous story of education, accessibility, and language, that we as Africans experience by both writing and living our stories.

I believe there’s a lot that will change in our ‘reading’ culture when we gain access to stories we can consume, in languages more of us can speak, sold in currencies and through payment systems we have access to, and in mediums we can reach. Afterall, some of these mediums, like the oral, have been age-old, traditional African storytelling models that previously had thrived.

My Pidgin English fiction magazine and podcast, OD Ekpeki Reads, draws inspiration partly from the Levar Burton Reads podcast, and BBC Pidgin. BBC Pidgin has done an amazing amount of work curating an audience of Nigerian Pidgin English listeners that spans tens of millions of people all over Nigeria. Might this not be harnessed to further the dissemination of stories and improve our culture and ways generally? Beyond having a magazine that publishes and narrates the most important stories by Africans I can find into Pidgin English, what if we had a column on BBC Pidgin where an Africa story was read monthly? It would do an amazing service to us as a people. I am currently in talks with editors and other personnel at the BBC over this.

Beyond this though, what more could be done with the form and language? What if instead of just short stories in Pidgin, or even read on an extensive platform like BBC Pidgin, we had novels, our favourite novels, translated to Pidgin English? Think of some of our favourite classics. I deemed that “A Soul of Small Places” needed to be consumed by a subset of people that it could currently perhaps not be. The subset it is written about, that have the very same struggle with education. The girls in rural areas, who may not yet have the access to read in English, that have to pay a dastardly price to. In the same way, many works of African literature are not accessible to the very people they are written for, and about.

Take The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. Would many of the illiterate wives in the story be able to read the very story that speaks to their experience and lives? But if it was translated to Pidgin, they might still not be, you say? True, because most people who can’t read in English can’t read in Pidgin English either. That is where narrations and a sort of return to our oral storytelling traditions come in. They might not be able to read in Pidgin, but they will be able to listen to a story in Pidgin English. We have seen many an illiterate cow herder or bus/kekenapep driver with radios, enjoying programs in vernacular languages. What of Things Fall Apart? It may be the bestselling African novel. But many Nigerians have not had the access to consume it because it has been translated into various global languages, but not into one they can consume. It is also their story, about them, for them. Do we not owe it to them to at least try to have it in a medium that is accessible to them? What of the widely celebrated, recent release by Chimamanda Adichie, Dream Count? What of the people who cannot read or speak English? Do they not deserve to celebrate it too? Do their dreams not count?

It is with this in mind that The African Pidgin Writers series was born, a project that will include translating works and narrating them as audio books in Pidgin. Tendai Huchu was highly enthused and receptive when I asked his permission to get a local publisher to collaborate with me to translate and publish his African classic, The Hairdresser of Harare, to Nigerian Pidgin English. It’ll be the first work in The African Pidgin Writers series. I also spoke to Joe Haldeman, the author of The Forever War, one of the great classics of Science Fiction, who approved of his book being included in this project as well. A story about the forever tragedy of war which we are in this moment mired in, across the African continent and beyond, will always be important, especially now, especially to a people who have long suffered and continue to experience such tragedies. A project like this would put works like this in the hands of people who would otherwise perhaps never have the chance to read them, to learn and grow from them.

I am also working on a project, Pidgin/Creole Beyond Borders, that aims to make stories more globally accessible to people outside the brackets of colonial languages, something I believe aligns with the vision of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. That was a goal I had in mind, when I started Jembefola Press in 2021. It was this project, this need, that inspired the name itself. It is derived from the djembe, a West Africa talking drum, created during the Malian empire. There are many variations of the spelling for djembefola. The origins of the dj spelling are said to be French, and because decolonization is important, I chose to go with the Jembe spelling, which may be closest to the original African sound. The name comes from the saying, “Anke djé, anke bé” which translates to “everyone gather together in peace.” A djembe is said to contain three spirits. The spirit of the tree it was cut from, the spirit of the animal whose skin was used in the making, and the spirit of the maker of the drum. I wanted Jembefola Press to carry the spirit of Africans, and Africa, in the stories I put out with it. A djembefola is a master djembe player. Formerly, one could only be born into the djembe family to be a player. Now though, anyone can be a djembefola.

So, if you feel the pull, and aim to be part of this work, of disseminating the true spirit of African culture and stories and all the things that we carry in the magic of our soul and sounds, feel free to reach out. If this impels you to collaborate in any of the mentioned projects, do reach out, that we may weave sound, and soul and story, and spirit, to make magic together, in the beauty of language that is heard and felt by all who need to.