OjuOponIfa

A Bio-Sketch Of Arts Writing In Nigeria By Jahman Anikulapo (Delivered as a Keynote at a seminar on Arts Journalism at the Goethe Institut, Lagos; 2003) No one should pretend that the story of arts writing in Nigeria’s popular media has ever been formally articulated. The chequered history has never been written in any form. What exist are faint, sometimes, vague ideas of what had been and what is. Albeit the various recorded comments about the origin of arts writing in the country have been largely a function of the personal interest of the person doing the chronicling. Thus we shall crave the indulgence of this house, if the little story we shall tell today about the origin nay the story of the Nigerian arts writing is largely from very personal perspective. But we could proceed that the story of arts writing in the media is as informal as the way the vocation itself came into being. Those who have said that the vocation of the arts writer was parasitic of then larger body of Jo...

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 The Prize and The Truth (Odia) THE NLNG LITERATURE PRIZE CONTROVERSYBefore The Nigerian Prize  BY ODIA OFEIMUN  Unlike Professor Olu Obafemi, President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, I do not take the Word as an egg which cannot be reassembled once it is broken. The truth is that the word, if it is an egg, was already broken. All that we do as writers is to train it in support of life, scooping it, beating it, refining and spicing it, to educate taste, thus making and adding meaning, nutritious meaning, to existence. How well we do this is dependent on how we use imagination — the heart, mind and will, that is part of our being homo sapiens. Those who do not care about the meaning that they make, who therefore think of deconstructing before they have learnt to construct, are the ones who tend to put the world in trouble. They tell the rest of us that we can always leap before we think. They seek to, and because they fail to assemble the egg that is alr...