Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

A reader lives a thousand lives before s/he dies, the one who never reads lives only one
–George R.R. Martin

By Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

I won a prize when I was eight years old for being ‘the best read student in the school’, going by the number of books I took out of the library, so this means I have always been a bibliophile- a lover of books. It is no surprise that I met (and married) another bibliophile, guess where – in a library! As we celebrate World Book Day on April 23rd, I thought I should share a list of some books that have influenced me over the years. In compiling this list, I tried to stay away from books we all had to read when we were in school, because I wanted the focus to be on books I chose to read other than those I had to read in order to get through school. This is why the books of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas and many of the famous books from the African Writers Series are not on this list.

In the good old days of the original Heinemann African Writers’ Series, we used to compete with one another over how many we had read, it did not matter if the books were recommended school texts or not. We grew up seeing the contestations of an Africa finding its way in a changing world, through the eyes of Ngugi wa Thiong’O, T.M. Aluko, Elechi Amadi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Denis Brutus, Ayi Kwei Armah, Okot p’Bitek, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and so many others. We also invested heavily in James Hadley Chase, Harold Robbins, Nick Carter and Jeffrey Archer novels. I did not care much for Denise Robbins and Mills and Boon romance novels, but, hey, a young girl needs to dream about love, so I did have a lengthy relationship with Barbara Cartland’s fairy tale-ending novels.

A good book took us back in time to ancient lands around the world. We could take part in treasure hunts, wars, death defying stunts, exciting car chases and high wired schemes of clever criminals that writers such as James Hardley Chase liked to champion. We could also acquaint ourselves with the constant struggles between tradition and modernity, through the lives and choices of Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo and Flora Nwapa’s Idu and Efuru. Whether we were looking for action, drama, history, romance, sex (yes, we read those too!) or fables as our means of escape into another world, there was a book we could read.

As a young adult in my early twenties, I acquired a taste for the steamy ‘bodice-ripper’ genre through the novels of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers. My mother picked up one of my ‘bodice rippers’ once, she started to read it, and then asked me when I would be buying another one! When I was young, we read because we knew no other way of exploring the world. Yes, we had television, but our viewing window was restricted to the two hours between after we had finished our homework and we heard Dad’s car turning in.

A good book took us back in time to ancient lands around the world. We could take part in treasure hunts, wars, death defying stunts, exciting car chases and high wired schemes of clever criminals that writers such as James Hardley Chase liked to champion. We could also acquaint ourselves with the constant struggles between tradition and modernity, through the lives and choices of Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo and Flora Nwapa’s Idu and Efuru. Whether we were looking for action, drama, history, romance, sex (yes, we read those too!) or fables as our means of escape into another world, there was a book we could read. Fast forward to now, we are literally begging our children to read something that goes beyond 140 characters. Everything is now ‘too long’, ‘too intense’, ‘too deep’.

When I was in my first year at University of Ife (now OAU), 1980/81, I was in the History department and I took an elective, the History of Theatre in the Drama Department. My lecturer, Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi asked us one day if any of us had read Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’. None of us had. Dr Ogunbiyi proceeded to declare all of us illiterates who had somehow managed to impersonate their way into his classroom posing as students. ‘How can you be in University and you have not read Walter Rodney’s book’? he asked.

When I was in my first year at University of Ife (now OAU), 1980/81, I was in the History department and I took an elective, the History of Theatre in the Drama Department. My lecturer, Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi asked us one day if any of us had read Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’. None of us had. Dr Ogunbiyi proceeded to declare all of us illiterates who had somehow managed to impersonate their way into his classroom posing as students. ‘How can you be in University and you have not read Walter Rodney’s book’? he asked.

After the lecture we all fled to look for the book and we made sure we read it before we presented ourselves in his next class. In our day, it was not that our parents and teachers did not make us feel like idiots every now and then. The difference is that it mattered to us. We did not think that being called ‘illiterates’ while we were in a University was a good thing, so we went out of our way to prove them wrong and fix the problem. Even though it is currently difficult to get hold of certain books, now we have the internet which provides access in ways we could only dream of then.

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Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a Gender Specialist, Social Entrepreneur and Writer. She is the Founder of Abovewhispers.com, an online community for women. She can be reached at [email protected]