Bolaji Olatunde Speaks

  Nikki May says she wrote Wahala because she wanted to see herself in a book — middle-class, mixed-race Nigerian living in Britain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iq5NJMhxL8. It’s a novel inspired by a “long and very loud lunch with her Nigerian friends in London”.  That aspiration has been met. She also believes the success of the book will mean that she has been forgiven for dropping out of medical school. She shares this characteristic with a character in the novel. The average helicopter Nigerian parent sparingly forgives such acts but it’s not unknown to happen.   Three female best friends based in London have a close bond. They share several characteristics, as close friends often do. They are all of mixed race (more popularly described in Nigerian society with the word “half caste” which is a pejorative in the West and a compliment in Nigeria). All of their fathers are Nigerian, their mothers are Caucasian. Ronke (Ronks), Boo (Bukola) Whyte and Simisola (Simi) fi...

  Buchi Emecheta was once described by her son as a “womanist”, a word that is perhaps closely related to the more popular word, “feminist”. Her ideas about the place of a woman in what is ostensibly 1970s and 1980s Nigeria are explored in this novella that packs a punch that is far greater than its small weight. “Going to the United Kingdom must surely be like paying God a visit,” Buchi Emecheta declared in a BBC One programme The Light of Experience about her perceptions about that island as a little girl growing up in Ibusa, Nigeria. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7cAwemP-u8 She vowed to someday visit that country; she would go on to live there for decades. Bintu, the narrator of Naira Power by Buchi Emecheta, follows this path. “I am a woman who has stayed more than half of her life in the United Kingdom, pursuing one set of studies and then another,” Bintu introduces herself at the beginning of the novella. The book opens with Bintu explaining that she has been visitin...

  Book Publisher: Expand Press Limited , Lagos     Date of Publication: 2020     Rare is a published memoir by a Nigerian musician. Lady Onyeka Onwenu has served the reading public with this intriguing insight into her life. To her long-time fans, the title “Lady” may come as a surprise ─ to many who have followed her over the decades, she is known simply as “ Onyeka ” .       My earliest memory of Onyeka is watching her on television circa 1983, in her much younger days, roll across the bonnet of a black Rolls Royce car, singing away (or probably more accurately, miming away) a song that I can’t remember, but easily outshining the Spirit of Ecstasy, the sculpture that adorns Rolls Royce bonnets. It was a sensual dance, one can say with the benefit of hindsight, but my childish brain thought, “Hmm, that’s a very playful person . I should marry her. ” Evidently, by the time, Onyeka was aware of “the power of Kpongem ” — the pow...