The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
You cannot come to a Nigerian restaurant without having pepper soup.
Some of my reactions are very Nigerian. I still believe that words are things.
It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.
