What's the point of writing if your audience cannot relate to your art?

So in both potential and real dimensions, the African century is rising and may render the Asian century very short-lived. The wars are in net reduction, economic success stories are being written, growth rates seek to double digits in a good number of countries and the youthful generations through global education, literature, art, music, film, sports and above all social media are less chauvinistic than the previous independence and post-independence generations.

But what’s contended in contemporary African poetry is of a different kind, the poets writing now are about how the individual African demands to be received, both at home against conventional norms, and globally against what’s stereotypically African.

Spreading panic is a Nigerian pastime. Living in an environment of perpetual gloom, one can understand. But I don’t understand the motivation for the Nigerian behind a smartphone and bandwidths, who envisions the worst, whose Facebook post or tweet can cause his reader depression.

Africa is my mother and father. Africa is a complicated home and a language I lost my fluency in. Africa is my beginning and end.

To colour is to accept that there are limits and bounds, that freedom is the deep end of a shallow pond and drowning is not a choice. That our liberties are normative and must issue from the collective fiat of convention, the healthy custom of the many against the wily tempest of the one. Liberty then is a prison of accepted conduct, a glazed casket waiting for us to die.