Helen Oyeyemi is the author of Icarius Girl and The Opposite House.

REVIEW OF CHARLES COLSON'S HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? 

BY TOPE APOOLA, AUTHOR, TIMES OF THE SUPERMEN

Midway into the book, I felt shame for my earlier and apparently hasty comment on the book.Digging deep, I soon realized it was a very good one, probably the best to come from a Christian writer. Charles Colson delved into philosophy with the competence of a philosopher, and into science with the swave of a scientist. He defended the Christian faith well but too hardly on certain occassions, thereby making his book seem phony. Charles Colson does not appear to understand the merits of Cultural Relativity. He stopped sounding objective when he tried to convince the reader that there was no possible dissension from his opinions. It is very difficult for me to believe that Colson can be 100 percent right in his take on religion and human living. I can give him 70 and 70 is an unusually high mark!
How Now Shall we live? is a very lively book!

Tope Apoola Fun Literary Awards




Hottest Book Cover 2011



Chimamanda Adichie- Hottest Female Author, 2011





Onyeka Nwelue- The Most Sensational Young Author, 2011



Helen Oyeyemi- The Most Mysterious, 2011



Excerpt from the Novel, Times of the Supermen

Pg. 209
When he heard a teeny noise in the quiet place his weak heart came alive. His sight was blurred as it had been fixed on the evening sun for ten minutes. He looked to the direction of the noise and allowed his sight to normalize. He did not only look, he smiled, for the first happy sight in six weeks had finally come to him. A pigeon was born and that alone made him smile. He had lived alone for too long that a little thing from nature gladdened his heart. He stared with inexplicable interest, as the little pigeon broke loose from its shell. He had become drawn to such things and he had grown to be fascinated by everything in its beginning. His life as a celebrity had ended the day he was told that the growth on his throat was
malignant. Since then, he had come back to his old opinions, when he was still pursuing his doctorate in Oxford as a temperate young man.
He was an exceptional psychiatrist; the best among his peers. He traveled two hours every other day in the nineteen-forties to a little place near London to treat a wealthy man who was sick with mild psychoses. There, many great people came around visiting his patient. The old aristocrats who came loved him and some loved him too much that they opened up to him on everything under the sun. He was a humble, slavish genius and there was no need hiding anything from him. It was in fact pleasurable to bare their dirty linens to his young face.
Fifty years after a fabulous career he had returned to his hometown, Iluimo where he continued to wrestle with journalists and young doctors in need of inspiration. His wife who was also a psychiatrist was hardly around. She needed to represent him wherever he was invited to speak because he was sick and old. None of his children or grandchildren ever returned to Nigeria. Once again, he was alone most of the times, like he used to when he wandered in the mansion of the wealthy British, snubbing ladies from different continents who wink at him.
Though he responded well to treatment, he had become too pessimistic about his survival. He was ninety-two years old after all. The day he was told that his chemotherapy was successful, he went out alone to the hilly side of his village to have a feel once more of what it was like to be strong and healthy.



 

Onyeka giving a lecture in India





I first met Onyeka at the monthly Bookjam event held at Lifestyles session of the Silverbird Galleria, Lagos. His diction was impressive and finely intonated. He quickly passed my assesment of what i thought a writer must look like. Elitist, self-assured and arrogant!

 We met a second time in thesame place, but not during the Bookjam. Ibo intonations became noticeable and he became a lot more lively, down-to-earth and indeed, less than my imagination of a Wole Soyinka stereotype. I think i know why he dropped the guard- cos he now consider me a member of the crazy village of writing. This dude, i came to realize is one hell of a writer (even his book, The Abbysnian Boy hadnt done enough to convince me as his personality had). Crazy, independent and free thinking. I enjoyed listening to him and one other friend, David, who literaly laughed at almost every human institutions. Good way to be a writer, i think, but i am afraid, he risks too much believing in no God.

 I will, in the next few days expound on various atheistic beliefs of major Nigerian writers. Stay glued to this blog and get yourself reading!

ABOUT ONYEKA NWELUE

Onyeka Nwelue (born 31st January 1988) is a Nigerian writer and filmmaker. He wrote the first draft of his debut novel, The Abyssinian Boy within the three months of his six month-stay in India, where he had gone to write, under the invitation of the India InterContinental Cultural Association (IICCA).
The son of a politician-father, Chief Sam Nwelue, also a Knight of St. Christopher and school-teacher mother, Mrs Kate Nwelue, also an Anglican Lay Reader and cousin to Flora Nwapa, he spent 6 years in an Anglican seminary, before travelling to India, where he practiced Hinduism before turning to atheism. He writes mainly on religion and sexuality.
He splits his time between India and Nigeria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyeka_Nwelue

Where is Mother NIgeria by Tope Apoola

WHERE IS MOTHER NIGERIA?
by Tope Apoola

Pleasant week for me, I was at a Chinese Restaurant twice, courtesy of a relative. Quite a number of things competed for my attention, and like I had never been to one before, I noticed and appreciated the beautiful, ethereal songs that oozed from the inconspicuously placed speakers. I had always loved classic music, especially Yanni’s, Enya’s, and Nigeria’s own Asa’s, though this particular one was Chinese, it still produced the same feeling in me, a soothing feeling of exquisiteness. Only on the second visit did i fully appreciate the reality which stared us in the face, that the Chinese indeed believed in a way of life and passionately wished to share it with the world!
Let me illustrate in fair detail, how i came about this conclusion about the Chinese. I was not immune to ethnocentrism, neither had I fallen cheaply to the efforts of the authors of this restaurant tradition to impress whoever came around. Just before the wall of ethnocentrism teared down in my mind, i hummed a few street songs to myself, thinking that it would show to me, how colorless and dull some music could be, when compared to ours. I was wrong. The playing music was equally entertaining to me if not more, and with the power of imagination, i deciphered it wouldn’t be easy if i was to choose the better between the two unrelated genres of music, even if it were to be played through very good machines. The reasons are not far fetched; i was in a Chinese pub, and here, everything Chinese is right! They have a tradition, which they proudly share with the world!
I wondered as I rested my back, how proud we truly are, of our own tradition, or how worthy our ways of life are (because culture is no more than human inventions and should not be sacrosanct). If the only thing we portray to the world is fast music, impulsive dancing steps without depth or soul, then we might well be deserving of any opinion the world have about us.