Awakening the Reader within You

Text of a paper presented by Richard Mammah, MD/Editor-in-Chief, Sunbird Africa Media, publishers of the pan-African weekly, The Difference at the Edgewise Reading Promotions event held at Government College, Ikorodu on May 22, 2013.

The Convener, Principals, all other guests, students, Ladies and gentlemen

This week in which we have gathered is a most important one. Even as we are here trying to better understand the importance of reading to us, the whole world is at the moment paying tribute to one of the most important contributors to the reading enterprise that we have known till date, across Nigeria and Africa. I am referring to that most illustrious writer and son of Africa, Professor Chinua Achebe. I now invite us all to stand up and pay our respects to him. May we rise up now and observe a one-minute silence in honour of the writer of great books like Things Fall Apart, Chike and the River, No Longer at Ease, There was a Country, How the Leopard Lost its Claws, Arrow of God, Beware Soul Brother, Girls at War and Morning Yet on Creation Day.

(May His soul rest in peace. Amen)

In paying tribute to Achebe and indeed the writers in the nation, we are acknowledging the basic fact that without writers there would not be books. And without books there would be nothing to read.

 Now this would be scary! A world without books? That would be a tough one as it would mean there would be no schools, no teachers, no principals, no students, no professionals and no progress as we know it today.

Look around you for a minute and make the connections. The hall in which you are sitting was designed by an architect. He read books. The teacher that stands in front of you went to school. And read books. The parents that sent you to school went to school also -where they read books. The television you watch, the mobile phones you use, the sandals on your feet, the clothes on your body, the water you drink, the food you eat, the bed on which you sleep and the language that you speak have all benefited and continue to benefit from this great world of books.

For everything in the universe to benefit from books means that there must be a very deep connection that we all have to books. Yes there is. And I would explain it.

Before humans came to the world, there were already other species on the earth. Whether you are basing your story on the Bible account or on the research of archaeologists, there is evidence that other creatures were on the earth before man came.

But man’s coming changed the entire picture. Man was Homo Sapiens - thinking man – and this was the critical difference. For the first time in the history of the universe, there was now a created being that could think!

Thinking indeed is very powerful. Hear what the Christian Bible has to say about this activity: ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he!’ Yes, thinking truly is everything.

We are in school now and we have thoughts. Someone in this hall has thoughts to be a doctor. If you follow it through and it aligns with God’s original will for you, you will truly become the doctor you are presently thinking to be.

As a growing child, former American President Bill Clinton, thought he could be President. One thing led to another and he became his thoughts. You too can become your thoughts.

Because thoughts are so powerful, there is therefore a responsibility imposed upon us to ‘guard our hearts with all diligence.’ And this is where reading comes in.

Reading is a critical feeder for our thought process. Through reading, we come in contact with information that is stored in the brain against the day it will be required to be used. For example from the first day of this school term till date, our teachers have been instructing us in line with the already defined scheme of work. At the end of the term, examinations would be conducted with questions that are taken from this scheme. It is how much and how well we have imbibed what we have been taught that helps guarantee how well we do in the examinations.

But then how exactly does this work? Two words are very important to help us understand the reading process so we can fully understand and appreciate how to awaken the reader within.

The first is recognition and the second interpretation.

To read requires that we recognize the text characters in which we are reading. For example to read in English would require a sound knowledge of the 26-alphabet English Language. But this knowledge would not automatically confer you with the ability to read in say Arabic or Chinese which have totally different alphabetical scripts.

Also, beyond alphabet recognition there is the point about the words that are available in a language and their normal or regular patterns of coordination and arrangement. For example, when the English reader meets the word Professor in a text, his idea is of a senior lecturer in a University. For the French reader, even when the ‘Professor’ is also an academic, the reference does not really confer an element of class or rank!

And on the arrangement of words, we should note that languages have different forms of ordering. While the average English sentence uses the SVO structure, several other languages use different syntactic systems in the main.

The second critical word that we need to understand is Interpretation. After recognizing words, we need to interpret them.

To interpret involves conferring meaning. And this can only be done from an already pre-assigned system of meaning values. For example, in nursery school, children are taught to recognize shapes. While the adult reader finds this funny and simplistic, the truth is that the children are at this early stage being handed critical meaning markers that would shape their lives continually. It is from these meaning markers that we all have been given that interpretation comes.

So when we talk of interpretation we are really referring to taking the words and passages that we are being asked to assign meaning to, and matching them with our pre-existent meaning markers that we had built up over time.

What reading does for us then is to help us develop a stronger interpretation base. As we continue to read, we increase the number of words that we are familiar with as well as the permissible forms in which they can be used. This is what comes in handy when we have to write new compositions and speak extemporaneously to audiences.

You cannot give what you do not have. If you do not continue to read, you are starving your data base. On the day you will be required to write that essay or make that speech you will find yourself, as we say in these parts, ‘eating your mouth’ and not bringing out the words that should be flowing. In that day, it would not be anybody else’s fault. You made your bed yourself and can now enjoy your embarrassment!

But this would not be your portion. So pick up that book now and read. And when you are done, pick up another one and read. And when you are also done, pick up yet another one and read! This is the only way to go.

Thank you for listening. And God bless you.

Richard Mammah

My Nigerian Story 1

I have a new work-in-progress ‘Nigeria: A Country, Its Origins, Inconvenient Truths and Prosperous Future.’ It is the story of Nigeria and I will be serving bits of it as I work through my blog richardmammah.blogspot.com as well as on my facebook page.

Bellow is a sample:

‘Where did Boko Haram and its later-day co-traveller, the Jama’atu Ansaril Muslimina fi Biladis Sudan (Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Africa, or simply “Ansaru”) spring from?

The jihad of Shehu Uthman dan Fodio is said to have largely side-stepped the Borno-Yobe areas that have since been confirmed to be the operational and logistical hotbed of Boko Haram. Is this then a catch-up moment for Islamists from the old Borno Emirate?

With the benefit of hindsight also, would things have been somewhat different today had the Nigerian political and security elite done much more to totally extinguish the fires of earlier conflicts like the Maitatsine uprising and the Gideon Akaluka saga?

Beyond his own words, what exactly was former Governor Sheriff Ahmed Sheriff’s association and involvement with Boko Haram?  Has that involvement now been confirmed to have fully ended?

The journey continues...'

The Joy of Reading

(Address delivered to the students, staff and guests at the Edgewise Reading Network’s Readership Promotion event held at Comprehensive High School, Isawo, Ikorodu on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, by Mr. Richard Mammah, MD, Sunbird African Media Ltd.)

Good Afternoon, Mr. Chairman, the Principal, guests, staff, students, ladies and gentlemen

Permit me to start this address by expressing my heartfelt gratitude to PreyeTambou and his team at Edgewise Reading Network for fighting so ebulliently to get this programme going. As a long-time devotee of the cause of reading promotions in Nigeria, I very well know what a yeoman’s task this has, and continues to be. I salute you.

Now, is there really joy in reading? And what kind of joy exactly would that be?

I will call to the witness box the child, aged four who has just been told his favourite bed-time story and is vigorously pleading for one more take. Is there joy in reading? Ask him!

My second witness would be that candidate in the university semester examinations who finds out in the course of answering a question that not only is he able to largely recall a lot of what he had read up from his course notes and texts, but that several other bits of information from other books and materials he had encountered at different times and seasons are easily returning to his mind at this moment to guarantee that he would no doubt get a very good grade in the course under reference. Is there joy in reading? Again, we request that you direct the question to him!

My final witness for now would be that Professor who has just finished delivering his inaugural lecture to find himself looking down - from his perch up there on the podium - at a packed hall full of applauding listeners much impressed with the depth of scholarship that he had so effortlessly handed down.

Interestingly, as I speak, my friend and fellow champion in the course of the book in Nigeria, Professor Remi Raji is at the moment putting finishing touches to a paper in that mould that he would be delivering at the Trenchard Hall of the University of Ibadan. Is there joy in reading? You can ask the good Professor, who is also the current President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), after he has finished his lecture tomorrow.

I have called up these witnesses to make the first basic point that contrary to what many of us have been made to believe reading indeed is and should be fun.

So from where do we get the idea that reading equates drudgery and what should be done to help that student who finds reading as a boring chore to get over his erroneous feeling and begin to better appreciate the great bliss that is inherently contained in the reading enterprise?

Let us begin from trying to understand what reading is in the first place?

 The Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines reading to involve a process of understanding ‘the meaning of written or printed words or symbols.’ Whether it is in decoding bus-stop directions, instructions on a drugs’ pack or sifting through several volumes of texts to prepare a research paper that would help you get that certificate or degree, the reading enterprise always involves making meaning out of the processing of characters and alphabets that the reader can recognise.

Broken down therefore, reading would simply be an interface of words, recognition and meaning. You confront a text; you recognize the words, read them together and make meaning out of them.

From sentence to paragraph, chapter to section the process does not change. It is: Words-Recognition-Meaning.

Would you sometimes meet strange words? Yes. Would some passages sometimes not read like ‘Greek?’ Yes. Would some authors not sometimes be talking above your head? Again, my answer is yes. But the solution dear student is not to run away. And to help explain this point, I will take a slight detour into the world of driving.

If you ask the average driver on our roads, he would tell you that there was a time when he really did not think he would today be driving through the streets and highways of Lagos. But having come to grips with the fact that this was one vocation that he was almost compelled to master, he had no choice but to pick up the proverbial gauntlet and get on with it. Today, the rest is history.

Happily, the reading enterprise is not that ‘oppressive.’ Looking around you, you will find that there are indeed things that you naturally like reading. You may not be the greatest fan of bed time stories but your favourite could be poetry. You may just tolerate biographies but comics would make your day anytime!   And this indeed would be our first point in joy-reading: read a lot of what naturally excites and interests you! Indeed, in some situations, it would be from reading and continuing to read more and more of the stuff that interests you that you would find readily recognizable cross-reference material with which you would better explain yourself when you get up higher on the educational and career planes where the focus is on depth and breadth.

Let me illustrate this point some more with three references. One, as a journalist, who had to write an opinion essay on the level of corruption in the ruling People’s Democratic Party a few years ago when Ahmadu Ali was Chairman of the arty and Baba Olusegun Obasanjo was President, I drew upon my fictional knowledge of the story of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ to caption my essay; ‘Ali, Baba and the Forty Thieves.’

Second, as a copy-writer for an advertising agency several years back, I chanced upon a spectacular piece of word-play in an advert about the satellite product, Capsat that took its bearing from the historical saga of the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. It read: ‘If Napoleon had a Capsat, he would not have lost the Battle of Waterloo!’  I was impressed.

Days later, I was commissioned to write a copy for the public relations firm, Imprint Communications, and with the Capsat copy still reeling around my head for inspiration, I penned these lines: ‘Many years ago, dinosaurs roamed the face of the earth. We know about this today because they left their Imprint! Needless to say, my own word-play involved matching the name of the company with the saga of dinosaurs that had since gone extinct but whose tales I had read in some of my voracious life-long searches for story after story to devour!  So do not let anyone discourage you that you are reading too much of the stuff you like to read! Rather, politely tell them that ‘it would come handy someday!’

 That settled, our final point would have to do with what you have to read but do not like. Being in school as we currently are, I am sure that you will find situations like that. To address this, you could adopt one of two possible responses.  The first would be to appreciate the truth that there is indeed no hurdle under the sun that cannot be confronted and scaled. For example, people say that it is almost impossible learning new languages after childhood. Well, this speaker did learn to speak and write Deutsch at age 36! And he does not have the gift for languages per se as is apparent with his continuing battles with French and Yoruba. Beni!

The answer really to coping with tough and difficult reading encounters would be in finding an appropriate method with which to prevail.

In this, one first point that must be made is for the reader to recognize that escape would not be the answer. While the temptation would be strong to damn the subject because you do not enjoy it presently, the truth really is that it could be all-too-critical for your future that you must secure a credit pass in or you could find out in the course of time that ‘the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’

This in a sense is the story of my relationship with Geography. After having dropped the subject because I had considered it ‘uninteresting,’ events and circumstances made me to do a u-turn in my final year in secondary school and I signed-in Geography as one of my Certificate Examinations subjects. I then proceeded to break it down to subjects and sections as contained in the syllabus, gave the subject more time in my private study time-table and thankfully also, the subject teacher, Mr. Kwame Ayekpa, kindly availed me all of his time and resources (including meals at his home in the staff quarters!). The result was stunning!        

So it comes down finally to the environment within which you read. Again, I repeat? Would there be difficult moments? You bet. Would reading be boring sometimes? Correct. Is it okay to shut the book and take a walk? Absolutely!

But even as you have your way and take that break when you must, you must also equally pay attention to that soft, nudging call from your books as they gently implore you long after you have rested: ‘can we please return to our world of study ...and fun! Respond to the prompting and you will ultimately find out like many others before you that truly, ‘reading maketh a man.’

I thank you for your patience and attention.

Introducing Books.com

The new rave of the moment in the Nigerian books sector is Books.com.

It is an eight-page pullout published in the forthnightly pan-African newspaper, The Difference, by Sunbird African media.

In it are interviews, reviews, profiles, news and other titbits on the books sector in Nigeria. Ask your vendor in Accra, Lagos, Abuja, Owerri, Benin, Asaba, Onitsha, Lome, Cotonou, Abidjan today for it.

Reading Promotions Conference in September

The Reading Centre, in conjunction with Options Bookhouse, is convening a Conference of Reading Promotions Organisations in Nigeria.

The event holds at the University of Ibadan on Thursday, September 13, 2012.

It is holding on the sidelines of the Ibadan Bookfair which is being hosted by the Nigerian Bookfair Trust (NBFT).

Stay tuned for more reports on the event as the build-up intensifies.

For an end to fagging

I was at a Parents-Teachers Association meeting a few days ago and sat there wringing my hands over what we sometimes do to ourselves.

As you make your bed so do you lie on it that wise maxim reads. As a people and as a country, we are indeed getting a lot of what we ask and prepare for. So why blame the gods?

The discussion in question had to do with the practice of bullying and fagging. And as I sat there listening to speaker after speaker make their case for or against the practice, I heard different perspectives on the matter.

Some parents were bothered that it was a brutalizing experience and wanted the school to put its foot down and totally outlaw the practice while for others, they cited their own history and what they termed the natural seniority pecking (and I dare to add here for good measure, brutality too!) order in the larger society to justify why the practice existed and why perhaps it should continue to be tolerated.

I listened and waited to hear someone tell me about the pristine benefits of the system. But none came.

The world in which we live in today is clearly not that of yesterday. A lot has indeed changed and continues to change. And it is indeed only societies that very well appreciate this truth and strive to work with it that will get the best out of their own lived experience.

As a teen attending one of the government colleges in our country in the decade of the 70s and 80s, I was seriously bullied and fagged and it truly did not make sense to me and still does not today what benefit I was supposed to get and had indeed gotten from that experience.

On the contrary, what I got was discouragement and pain that it has taken the grace of God to help me work out.

I am therefore at a loss as to why parents and schools would continue to hide behind one finger and continue to condone and advocate a practice that they seriously cannot point to its benefits.

I think it is laziness to ask us to condone things because they always were there or that we can do nothing about them. The truth is that many of the things we think were always there were really not? Was fagging really always there? My understanding of history does not support this.

Relatedly, is it indeed true that there are things that we really cannot change if we set our hearts to do so? Evidence around us also points to the contrary.

The nearest that has come to an intelligent defense of these obnoxious practices is that it prepares the children to be tough. Perhaps they are right, but is this the only way to toughen children? If we must toughen our kids can we not work out more ennobling systems and clearly measured and beneficial structures to do that?

And then we must ask the other point whether it should indeed be a policy to go all out there and just toughen them for toughening sake. Do the streets in which they live today not naturally hand them tough choices? Does life not throw one tough spell or the other from time to time even as they grow up? What indeed is to be gained from a state policy to just go out there and toughen them? What is the content of the toughening programme. What is the end result?

 When I look around me, I see the literal example of what Jesus meant when he said that I see  the literal example of what Jesus meant when he said that ‘I see my people going about as sheep without shepherd.’ This I believe is the bane of our society and why relatively puerile debates like this and unhelpful perspectives as the ones I am addressing now continue to fester.

In countries around the world, people and systems are put together at all levels of the development matrix by their properly burdened leaders, read shepherds, to meet and achieve set national goals and objectives that are derived from the lived experience of the people.

When Israel for example found out that it was surrounded by relatively hostile neighbours that would rejoice vigorously over its extinction, it elevated security and compulsory military service for all of its adult population to the level of state policy. When India and China saw that they needed to catch up with the rest of the world, they went for cultural nationalism and longer hours and years in school, You just do not enshrine a policy for history’s sake, you do so with a specific appreciation of what you want to achieve in mind. And it must be quantifiable and measurable.

Maybe it is time some parents look back to see how maladjusted they yet remain today, some of which may be traceable to some of the brutal experiences of their past, fagging inclusive? Maybe it is time for some forward-thinking university to commission a study on the short and long-term negative implications of the practice on our national economy and the psyche of our people? Maybe it is time to check and trace the connections between such emasculating and dehumanizing practices and the continuing inability of our people to stand up for their rights, speak truth to power and tame the excesses of leaders, which has led to the deepening of other social vices as unbridled violence, corruption and non-accountability. For if as seniors and school fathers and mothers are permitted, and as is the case now, even encouraged by parents to get away with literal murder because it is a fact of life that ‘seniors would be seniors,’ why would our seniors in government and our offices not think they can continue in the self-same mould in which we had cast them?

On the contrary however, societies that would be great do set up very high and ennobling standards and strive to reach them. When the average accident happens in Lagos, you see crowds form in o no time with almost no intention to do anything practical about the victim! This is not the case with societies that take human life more seriously. When someone adulterates fake drugs in Onitsha, he gets a chieftaincy title to boot. In China, it is the death sentence for corruption, and in Abuja, Senior Advocates of Nigeria fall over themselves to clinch the juicy account! We have badly made our beds!

What about an alternative schema where we teach the strong, read seniors, to stand up for the weak, read juniors? What about teaching these uppity upstarts (excuse my French) whose only claim to power and privilege in the school environment is the historical circumstance that they were born first or got admission before the juniors that real grooming and success in life which they had come to school in the first place to be equipped for is more than skin deep? What about beginning to model for them, even at this formative stage, that the doctrine of ‘equality before the law’ - which is a critical sine qua non for effective democratic practice- is far more than one line in their Civics and Government textbooks.  And finally, why do we not elect to fill their minds and heads with liberating visions and possibilities of the life not yet lived rather than compel them to stagnate in old moulds that have essentially not led us very far? The choice dear reader is ours to make.

Children's books on my mind

Two meetings in recent days with some stakeholders in the books and reading promotions circuit in Nigeria have set the stage for this entry.

The first was with Mrs. Moore and the Bookfair committee for the annual Lagos Television-organised Lagos Bookfair and the other was with Mrs. Funke Adeniji of Achievers Educational Services.

First LTV. Regular readers of this blog would know that I do not only make a point of duty to follow on bookfair events in Nigeria, but that I also go the extra mile to both critique their output and make recommendations on how they can do better. It is in this mould that I decided to pay the LTV organisers of the Back-to-School leaning Lagos Book Fair a visit at the close of the month.

The first thing that I find impressive about the LTV event is that they have presently reconstituted their LOC to ensure an even better event this year. Great. Talking with two members of the team, I am encouraged by the fact that they have presently begun to take steps to deal with the content shortfall of that event which I commented on after viiting the fair last year.

Second is the fact that the current team appears to be more disposed to receive and consider inputs from outside the LTV enclosure.

As  for Mrs Adeniji and the Achievers project, I had been informed about her project on a visit to my son’s school. His proprietress, Mrs. Oladeji, who very well knows of my interest in books and reading had mentioned her to me in the course of that visit and I promptly decided to see her.

The visit was very rewarding.

On the heels of planning for a Conference of Reading Promotions Organisations to hold on the heels of the Ibadan Bookfair on September, 13, 2012, I had been on the lookout for organisations that were currently doing impactful work in the Nigerian reading promotions circuit.

Seeing and talking with Adeniji confirmed that the idea of the conference was indeed a most timely one. Before meeting adeniji, a second recent confirmation for this had come out of discussions with the University of Lagos Chapter of the Reading Asociation of Nigeria (RAN) and Dr. Chiji Akoma of the University of Villanova who is currently involved with a reading project in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria. I shall return to the Yola project in a future post.

Back to Adeniji and my impressions from our meeting. With an office in the Yaba area of Lagos, Achievers Educational Services is engaged in bookselling, library development and consulting. What had actually taken me there was their novel reading initiative and this is what I found out.

The project is structured as a resource development initiative for participating school children built around books. The Achievers team visits schools and signs on interested ones to their combined library development and reading promotions resource initiative.

It involves helping schools develop and stock their libraries, scheduled reading and resource development sessions with the children and developing their capacities in the areas of feedback-giving, independent reading, book reviews, ethics, accountability, the use of the library and creative writing and expression.

And would you read better if you are the subject of the text?

My encounter with the promoters of the personalized book concept in nigeria is the motivation for this post. Here is how it works: to get children reading voraciously, put them and their associated environment into  the content of the books.

Project Coordinator, Uncle Jeff, is sure doing some work here. Keep it up sir.

And CORA makes a Hay trip

Through a facebook post, I learnt that the Committee for Relevant Art is observing the Hay Book fairthis year.

This is great. Exposure and training would continue to be given elements in the bookfair arena and other Nigerian bookfair organisers would do well to similarly broaden their diet.

What does Cape Town offer this year?

There may be a debate about whether between NIBF and CTBF which is the biggest African book event. But it must not be reduced to the pedestrian logic involved when the PDP and the ANC jostle for the political party captainship in Africa.

It is rather content and impact that is king.

While NIBF has been growing notably its Indian link even in the face of reduced governmental and sub-regional participation which it needs to check), Cape Town with an eye on impact and the bottom-line - and hopefully yet with the continued strong support of the global bookfair avatar, Messers Frankfurt Bookfair  GMBH - has recently adjusted its fair to hold every two years.

The Return of ZIBF

Great news, a smaller version of the once imperial Zimbabwe International Bookfair  (yes, I was lodged at the Hotel Ambassador during my 2000 visit!) now takes place in the traditional July/August period.

This much was confirmed to this correspondent at the 2012 NIBF by African Publishers Network Executive Secretary, Tainie Mundondo. As she put it ‘the good times are back again.’

And this is also praying that President Mugabe gives that country an even bigger break so some of us would yet find pleasure in visiting and participating in one of Africa’s most impact-ful book convocations till date.

And this time I plan to lodge at the even more majestic Monomatapa Hotel!!