“Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise. . .” — Ecclesiastes
Nigeria’s literary X comes alive a few times every year. And it’s a carnival. You feel a thrill just following the thing. But it’s even more exhilarating to join, to have an opinion—you feel triumphant, like Ulysses after he cut up the suitors. People get blocked, timeline gets clogged, the blind have their reasons unchanged, and the seeing lose their sight and miss their way.
The thing has come early this year, with a fury. Before the fire began, I had seen the tweet by Fortune Amor (@foxypiano) where they offered to share a link to scanned copies of the books in the Heinemann African Writers Series. I thought it an over-wise thing to do. But I did not expect the reactions to come this thick, this quick (almost 8000 tweets on the subject, according to X, last I checked).
The tweet has been deleted; “i am saddened i am in this position. i have been accused of being a ‘criminal’ and i have deleted the link,” Amor wrote on X. The catalyst for those accusations was a tweet by the writer Molara Wood: “That Google Drive link of 200+ novels in the Heinemann African Writers Series is piracy on a grand scale. Truly surreal to see someone so brazenly offer to share it, & for so many to express interest in getting the link. Gross violation of IP by ‘supporters’ of African writing.
Refusing to gree, one @suavamente, quoting Wood’s tweet, shared their own link to 200 digital copies of books in the series. At the time of writing, the tweet by Wood is at 925,000 views. The shared link has been saved by 10,000 people. And the devil goes on cooking.
Elnathan John, Lola Shoneyin, Tade Ipadeola, Wale Lawal, Romeo Oriogun . . . all the big guns have had their say on the matter. As many have said, piracy is an ethical issue. It is illegal. But many also agree that there are other sides to the conversation.
I don’t see any reason to shun ethics. But I believe that—in our thinking about this issue (and related ones)—a circumscribed place is possible within the ethical sphere where what would be wrong in some other case is justified both by circumstance and by necessity. I think that in light of a peculiar circumstance and in the interest of a particular aim—in this case, the procuring of a proper education (cultural and literary)—a person may read certain books, however they happen to come upon them.
**
Everyone agrees we live in a broken country (I speak of Nigeria). But brokenness has been largely equated with poverty, with the absence of monetary capacity to purchase books. True, the country is in bad shape economically. And that is a fact to keep in mind.
But though money is a problem for me and the class of people that I am drawing up a room for here, they are the kind of people who, if they have it, will use their last-card to buy books they need. But the country has more than one k-leg; every one of its ten thousand wheels is wobbly.
**
Sometime in 2024, I was undergoing an informal mentorship through conversations with a writer in the United States. He recommended Juan Ramón Jiménez’s The Complete Perfectionist to me one day out of the blue. I would learn much from it as a young poet and it would help to cleanse the palate of my thinking, he said.
This was my response:
I started reading your first book a few hours ago. Finally found it on Internet Archive. The library allows you to borrow a book for a certain amount of time. You can borrow it again whenever you like. But there are also online libraries where one can download books: I wonder whether it is ethical, but I don’t bother much about it, because—for me—a writer writes to be read. I buy books (sometimes with the last change I have). I have a room full of second-hand books. But I cannot always find what I really need to dig into. I have been reading Geoffrey Hill, for instance. I am not sure there is anywhere in Nigeria where, by ‘chance’, I will find a book by Geoffrey Hill.
The first thing to be pointed out from my email: some books are available, and some books are not, and often it is the books needed for a person’s cultural or literary development (their education) that are not available. In this case, I am not talking just as a reader who enjoys literature (in that case, I should read whatever I can find). I am talking as someone who is after a certain cultivated nature and seeking things that will help them better their craft, so that they can do the work cut out for them.
In recommending the Jiménez to me, my writer-mentor was giving me something I needed to grow, just as they knew their own books served the same purpose (reorienting the course of my life as a poet, tuning my ear). Hill perhaps has been the greatest influence on the exercising of my mind. These writers, and many more, are a need. They are like bread, like water, almost like air.
“There are so many fine and substantial things in the world at any one time, but they are not in touch with each other,” wrote Goethe, and this is a tragedy. The success of “the magical years” that characterised the first generation of Nigerian writers owed a lot to such beautiful things having contact. Achebe and Soyinka and Okigbo and co were in touch with one another and in touch with great thought and great literature from around the world.
The tragedy of the Nigerian state today is that it wields a pervasive force to prevent that contact, which is doubly tragic because it cannot thrive any other way. And when we talk about the lack of access, it is this second sense—of keeping you away from those among whom (and the fine things to which) you belong (and which belong to you)—that is meant, as I point out in that email: “I am not sure there is anywhere in Nigeria where, by ‘chance,’ I will find a book by Geoffrey Hill”.
**
On my birthday a few years ago, I was at Ouida to buy books but did not get the books I was interested in. I was going to get Teju Cole’s collections of essays (which, of course, are to be read by any Nigerian in the thinking business); I did not see any. I got The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (a good buy, though I knew its importance because I had read it online years ago) and saw a few collections (by Kayo Chingonyi and Nick Makoha), which I bought. Some of the books I bought I bought to fulfil righteousness; they are not a necessity for me by any means.
It may be argued that bookshops cannot stock up books that are not in demand. At Ouida, the shelves were filled, but they were mostly contemporary African novels, political books, books by star-scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and popular fiction. It’s a business, and no one starts one to lose money. If we are talking values, we have to also ask why there is no cultural taste for older African literature or better poetry (like those by Seamus Heaney) in a country of 200 million people (for years, Rupi Kaur was a top-selling author at RovingHeights). The point is this: because the public has the taste it does, those of us who are after something different have nowhere to go to be served.
It’s so bad that even if you decided to order the books from overseas (and most, even the wealthy, cannot do this for more than a few books every year because shipping costs are prohibitive), you still may not get the book. The writer who recommended Jiménez sent me a copy of their latest book. I am still waiting. My chapbook was published in 2023, I touched it in 2024 when my friend brought it from the US for me. They kept returning it at the port.
This is our peculiar circumstance.
**
A possible retort to my case thus far might be that it is selfish, one-sided, and has not factored in the writer. My answer, as I also said in the email, would be that a writer writes to be read.
Every writer is looking for readers of a certain quality, and when they find them, it rarely matters (if it ever does) how such readers found their work. The goal of a cultural education is to become a reader who is worthy of the authors that one has read (again, however one came into contact with their book). Such a reader must also write, since it is in their prose or their poetry that they are to pay back the blessing of the literature that they’ve loved and imbibed.
The value of such reader-writers to us as a people (as Nigerians, Africans) far exceeds the means by which they get the books that made them good readers, because the culture takes dividends. Remarkably, these readers have cropped up in recent years. The scandal, though, is that without the kind of “piracy” that I am arguing for here, such readers cannot exist in this country. In fact, the productive capacity of Nigeria’s entire cultural economy will dwindle to a dot or two without it. The historians of the future will have to account for how much of the critical renaissance (as well as the fabled golden age of Nigerian poetry) that we have been witnessing in the past five years is due to shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive and Z-Library, but neither is of marginal significance.
Once this is understood, we begin to see the need to order and marshal our values in a way that comprehends the sanctity of that circumscribed place.
**
In 2022, I bought A Decade of Tongues from Mr Emeka, a wiry secondhand bookseller behind Lagos State University. (It could be argued that secondhand booksellers are responsible for keeping our reading appetite up in the country.) I read it and began a piece. It took a few years for the essay to appear. In that time I was able to access other books by the poet (through shadow libraries and Internet Archive), and I realized that some of my opinions were not on point. I rewrote the entire piece and it became “J. P. Clark: A Poet and His Phases,” which appeared in this magazine and is perhaps the only critical piece on the poet by a writer of my generation. I have written other pieces of similar origins.
I know that I am not alone.
And if Clark-Bekederemo were to be alive, I doubt it would matter to him. The writer-mentor, to whom I confessed that I had read all their work the same way, did not bother about it once. On the contrary, what they often said was, “You know my work so well”. They added that one day they hoped I would visit their home, so they’d give me actual copies of their work.
**
Can we argue that circumstance and the work that has to be done makes it necessary for some readers to access scanned PDFs of books in the Heinemann African Writers Series through a shadow library or by following a link to a Google Drive?
Wherever you stand on the debate, it is inarguable that books in that series, for the bulk of us who do cultural work in this country, are hard to come by in the traditional ways. And yet the work has to be done.
It has to be done for the life of the culture. Jack Mapanje, Alex La Guma, and all the other writers whose books are curated in that doc need to be read. The young African critic reads Geoffrey Hill and Clive James but it’s partly so that he can read Okigbo and Clark-Bekederemo well. So that he can better understand his culture and his own people. Engagement is not possible without knowledge. How am I to be worthy of Mbella Sonne Dipoko if I cannot find Black and White in Love and read it? And if they are not read, to whom do they matter, and for how long?
What’s more, the larger culture has to warm up to these authors, and it is our job to get people interested. It’s a give-and-take situation. The person in search of learning takes where they find so that they can give. As things stand, giving is impossible otherwise.
But let me offer, before I drop my mic, a caveat.
Discerning readers would know that I am not arguing for the kind of thing that people do on X and TikTok where they ask for and share links to Damilare Kuku’s books. Let me make it clear that those readers have a value problem, because Kuku’s books are available and are quite cheap (though most of the copies on the streets are pirated, and we may ask whether readers who buy pirated copies on culverts in Ajah are doing the right thing). Likewise, most contemporary African novels are available. I will be a thief if, because I can access Ghostroots by Pemi Aguda on some site for free, or Nomad by Oriogun, I go and download it and say I want to do the culture a favour.
People like Amor also need to be more circumspect. Christ said to shout on the rooftops what He said in the closet, but that is never without its costs. There is something “surreal” about Amor’s “brazenness,” as Wood noted; it’s almost a kind of foolishness.
Finally, thanks ought to be given for Olongo and Archivi.ng. No reason to go looking around for Black Orpheus when the copies are digitized and can be used “legitimately” by anyone who wants to. How might we do the same for books in the African Writers Series, and for other works (including films) in that category?
Na the real question be that. E
