Nigerian scholar, playwright, poet and former diplomat Professor Iorwuese Hagher has charged African writers to prioritise justice by giving marginalised voices a central place.
He said justice and equity are vital for freeing the downtrodden and severely deprived rural communities.
Professor Hagher made this call in his keynote address at the Benue Book and Arts Festival in Makurdi, titled “Books and Arts as Weapons of Mass Liberation.”
He emphasised the need for African writers to chart a path toward self-determination and challenge the global status quo of unipolarity, along with the legacies of imperialism, as seen in recent conflicts like the Hamas-Israel and Russia-Ukraine wars.
The playwright added that knowledge is power, and there is no greater cultural expression than the shared understanding of culture conveyed through books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs.
According to him, books are the guardians of culture, serving as the foundations of culture by selectively determining what is essential, dominant, and acceptable and what is fringe, unimportant, and insignificant.
A people’s culture, he said, embodies everything in their collective way of life, encompassing the arts, artefacts, morals, materials, and lifestyles of the people, including their technology, perspectives on life, and daily experiences.
“For hundreds of years, the West monopolised knowledge and dominated critical discussions, shaping the philosophical foundations of the slave trade, slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. However, the book revolution has broken down cognitive barriers, enabling us to challenge Western cognitive empires and the coloniality of knowledge.
“We need our writers, artists, and intellectuals to understand that the war against racism, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and neo-imperialism is not over. African writers must be warriors in the unfinished struggles for liberation from hunger, poverty, destitution, dispossession, and identity crises. The words in our books are the mass weapon for re-worlding the world.
“We need our writers and actionists in arts and culture to chart a path towards self-determination and challenge the global status quo of unipolarity and the legacies of imperialism, as evidenced in the recent Hamas-Israel conflict and Russia-Ukraine wars. Here in Nigeria, we are confronted with the tragic internal displacement, dispossession, and expropriation of our people’s lands by ethnic militias and governments without compensation.
“As weapons of mass instruction and liberation, our books must bring marginalised voices to the centre and prioritise justice and equity as critical resistance to free our downtrodden and severely deprived rural communities,” he said.
Professor Hagher noted that the Makurdi Festival of Books and Culture has become a wind of change blowing across the River Benue, creating a radical shift that has transformed Nigeria’s literary landscape and opened possibilities unimaginable to previous generations of authors like himself.
“For centuries, the flow of information has been one-sided. For decades, the only path for writers like me was to publish in the West. Even as late as 2022, when I published my ANA award-winning novel, The Conquest of Azenga, in Nigeria, the New York Times Literary Review refused to publish its excellent reviews, written by one of the world’s respected literary critics. Their reason was that the novel had not been published in the United States.
“Africa has changed all this. We do not need the West to tell our stories to us, nor do we wish to continue being ‘discovered.’ Our writers are now discovering the West and telling the West how we found them.
“African writers and their agents are signing deals with African publishing houses, trading book rights, and collaborating on everything from editing and proofreading to cover design. Makurdi has become a significant hub for book production and activities, where high-level books are produced to global standards in small studios.”
