submitted by babatunde omogbai

I grew up with parents that had personal libraries, in a middle class family in the western part of Nigeria. Reading at an early age was a criteria to getting gifts and presents but the presents were simply more books.

We read ( my sisters & I) until we started rushing out in the mornings to go get the morning papers for our dad, all because we wanted to read the cartoons and be the first to finish the puzzles in the morning papers.

Our mum was the African collector while her husband was the ‘Oyinbo’ collector, which gave us the children a wide range of books to read till we went adventurous with our quest for new authors.

Couple of books from our formative years and till date I still try to picture Thumbelina, Alice in wonder land (…the Cheshire cat), Ali-baba & the forty thieves, famous five, secret seven, tintin, asterix & Obelix etc. We graduated and read some more books, Richard the lion heart, Jane Eyre to mention a few.

The African authors we read were also as intriguing as their foreign counterparts though we could relate more with the information (except for telephone conversation.. the poem).Even though we had never visited these foreign lands and never experienced their culture first hand we did understand there was/is a great difference in our ways of life (.. why do the English have tea and biscuits late in the afternoons, why would they serve caviar as an expensive dish and why are all the men in M&B either tall dark and handsome TDH with broad shoulders and the women , blue eyed blondes or with heads full of dark hair.)

Growing years in these libraries were interesting and the African stories were so real that we didn’t have to pause to imagine what the author was/is describing, and there were always questions to ask (…asked my mum once why the entire village wanted to see the soiled white clothe & its importance in ‘the virgin’, why will someone say ‘the beautiful ones are not yet born’ or the adventures of a young man in ‘the director’, …please did any one read Jaguar Nana.) 

Books were the only imaginative windows to other worlds, culture and lifestyle then. They open up your mind and always give you food for thought. They help shape your thoughts and give you the pedestal to form your own opinion/ideas of situations and issues.

Once read in one of the history of the European Church, that in the advent of the print press, people were no longer going to church to be told about God but were in church with questions that needed answers. (… They were there to have intelligent debates)

We need to bring back the reading culture, it was fun for me and I guess for my other siblings as back in the days you had nothing to talk about except the different characters in the various books, comics you‘ve read.


First read about Nick Carter (…not the musician) in a book and he was an American character like the British James Bond.