[my Maternal Grandmother ] Was A Teacher

I Think, In Common With A Lot Of Novelists, I Wasn't The Most Athletic Guy At School.

Things That We Have To Really Dare Ourselves To Do Come Quite Naturally To Others.

What Is An Adventure? That Depends On Where You Are Starting From. Little Girls In Your Country, They Hide In The Gap Between The Washing Machine And The Refrigerator And They Make Believe They Are In The Jungle, With Green Snakes And Monkeys All Around Them. Me And My Sister, We Used To Hide In A Gap In The Jungle, With Green Snakes And Monkeys All Around Us, And Make Believe That We Had A Washing Machine And A Refrigerator. You Live In A World Of Machines And You Dream Off Things With Beating Hearts. We Dream Of Machines, Because We See Where Beating Hearts Have Left Us.

I Was Astonished To Find That The Positions My Grandfather Had Defended Were Now Overgrown And Entangled With Trees And Thorns. I Suppose I Had Developed A Sense Of Reverence For The Locations He Described In His Memoirs And Letters - The Forts And The High Emplacements. I Had Expected Them To Have Been Preserved In Some Way.

Is It My Fault If I Do Not Look Like An English Girl And I Do Not Talk Like A Nigerian? Well, Who Says An English Girl Must Have Skin As Pale As The Clouds That Float Across Her Summers? Who Says A Nigerian Girl Must Speak In Fallen English...?