As I was saying....

The sunlight streams through the slightly chilly breeze and I make my way up the steps through the ornate carved doorway into the church. As I move forward, I notice the dreadlocked ma, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt of doubtful cleanliness, standing just within the portico, outside the door, who grins and says "Morning brother"in a patois tinged tone, as he clasps his hand in front of him in a mock- approximation of what Presidents do, while listening to their peers at a bilateral press conference.

I pause at the doorway to collect the Order of Srvice from a grinning usher and just then hear some commotion at the door behind me. An African family have just arrived and Dreadlocks, my friend is objecting loudly to the teenage son entering the church with as he puts it "his trousers around his ankles". The parents stride ahead pretending they have nothing to do with the boy, and the boy tries to do the same, but Dreads is having none of it, he chases after him, up the aisle, almost into the main body of the church, and finally, the boy, defeated, pulls up his trousers, sparing the congregation the sight of his striped boxers, while his sisters titter and the first bars of the opening hymn ring out.....

News that the londonpaper is to close fills me with a sense of glee, perhaps, now the other free evening paper, London Lite which seemed to have been set up in direct competition to thelondonpaper will also now close and all our train carriages, stations and streets will be the cleaner for it. Besides it will be good to enter a station on the way from work without first having to run the gauntlet of vendors pressing the rival papers insistently on you.... I do feel sad for the vendors, who mostly appeared to be from the Indian sub-continent or African-whether this was a planned recruitment strategy or merely the function of relatively poor pay, I never knew. Now they will have to find new arduous immigrant work in the straitened economic times. I wonder if it will also affect the cleaners as there will be a lot less rubbish to pick up...

In Nigeria, the ripples from the closure of some of the 5 biggest banks continue. In the Financial Times this morning, I read that the EFCC is now to go after the internal and external auditors of the banks in question. Will this be the Nigerian Enron? Hardly, knowing how my beloved country operates. It will probably all fizzle out in a few weeks, but the reactions, predictably are amusing- there are the usual insinuations about ethnic sentiment on the part of the Central Bank Governor. So he, northern prince of Kano that he is, is for instance, accused of a vendetta against Southern banks. Yet of the 25 banks left standing, only 1 could at best be described as a Northern bank. So isn't it inevitable that the numbers of those culled would reflect this? Then there are the "It is the work of my jealous enemies" group, insisting that they shall be vindicated, seeing as they are holy people. Reading some of the comments on the scoop breaking NEXTwebsite, I reimagine the crash of Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock and co, this time with the bankers insisting divine justfication and their manicured wives holding nightlong prayer and fasting sessions in their plush 5th Avenue apartments....

I've just finished Sarah Waters book, The Night watch, longlisted for the Booker Prize this year. I enjoyed it, as it was brilliantly evocative of a pivotal era in British history, the immediate post-war period with the decay of many large estates and families. Although it is billed as a ghost story, I didn't find it scary at all, but then that's often the case with me- somehow, a horror film can evoke the sense of fear where a book can't. And yet, I'm often transported to different worlds by books, so there must be something about the failure of my literary imagination.

Next up on my list, a clutch of recent African writing, which to my shame, I have been too busy before now to read. But I have gone to Daunt's and ordered them and this morning will be picking up, in no particular order, Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly a collection of what I am told are jewel-like stories, polished and glittering, set in contemporary Zimbabwe, Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters Street following 4 Nigerian prostitutes in Belgium, Adaobi Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You By Chance, probably the first novel on the 419 phenomenon and Brian Chikwava's Harare North, detailing the lives of Zimbabwean immigrants in London, which apparently they call Harare North... By the way, where are the new Nigerian male writers? There's Adichie, Atta, Unigwe,Nwaubani, Shoneyin,Agary on the female side....have we men been rendered voiceless?

Meanwhile across the ocean, poor Brother Barack is under fire as millions of uninsured Americans vociferously attack his plans to give them cover (I read that somehwere, can't remember where, and it made me chuckle. But seriously, the whole debate lays bare the difference in culture between the US and Europe, especially the throwing around of the word "socialist" as if it were a particularly slimy and dangerous thing to be....

So the plan is to resume blogging, once a week, every week, without fail......hope it works, or rather, the demands of the day job permit

Writing for radio workshop Nigeria

Sent to me by a friend of a friend...will blog properly later

Are you interested in writing for radio and live in Nigeria?

British Council Nigeria would like to pilot a programme to promote literature development through radio. This programme will be established as legacy activity following the Crossing Borders online mentoring project. It is further stimulated by feedback from the Beyond Borders Festival of Contemporary African writing (October 2006) outlining the need for more holistic literature development policies to continue to provide professional development opportunities for writers and to support the development of new audiences for writing.

The programme will provide critical support from UK-based professional writers who will deliver 5-day creative writing workshops in Nigeria in March 2008. We hope to produce, record and air some of the selected creative pieces in collaboration with a broadcast partner in Nigeria later in 2008.

We are looking to work with 48 writers across Nigeria on this pilot phase. We would like to engage writers who are keen to develop new skills in radio writing that explore exciting topical issues. We invite applications from writers who must:
• be Nigerian citizens
• be aged between 18 and 40 years
• be experienced writers with a portfolio of original work and a strong interest in short fiction, the use of dialogue, and narrative voice
• have an excellent standard of written English and be able to use its idioms creatively
• have a strong commitment to developing their work and that of other writers, through participating in creative writing networks
• be able to dedicate the time to complete writing assignments by agreed deadlines and fully engage in all aspects of the process
• be available for the live workshops (March 2008 exact dates to be confirmed)
• possess word processing and basic Internet access skills

Former Crossing Borders participants are encouraged to apply.

If you are interested in applying for a place please send:
- a one-page letter of interest with an original idea for a short story (theme and narrative treatment) and a statement explaining how you expect to benefit from participating in the programme
- a one-page Curriculum Vitae with your name, age, gender, contact details and details of any publications
- 2 sides of A4 prose writing – can be an existing story or novel extract. Remember that the first sentence has to attract and hold our attention!

The closing date for applications is 30 January 2008. Successful applicants will be notified by 18 February 2008.
All applications should be sent or e-mailed to:

The Project Coordinator (Connected Africa Arts)
British Council
20 Thompson Avenue
Ikoyi
Lagos
Nigeria

E-mail: Olamipo.bello@ ng.britishcounci l.org

Back on the blog, KLM rubbish, Booker longlist and TED Global talks

I haven’t blogged in a while, not because there was nothing to blog about- what with Yaradua’s “independence” moves in Nigeria, foot and mouth scares on farms and chaos at Heathrow in the UK and the alternately infuriating and depressing news of TV star Funmi Iyanda’s brush with the “fashion police” in Lagos, there’s been more than plenty to blog about. But it seems that the sunny weather we’ve had in the last week or so has lulled me into a state of lethargy. That combined with work where lots of colleagues are on holiday making things pretty tight and the relentless march of friends, relations and friends of friends and relations of relations visiting from Nigeria has pushed blogging way down the list of priorities but anyways here I am

I read the increasingly vociferous complaints about how shoddy services at Heathrow were in the last few weeks but took it all with a pinch of salt until I had a reality check the other day. I was seeing off an uncle flying back to Nigeria. First I tried to check him in online so that we could avoid waking up at 4 am to catch the 8 50 flight. The KLM website wouldn’t let me and I finally rang up the contact telephone number only to be told that the online system was down and check in over the phone would be to Amsterdam only so he would have to retrieve his luggage in Amsterdam and check it in again to Lagos. And so we lost a potential extra hour of sleep. Then he made the mistake of not weighing his luggage and so as soon as I arrived I asked a member of BAA staff where the weighing scales were only to be sent off in completely the wrong direction. We finally arrived at KLM business class and the attitude of the staff at the check in was atrocious. The two women were engaged in an obviously-more-important-than-work chat and ignored us standing there for a while. When I finally, ostentatiously cleared my throat, one of them caught my eye and with an “I suppose I better deal with you since you’re not going away” look sauntered over to the desk and started up the computer. Just as she was about to start the check in process, she reminded us that this was the Business class check in not economy. My uncle replied that he was well aware of this, only to have her supervisor retort sharply “A lot of people make that mistake, so she was only checking” The aggression seemed so unnecessary at 6 30 in the morning and in what was supposed to be business class that I asked her to please mind her business and let us get on with checking in which obviously did not go down well…. Then there was all the drama about the security queue. You could carry a laptop as long as it was not in its case through the barrier but then it did not matter how many bags you had subsequently. So my uncle had to take his laptop out, squeeze the laptop case into his briefcase but once he was through the barriers it was fine to take it out and put the laptop back in its case- I struggled to see the rationale for this….All in all I finally saw why people were complaining- I mean I wasn’t travelling but by the time I waved him through the security barrier I was exhausted…

I’ve just finished Cuban writer Abilio Estevez’s Distant Palaces and it suddenly struck me why Havana had seemed so familiar when I visited it a few years ago. It was the echoes of the ancient quarters of Lagos Island that did it- the crumbling Italianate mansions, the strong sense of a syncretic Catholicism, the salt tinged organic breezes of Marina and the Malecon against a backdrop of decay and vibrant human living. Reading Estevez, his descriptions of Havana could have been set in Lagos Island….

On the subject of writing, Helon Habila has an interesting piece on what I had earlier suggested was an amazing year for Nigerian writers. I’m particularly interested at his classification of contemporary Nigerian writers... And the Booker Prize longlist is announced with some surprise at the brevity of it, sadly there are no Nigerians on it and although On Chesil Beach and Winnie and Wolf were on my to read list, the rest are all new to me ….

Finally, in continued pursuit of Nigerians off the beaten track, I’m pleased to read that Tayo Aluko, the Liverpool based singer and architect is performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this week; and to see The Financial Times at the weekend reveals that the chef at the new fashionable London restaurant La Petite Maison is Nigerian born Raphael Duntoye

And finally Nigerian writer Chris Abani's talk at TED Global earlier this year is now available and also here . Also worth listening to are Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, George Ayittey and William Kankwamba