Nigeria at 60: Our Roots by Tayo Fatunla

Source: New African magazine

Africa: Tradition versus Modernity

Source: New African

(New African)--Visiting a museum in Auckland, New Zealand, a colleague and I were impressed by a battle-ready Maori warrior, showing his martial prowess whilst doing the Hakka. 

The display was suitably intimidating. My colleague got carried away and began to over-exaggerate its efficacy, claiming a warrior could dispose of their enemies in seconds. I reminded her that the weapons had proved ineffective against European firearms, and this was the most likely explanation why the warrior was now on display in a museum, and not on the battlefield.

Writing Africa to the World

Source: faithmwaura.com

What role should African literature play in presenting the continent to the world?
"To write truthfully, beautifully and to raise high the possibilities of literature. Literature is not advertising; it is all the truths that we cannot take and sometimes all the beauty that we cannot bear. It is about our enrichment and about compelling us, through its dreams, to face ourselves. The best contribution that literature can make is to be the best literature that it can be."

Ben Okri, New African magazine

It's Igbo not Ibo

Dear Editor

Since I first read your magazine in 1999, my month begins in effect with my buying a copy of New African.  I am very grateful to New African for undauntedly bringing an African perspective to bear on its stories, articles and reports; and, by so doing, correcting centuries-old skewed opinions on Africa and Africans.

However, I was disappointed that the November 2006 issue of New African used the colonial English-created paternalistic name, “Ibo” to refer to the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria.

Igbo refers to the people and their language.  But “Ibo” appeared five times in Lindsay Barrett’s Presidential hopefuls seek ethnic relevance and once in Ejiroghene Barrett’s Nigeria, why the troubles in the Niger Delta.

This is all thanks to New African’s ignorance that “Ibo” was the result of the colonizers’ inability to pronounce the double-character Igbo “gb”—considered as one letter—hence opting for just a “b” instead.  What an arrogant and a patronizing way to treat a people’s name and disrespect them! Certainly, New African does not want to perpetuate this disrespect.