I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

What’s important is that we recognize the falsehood of the notion that the Third World should be abandoned because it’s a waste of time.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this...

The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it’s a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level...

Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.

Nigerians are what they are because their leaders are not what they should be

As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.

I don’t care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That’s different from prescribing a way in which a writer should...

Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way...

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.

Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. “I have kola,” he announced when he sat...

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

I’m a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I...

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow...

If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the...