It is not enough for us to say we must tell our own stories if we don’t equally think or talk about the enabling infrastructure that supports the gen… - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Secondly, on mourning and melancholia, we know that mourning is still better than melancholia. At least with mourning there is a recognition that there has been a loss, a hurt or a wound that is necessary in order to recover from that loss. It is therefore not construed as a pathology, but a ‘working through’ of the hurt or absence. However, when melancholia replaces mourning, we are moving into a state of mental disorder and this may come with suicidal impulse. It is this that is considered a pathology. I guess given the successive blows of the last 500 years, the African world (from Lagos to Los Angeles, Benin to Bahia) probably oscillates between mourning and melancholia and we are still struggling to shake off.

Digital innovation is likely to have an even stronger impact across Africa than in the West, simply because of the historic lack of access to books... Digital innovation is allowing us to build our audience base through social media. And because we have a single platform for markets —Nigeria and the rest of the world–audiences are able to interact, connect and engage each other in a way that they would not have previously done.

Really, I thought to myself, how do you build a civilisation or ignite the imagination based on such a meagre diet of Euro-American airport fiction and self-help books? Yes, I am judging! Where is the counter-balance? I wondered why Amos Tutuola, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Aminatta Forna, Zaynab Alkali, Paulin Hountondji, D.O. Fagunwa, Bernardine Evaristo or Ben Okri were missing from these shelves. These emptied of spirit bookshelves, this erasure of African voices and vibrancy from view became the inspiration to set up a publishing company, Cassava Republic Press.