We must take ourselves more seriously and value what we do, even the minutia action and document. There’s no other time in history then now when arch… - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon.

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.

So much so that a figure like Achebe (never mind that he himself rejected the term) is heralded as the father of African literature despite being preceded by other writers such as Amos Tutuola who had published 3 books before him and even earlier writers in South Africa like Thomas Mofolo, writing in the 1800s and whose work was translated to English in the 1900s or The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, written by the Ethiopian emperor Galawdewos. This means that even the systemising and the categorising of our literary tradition is wrong, there’s a gap, a missing antecedent of writing in favour of writings and writers who pay homage to the metaphysics of English. Of course, this has meant that in the literary space, we have not been as prolific as our situation demands or the population of the continent.