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.

It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather (as we are here today) so that we can salivate over the apparent genius of the solitary writer while we sublimate the collective geniuses (the editor, book designer, proof reader, copy editor, publicist, sales people, indexer, the literary critic, the blogger, instagramer etc.) that are involved in the production of any one book for the celebration of the singular authorial voice.

Still, even in the age of new socialising media, who can deny that a book as a material object is infinitely richer and more meaningful than any of the arts? This is because through the thick description they enable, all the other artefacts of civilisation (music, fine arts, film, science etc) can be folded and compressed into that singular object. In the book, worlds, cultures, emotions and habits of being are collected, dissected and revealed to us so that we can have different voices to converse with in that quiet moment of aloneness, or to whip out to stimulate debate, dialogue or forment a revolution.