Soyinka's Death at Dawn, Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska's Some People come to mind immediately. But there are plenty, plenty more that I enjoy.

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

Sometimes a word or an argument will trigger a poem.

money-making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down. Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.

Time by itself means nothing, no matter how fast it moves, unless we give it something to carry for us; something we value. Because it is such a precious vehicle, is time.

Ghana is like a lion without a head

Humans, not places, make memories.