There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

Naming is like putting a stamp on something and fixing it. A kind of formaldehyde sort of fixation, but it becomes dead, sitting there forever, frozen. So, I'm not a great one for these modernist, post modernist, post colonial labels. I think they serve certain purpose. You do need some kind of sign post here and there, but it can also become an end in itself.

A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.

Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.