Chevening – A tale seen through a book collector’s eyes

I returned to Lagos in March of 2020, some hours before the country locked down its borders to all travellers to begin the COVID lockdown. It was a turbulent time. During my few days of pre-emptive isolation, I started learning guitar. I had bought it a few weeks earlier from a colleague in London who, like me, had packed and was on the way back to her home country. In the months following my return, I would improve my skills on the string instrument, and be grateful both for being back with family, but having the time to pick up a new skill.

I am a writer, and I love books. Even before I left for London to begin a Chevening Fellowship at the British Library, I had developed some habit for book collection, so much so that each relocation always involved plenty of angst about how to transport the books I needed to the new destination. When I was in London, I started buying more books. This habit followed me back to Nigeria, but began to extend to rare books and artefacts, a passion I wrote about in this long essay.

‘I am a writer, and I love books.’ The author (right) attempts to recreate a famous photoshoot from the historical archives of LIFE Magazine featuring Chinua Achebe (left) with two editions of his debut novel

Working in the British Library as a Chevening Fellow deepened that interest and appreciation for books, their provenance, their value, and their importance to culture and documentation. Traveling back home at one point to discover that the public interest in documenting our publishing history is not as strong as I had found in the UK was dispiriting. I resolved to participate, in the future, in opportunities to help develop a space for documentation and archiving in Nigeria.

In 2018, before I was awarded the Chevening Fellowship, I published a collection of poems titled Edwardsville by Heart. It is a part-memoir, part-travelogue covering the three years I had lived in a small Southern Illinois town as a Fulbright Scholar and student from 2009-2012. While in London, I developed a relationship with the Poetry Translation Centre to translate a number of Yorùbá poems into English. Yorùbá is a Nigerian language and my mother tongue. One of the results of my work was published in Love is Not Dead edited by Christopher McCabe. Later after my fellowship, the record of my work for the PTC attracted an American poet Emily Grosholz who contracted me to translate her collection of poems titled Childhood (2014) into Yorùbá. The result of that work, titled Ìgbà Èwe, will be published in the Summer of 2021 by Ouida Books.

Temporary book ‘storage’ at the Nigerian Library in Lagos.

Being a Chevening Alumnus represents not only a career-building platform of significance, but also a transformative experience.

Even for the simple idea of leaving one’s home to go spend time in another country for the purpose of research, education, and cultural immersion, it is a positive idea. The networks one will make from such an experience, combined with a chance to explore another space while doing work that gives one satisfaction, are invaluable.

Now, more than six months removed from the end of my fellowship, I can look back and say that it was a beautiful and rewarding experience.