*‘Education. Enlightenment. Empowerment... Pathways to the Future
(Being CORA’s statement (originally titled A clear path to the Future) to the opening of LABAF 2022 Plenaries, Friday, November 18, delivered by Toyin Akinosho, Secretary-General of CORA, at the Kongi’s Harvest Gallery, Freedom Park, Lagos)
OPTIMISM has always defined the choice of themes for the Lagos Book & Art Festival.
Of course, we have had themes that have spoken to the contrary; The Terror of Knowledge was the theme of the 18th LABAF in 2016; Eruptions; Global Fractures & Our Common Humanity was our subject in 2017. But in 2018 we called up RENEWAL: A World That Works For All and in 2019, our arguments here were wrapped around the theme: Emerge: Breaking into the New.
CORA is a very hopeful curator of arguments.
However, by the end of 2019, when we chose the theme for 2020, pessimism had stubbornly taken root all over the place. Our theme: A State of Flux, turned out to be predictive of what defined most of 2020.
The pessimism remained, stubbornly in 2021 when we came here. We were examining what humankind was going through all over the world: A Fork in the Road.
At this point we urged ourselves to cycle back into Optimism Street again. By November 2022 when we would gather here, we knew, the nation would be three months away from elections. So let our conversations provide possibilities.
As intellectuals, we must all imagine the kind of society we want to build at the end of this messy journey.
What we discuss here will travel out as thought forms. Nation-building is the implementation of collection of arguments. We are landscapists after all and we are sowing words.
The books selected for the Festival, interrogate, largely, what the authors imagine as the future of humanity, whether in terms of political evolution, demographics or the relationship between men/women and machines.
In one of the two books for discourse this afternoon, the Somalian novelist, Abdourahman Waberi, Imagines a world in which it is Europe and the global north, not Africa or Latin America, that is the destitute. People come in millions from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa.
Paul Morland’s The Future of Humanity in numbers, is also about demography dynamics. Every first year geology student is told that the Present is the Key to the Past. That the waves lapping on the banks of the Lagos Lagoon provide clues to how sediments are formed and how in cases, they become receptors of large deposits of gas. In the same vein, Dr. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – and argues that the balance of births, deaths and migrations have determined, over the course of the last 100 years, which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity.
There are Eight other such books, with differing takes on the future, to be discussed at this feast of the written word and the names of the sessions provide some insight: Big Cities, Future Living; Writing the Future of Hope; Robotics & The Nigerian Survival, Where are we now? And Is the Future Bound to the Past?
Ladies and Gentlemen, as most of you know, LABAF started life as an event of three weekend days, running from Friday to Sunday. Despite the fact that it has become a week-long fare since 2016, the Friday colloquium, which inaugurates a total of six book discussion sessions in the course of the next two days, has remained, the symbolic opening of the Festival.
And we have always been particular about who to drive the opening.
As our Keynoter, Professor Okey Ndibe, (born in in Yola, Nigeria in the year the country became independent) is a novelist, political columnist, and essayist. His two, highly acclaimed novels Arrows of Rain and Foreign Gods drip with biting satire. They are of works of fiction but books you could use. They are not ere storytelling.
Kunle Ajibade, who moderates this afternoon’s book discussion session, is a journalist, editor and author of the highest rank.
Someone, perhaps Socrates, once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The Lagos Book and Art Festival argues that the unexamined society cannot contribute significantly to human civilisation.
*Akinosho is Secretary General of the Committee for Relevant ART
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