I was happy to hear of the success of the Port Harcourt bid especially because I had read the bid document, an elegant 23-page write-up, which set out how a successful bid would benefit not only the city of Port Harcourt, but also Nigeria as a larger geography, and Africa in general. But perhaps the first great significance of the Port Harcourt bid is the massive and positive media coverage that followed—just about every newspaper in Nigeria ran the story of the win, many rendering it as a Great Victory, and the beating of Oxford was especially noteworthy, even for the BBC. And what was that victory for? It was for books, books & more books! Perhaps no other event, not even the recent Bring Back the Book campaign of the Federal Government, has situated the written word so highly in the public perception of Nigerians as this win. While The Guardian, the conservative and widely-read Nigerian newspaper, went to press with the headline “Port Harcourt wins bid as World Book Capital”, the popular youth-centred news website YNaija ran with the gleeful “We beat Oxford! Port Harcourt is UNESCO World Book Capital 2014”. The idea of a pugilist victory was furthered in national terms by a local news service stating that Oxford, no doubt in the sense of being the flower of Britain’s intelligentsia, had lost out to Nigeria! The reason for this excitement is, of course, the fact that the English language, my country’s official language, as well as Western Education, largely in English, together with its tool, books, came directly from Britain during the colonial relationship. In popular opinion, Port Harcourt’s win had shown that Nigeria had bettered a British bequest so well that it now could stand a head higher than Great Britain. Regardless of the rotational nature of the World Book Capital designation by UNESCO, it is our success at this post-colonial matchup that has aggrandized writing and books in the public mind and space.
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Richard Ali is the author of City of Memories
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