Materials from Nigeria
As a young Igbo man, Amadi does not understand why his mother insists he learn to read, since he already knows his numbers and will be a businessman one day, but an older boy teaches him the value of learning about the world through books.
The study of cultures of the past. A tour of Benin City, a West African town and capital of the Edo Empire, located in present-day Nigeria.
When the terrifying Iroko-man tries to take a woodcarver’s first-born child as partial payment for bringing fertility to his village, the father must find a clever solution.
This deeply personal story looks at the stately Nigerian funeral for the author’s grandmother, said to be “the greatest traditional dancer of her generation,” as told by Onyefulu’s young son. “When Mama Nkwelle died, everyone came to say good-bye. Uncle Asika said it was a special good-bye. It took more days than I can count on my fingers.
For Remi, growing up in Nigeria is a celebration of love and family, eccentricity and old ritual. She feels confident in her privilege and grounded in the heart of her culture. But when she turns six, she is sent to faraway England, to a posh all-girls’ boarding school where she will stay for what seems like a desolate, lonely eternity. There she’s left to find her own way – the only black in a school full of upper-class English girls whose rituals are as foreign to Remi as her’s are to them. Through sheer inner exuberance, Remi triumphs over the dismal climate, social anomalies, and glaring affronts that are her English experience. She endures foreign holidays celebrated with strangers, and navigates the labyrinth of race, caste, and culture, taking nothing lying down, and emerges victorious – if changed forever.
Yoruba Girl Dancing is the story of a girl’s exile from her homeland and her metamorphosis into someone that even she at times hardly recognizes.
Twelve-year-old Layo, a Yoruba girl living in the area of eleventh-century Africa which is now Nigeria, attempts to reject the man who has been chosen to be her husband.
An African folktale tells how the sun and water once lived on earth as friends, but because the sun failed to build his house large enough, he and his wife, the moon, were driven into the sky when the water came to visit them.
Smuggled out of Nigeria after their mother’s murder, Sade and her younger brother are abandoned in London when their uncle fails to meet them at the airport and they are fearful of what may have happened to their journalist father back home.
Recounts how the leopard got his claws and teeth and why he rules the forest with terror.
This is a story about Bobo, the boy who was taught to fly by his friends, Mot the moth and Moz the mosquito.