You are welcome to the presentation of "Scale Boy" this fascinating memoir by the award-winning author Patrice Nganang. He will have a highlight conversation with my amazing colleague Eddie Glaude. Hosted by Africa World Initiative at Princeton. April 2, 2026.

HE Yemi Osinbajo to give the 3RD Africa World Lectures at AWI, Princeton, Nov. 13

Yemi Osinbajo, Photo courtesy, Mo Ibrahim Foundation

His Excellency, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, the immediate past Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will give the 3rd Africa World Lecture at Princeton University on Nov. 13, 2025. Since his tenure in Abuja, Osinbajo, an ardent advocate for innovation as driver of African development and futures, has keep a busy international profile. One of his most consequential recent appointments is his role as the Guardian of the UNDP-supported Timbuktoo African Innovation Foundation. He is presently leading the international election monitoring mission for the presidential elections in Cote d'Ivoire this month. The previous lecturers were the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who gave the inaugural lecture (2023), and the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (2024). To register for the lecture and for online access, visit the Africa World Initiative website. 

Invitation to Wole Soyinka's Toni Morrison Lectures @ Princeton

Please join us for The 2016 Toni Morrison Lecture Series featuring the writer Wole Soyinka. Wole Soyinka has been described as ‘Nigeria’s national conscience.’ He is a professor, activist, playwright, critique and poet. His work often tells stories of democracy, government, religion, and tensions around tradition and progress. He is concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986. Soyinka is the first African laureate.

The series of lectures Wole Soyinka will deliver next week is called Commencement Rites at the Tree of Creativity. The talks take place Monday, April 18th; Tuesday, April 19th; and Wednesday, April 20th all starting at 5:30 pm. These lectures are free and open to the public, in McCosh Hall, Room 10. No tickets are required.

April 18th at 5:30 p.m.

‘In Praise – and Dread – of Trees’

Introduction by Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu

April 19th at 5:30 p.m.

‘Sweet are the Uses of Diversity’

Introduction by Professor Simon Gikandi

April 20th at 5:30 p.m.

‘As It Was in the Beginning’

Introduction by Professor Wendy Laura Belcher

The Toni Morrison Lectures are sponsored by the Department of African American Studies and Princeton University Press. The lectures are held annually and spotlight the new and exciting work of scholars and writers who have risen to positions of prominence both in academe and in the broader world of letters.

The lectures are published in book form by Princeton University Press and celebrate the expansive literary imagination, intellectual adventurousness and political insightfulness that characterize the writing of Toni Morrison.

The talks will be streamed live each night: https://livestream.com/aas21/wolesoyinka and on the African American Studies website aas.princeton.edu/livestream.

Breytenbach and Iweala event

Uzodinma Iweala, at Princeton University, Sept. 24, 2008. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


This past Wednesday, I attended a rare event here at Princeton; one of those days that, if you kept a diary, you begin by marking the date with an asterisk: a joint reading session by two remarkable writers, Breyten Breytenbach and Uzodinma Iweala.


Uzodinma Iweala reading, Sept. 24, 2008 at Princeton University. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu

Uzodinma Iweala, the 23-year old Nigerian author of the brow-raising first novel, Beasts of No Nation, and currently a medical student at Columbia University, invented a writing style that is as poetic--particularly when you listened to him read from the novel, the cadence modulated by the inventive remaking of verbs and nouns into present participles--as the narrative is horrific. He read the passage in which the boy soldier experienced his first killing orgy. The beauty of fiction, in the hands of Iweala, is that it could present this story of sickeningly degraded childhood in a way that still made the boy soldier a sympathetic figure.

Of course during the Q/A, someone wanted to know more about the language of the novel. Did he invent it? Was he reflecting the way of speaking of this fictional West African boy? By way of response he stated that his was a conscious refracting of pidgin english to satisfy his own literary aesthetic, but also to come close to the inventiveness of the pidgin language spoken in West Africa, emphasizing that his effort follows on the tradition mined by writers such as Amos Tutuola, Ken Saro-Wiwa (who wrote in naturalistic pidgin), and others.



Breyten Breytenbach, Sept. 24, 2008 at Princeton University. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu

The day before this event, I had been watching the 1978 documentary film "Afrikaner Experience: Politics of Exclusion, (in prep for my course on Art, Apartheid and South Africa) and therein was a discussion of Breyten Breytenbach as the foremost Afrikaner Poet, tried and jailed for 7 years after he "betrayed" his Afrikaner identity by marrying a Vietnamese wife (a crime under the law) and committed high treason by campaigning against the Apartheid regime while in exile. It makes you wonder why some South African artists never got the memo, considering that his older compatriot, Ernest Mancoba married the Dutch artist Sonja Ferlov and wanted to return to South African with her. Apparently in a more generous mood in its early years, the Apartheid regime persuaded the Mancobas to not come to South Africa. And they never did.


Breyten Breytenbach reading, Sept. 24, 2008 at Princeton University. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


Anyways, having watched the Afrikaner Experience the previous day, seeing the now 69-year old Breytenbach, gentle with a killing smile perpetually flickering across his face, you realize that such men as he have an incredible reserve of humanity that differentiates them from the crowd. For how else to understand the quiet decorous presence he shares with another former "terrorist" and compatriot Nelson Mandela? He read from his Windcatcher and the brand new All One Horse, which is illustrated with his own watercolors. I tried to count how many times the word "love" occurred in the poems; I could not, lost in the aura of a remarkable man, artist, and writer.