It was a delightful evening of verbal jousting at The Africa Centre in London on Tuesday May 6, 2025 as Margaret Busby, CBE engaged Sir Ben Okri in conversation.
“Ben, I hope my voice will not fail me, I have hay fever,” Margaret Busby told her guest.
“Hay fever has never stopped you, Margaret,” Ben Okri quipped.
“Neither has it stopped you too, Ben,” Busby replied with a quick riposte and the tone was set for the evening as writers, literary enthusiasts and fans of African literature gathered for the launch/presentation of African Stories, an anthology of 36 stories published as part of the Everyman’s Pocket Classics.
“You started as a short story writer?” Busby asked.
“I began with poetry,” Ben Okri told his interlocutor. “But I have a passion for the short story. I was the first Chairman of the Caine prize. I helped set-up the Caine prize, so I have always loved the short story.”
Commenting on how the 36 authors represented in the anthology were chosen, Ben Okri said there were three things he focused on: “excellence, mastery of form and wide representation of writers on the continent.”
He also noted that he wanted to focus on “elders” which was a difficult endeavour considering the large number of short story writers on the continent.
“I wanted, for instance, to include all the winners of the Caine prize but I had to shed my biases and make sure that elderly writers across Africa were represented and by the time I was done there was no time for contemporaries.”
Writing in the preface to the anthology, Ben Okri notes that “the short story is one of the most compelling of literary forms. It is perhaps the most rigorous literary form after the sonnet. It has the destiny of creating, within a few pages, a brief eternity.”
He would go ahead to, in response to a question, expand on that thesis by speaking to the place of the short story in the African literary tradition.
“The short story comes closest to allowing the richness of the African spirit and it is closest to the oral story telling traditions of fables and folk tales. Our mothers couldn’t spend all day telling us novels, so stories had to be compressed into short stories.”
Responding to Busby on what makes a story resonate, Okri shared that “I love stories that combine an element of fantasy and an element of ordinary life and of elevated language.”
He had also made the point in his preface to the book: “The short story is very suited to Africa. For there is something a little fantastical about African reality. This has nothing to do with the exotic…”
Continuing their banter, Okri seemed taken unawares by a question from Busby whose question riffed on gender (im)balance and representation.
“Thirty-six stories by 36 writers. How many are women?”
Okri began by explaining that the question was political and unfair.
“That is a slightly tilted question and an unfair one” before noting that his focus was “to represent all the older writers and put the African spirit on the world map.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the youngest author in the collection and one of the eight female writers represented in the anthology which includes Ama Ata Aido, Bessie Head, Grace Ogot, Clementine Nzuji Madiya, Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi and Nobel prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.
A request from a guest led to Ben Okri reading from his entry in the anthology, “Incidents at the Shrine” from his short story collection of the same title.
“Anderson had been waiting for something to fall on him,” he began before sharing the narrative of Anderson Ofuegbu’s unravelling.
Olu Alake described Okri’s presence at the centre as a homecoming of sorts because as he told it, Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road once “lived” at the Covent Garden premises of the Center.
Acknowledging the fact Ben Okri said, “You would find me at the bar having a beer and arguing with Dambudzo Marachera.”
In recognition of his long relationship with the centre Ben Okri was presented with a plaque – Icon of The Africa Center” by Oba Nsugbe, Chair of the Centre before guests repaired downstairs for the book signing session.
