Professor Niyi Osundare has warned that Nigeria’s growing loss of creative and intellectual talent to emigration could have serious consequences for the country’s cultural development.
The renowned poet and scholar said every artist and writer needed a community, an audience and an environment capable of sustaining creativity.
Osundare spoke during a conversation with Gbénró Adégbolá at an Ibadan event organised around the presentation of his book, Truth Is Trouble.
The book examines literature, politics, culture, identity and the role of the writer in confronting social realities.
Pointing out that “Art thrives on community,” Osundare said some of Nigeria’s most celebrated writers flourished within a vibrant intellectual and cultural environment.
He cited Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark as examples of writers who had strong communities around them.
“Every successful writer needs a community,” he said.
The professor argued that writers did not create in isolation, stressing the importance of audiences and responses to creative work.
“Who is your audience? Without the audience, art dies. Without response, art perishes,” he said.
Osundare said the loss of Nigerian talent through migration therefore had consequences beyond the economy, because it could also weaken the cultural environment that produces new generations of writers and artists.
He recalled teaching Creative Writing in Nigeria and encountering students he considered extremely promising.
According to him, some of these talents lost touch with the creative environment that had nurtured them after crossing the ocean, lamenting, “My heart bleeds.”
Osundare also urged Nigerians not to underestimate the power of indigenous culture and local experience in sustaining creativity.
He said the cultural environment in which an artist grows provides a form of “interiority” and satisfaction that can keep the creative fire alive.
The professor acknowledged that Nigerians had legitimate reasons for leaving the country but said the larger national question was why the country had made departure increasingly inevitable.
He therefore called for policies that would make Nigeria more attractive to its citizens and preserve the communities necessary for intellectual and creative development.
“Every work of art needs a community. Every writer needs a group of co-conspirators,” he said.
