Dele Momodu’s Photo Album and Other Stories from Nigeria

Dele Momodu’s Photo Album and Other Stories from Nigeria

The title of this article is not the title of my new collection of short stories and you will not find it in The Thing Around Your Neck, the first collection of short stories by the celebrated Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is my focus on the craze for scrapbooks of pictures by many Nigerian printers and publishers who have joined the bandwagon of the copycats of Dele Momodu’s Ovation magazine.

I loved Ovation when there was something to read in it. That was when Ovation had interesting features and even good fiction as well and was like the Nigerian version of Hello and OK magazine until the Nigerian publisher Dele Momodu decided to turn it into the Nigerian photo gallery of both the stinking rich and not so stinking rich people in Nigeria. Well from reliable sources, Dele Momodu took that decision, because most Nigerians prefer viewing photo albums of the rich in their Nigerian society and gossip about them to reading articles and fiction. Majority of Nigerians are actually intellectual illiterates or semi literates who have no brains for serious reading, except the compulsory textbooks they must read to pass their academic and professional examinations and once they have passed the examinations and acquired the certificates by hook or by crook, they push aside their textbooks and rush for the gossip tabloids and photo albums circulated all over the place in Nigeria.


Any dummy can copy and paste photographs on blank pages of white paper and print them for sale. But as we can see, gazing at the pictures of the Nigerian aristocrats and plutocrats does not add any value to the society and will not transform any non-literate to a literate person. What we need most now is the revival of the reading culture and increase the scholarship of Nigerians.

The proliferation of scrapbook journalism in Nigeria is doing more harm to Nigerians, because these photo albums are making Nigerians to become lazy readers and breeding a generation of intellectual illiterates.

I read newsmagazines such as Tell and The News and I also read the tabloids as well and they can be very hilarious and humorous. Imagine the National Encomium calling the Academy Award winning American actor, producer, and director Forest Whitaker African-American Nollywood actor? Then the Editor Azuh Arinze of the local Nigerian tabloid called Nigerian publisher and celebrity blogger Linda Ikeji garrulous!


It is a tragedy that in a population of over 140 million people, a prize winning book like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun did not sell up to 20, 000 copies in Nigeria, but pornographic magazines and music videos sell over hundreds of thousands of copies.
We see a generation of intellectual retards and dullards who would rather be lip-synching do me; I do you and chorusing monotonous pornographic jargons of female buttocks than be caught reading best-selling Nigerian books of genius.

That is why I was shocked to find out that most of the students in tertiary schools in Nigeria do not even know who is Leke Alder or Chris Abani and they did not even know that Kaine Agary won the last Nigeria LNG Prize for Literature for her melodramatic prose in Yellow Yellow!
But they have spent millions of naira to download ring tones of psychedelic songs and pornographic musical videos. Nigerians who will not spend ordinary N500 to buy a good book to read will spend over N2, 000 daily to make GSM phone calls. What a shame!

~ Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima

Highly Recommended Books of the Month

Conversations of a 21st Century Saint ~ Leke Alder
$30.00

minding your business ~ leke alder
$35.00


life as i see it ~ leke alder

Graceland (Today Show Pick January 2005) ~ Chris Abani
$10.20

Becoming Abigail ~ Chris Abani
$9.56

Song for Night ~ Chris Abani
$11.66

The Virgin of Flames ~ Chris Abani
$11.90

Kalakuta Republic ~ Chris Abani
$13.25

To Be Hung from the Ceiling By Strings of Varying Length (Black Goat) ~ Rick Reid
$10.85


GraceLand ~ Chris Abani


Daphne's Lot ~ Chris Abani











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