What part of Nigeria were you born in, and how much has the country changed since you were a child?
I was born in Kaduna, north-west Nigeria, in 1982. The place used to be very cosmopolitan – people living anywhere and it did not matter who you were. Now, there is self-imposed apartheid. After the 1990s riots, the city split into Christian and Muslim. If you were the wrong religion for an area, you’d have to move house in fear for your life. Today, there is an uneasy calm. Because of segregation, people can gather in their districts and speak out against one another. I think a crisis is brewing. Sadly, the government is not looking into ways of integrating people or bringing Kaduna back to where it was before.
Was there a particular seed from which your first novel, about a young man who gets caught up in Islamic fundamentalism, grew?
Born on a Tuesday was informed partly by my upbringing but also inspired by the almajiri [the name for those sent from their homes as children to study in Islamic schools] I met at university. I was interested in their lives and their thoughts and intrigued that they were [often] people without names. What is in a name? The question became important to me. The minimum a person can have is a name. I was interested in what happens when that basic form of identity is taken away. “Born on a Tuesday” is the protagonist’s name, but not a real name.
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