My people have a saying, it goes thus: “ze mbe si na ihe ya ji-achiri ihe egwu ya aga njem bu maka ya ezu ndiegwu”. It means that the reason the tortoise carries his instruments around is in case he meets other musicians.
I am happy to announce that I, the humble tortoise himself while carrying my out-of-tune instruments, met with some of the best musicians ever. Before I gush about my new squad let me take you guys back a bit and we’ll go through what an awesomely crazy month June was for me.
It is not news that just before I attended the Future Ready University Conference, I got an email that said I was a selected participant for the 2015 Farafina Trust Creative Writing workshop – in other words, I was going to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Well I met her. She is amazeballs – I say amazeballs because there are no other adjectives in my kinda limited vocabulary. I talked to her, hugged her, was in her personal space. It took Jehovah’s intervention for the creep in me not to just emerge from his doormot. She speaks Igbo with her brother Okey, who by the way is the turntest person I have ever met. IN. MY. LIFE.
She did not come early on the first day of workshop and all of us sat around the U-shaped arrangement of tables. There was a certain silence. People who knew themselves before then talked and laughed. I tried to intrude on some conversations since I did not know a soul from before then. When she finally came, she apologised for coming late… I found it funny because we did not even care. She was there. Standing in front of us. The emails were not a scam.