On “Inherited Tongues: Voices from Where We Come From”, a virtual reading and open mic at the Abuja International Poetry Festival, 22 October 2026.
A church stood where much else had been destroyed.
It was an image from one of the poems Tares Oburumu read during Inherited Tongues: Voices from Where We Come From, a virtual reading and open mic at the second Abuja International Poetry Festival (AIPFest). Hosted by Ella Fortté, the 5:30–7:00 p.m. session featured Oburumu alongside Michael Imossan. A seaside community had suffered devastation, yet the church remained. As the discussion later turned to its significance, the image opened a question about the place of religion in African societies whose histories have been shaped by colonialism, conquest and cultural transformation.
It was one of several questions that emerged during the session, as the poets explored memory, identity, language, trauma and the histories people continue to carry, sometimes generations after the events that produced them. Both poets are recipients of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. Oburumu won in 2022 for Origins of the Syma Species, while Imossan received the 2024 award for All That Refuses to Die. Oburumu’s later collection, Flora’s Love Colony, was also a finalist for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature.
For Imossan, water offered an entry into the relationship between geography, history and memory. Reading from All That Refuses to Die, including the sequence A Lineage of Water, he returned to images of rivers, seas and the Atlantic Ocean to examine ancestry and the transatlantic slave trade. There is something peculiar about water as a repository of memory. Rivers and oceans connect places, carry people and goods, and establish routes through which civilisations encounter one another. Yet the same Atlantic that facilitated commerce and cultural exchange also carried enslaved Africans away from their homes. The geography has survived, bearing histories that succeeding generations must reconstruct and interpret.
In Imossan’s work, these histories extend into contemporary questions of identity and belonging. How do people understand themselves when the narratives through which they might have done so have been disrupted, distorted or lost?
The audience discussion eventually moved towards more personal experiences of suffering, forgiveness and healing. Participants considered poetry’s capacity to help people confront difficult memories and articulate emotions they might otherwise struggle to express. Particularly interesting was the suggestion that people can carry trauma while simultaneously recovering from it. I find that distinction important. We often imagine healing as a progression towards the disappearance of pain, when it may involve learning to live with experiences whose consequences remain. Understanding what happened does not necessarily remove the hurt, just as forgiveness does not always require forgetting.
The discussion also examined the craft of transforming experience into poetry. Storytelling, imagery, rhythm and sound each perform different functions, especially in spoken-word poetry, where the audience encounters the work through both language and performance.
When Oburumu took his turn, the readings moved through experiences of cultural displacement, migration and the inheritance of language. Drawing from Flora’s Love Colony, he explored relationships complicated by distance, generational differences and changing cultural identities. One poem considered a mother and daughter whose relationship was affected by linguistic and generational separation. It raised a familiar concern about what happens when the language through which one generation understands the world becomes increasingly inaccessible to the next. Some things survive translation. Others lose their force: an expression of affection, a cultural reference, a particular way of conveying grief or describing an experience.
Other poems examined migration, belonging and the lives of people attempting to make sense of themselves in unfamiliar places. Seaside communities, ships and foreign cities appeared as settings for experiences that were at once personal and historical.
Then came the image of the surviving church. The ensuing discussion considered its symbolism within the wider relationship between Christianity, colonialism and African cultural life. Christianity has become deeply embedded in many African societies, although its expansion through European missionary activity was also entangled with colonial power and cultural displacement. Consequently, the church’s survival allowed for different readings. It might represent faith, refuge and communal resilience. It could equally prompt questions about which institutions survive historical upheavals and what their persistence reveals about the societies that emerge afterwards.
The audience discussion eventually broadened into the nature of cultural exchange between Africa and the West, particularly whether the relationship could be considered reciprocal given the historical inequalities through which many encounters occurred. There was an acknowledgement that these exchanges had often taken place under unequal conditions, with consequences for African languages, religious traditions and cultural identities. Yet the conversation also recognised the possibility of more reciprocal relationships, even as the legacies of colonialism continue to shape contemporary life.
By the end of the session, the poets had taken the audience across rivers and oceans, through family relationships, distant cities and communities negotiating what remained of their histories. The exchanges continued into questions from the audience, expressions of appreciation and reflections on the work of both poets.
I kept returning to the church. Perhaps because its survival, like the histories explored throughout the session, does not settle the question of what it means to endure. Something can survive an encounter and still emerge profoundly changed. What matters, perhaps, is understanding what has been preserved, what has been lost, and what those who inherit the consequences are able to make of what remains.
Editor’s Note: On Decolonisation, Choice and Cultural Exchange
One thought stayed with me after the conversation, particularly the suggestion that cultural exchange between Africa and the West has largely been one-sided. I am not entirely persuaded. The historical imbalance is undeniable, but it would be inaccurate to conclude that cultural influence has travelled exclusively in one direction.
Yoruba religious traditions, including the worship of the òrìṣà, have travelled beyond Africa and found adherents across different racial and cultural backgrounds. They may not enjoy the global reach of Christianity, but their presence challenges the idea that African cultural influence has been entirely confined to Africa.
Christianity itself has undergone considerable transformation in African societies. Consider the Aládùúrà traditions, particularly the Christ Apostolic Church, where Yoruba spiritual sensibilities, musical practices and cultural expressions have helped shape distinctive forms of Christian worship. There is something worth examining in the fact that a religion introduced through encounters with European missionaries could subsequently acquire expressions so deeply embedded in Yoruba cultural life.
Perhaps food offers a more familiar analogy. Cassava originated in South America and arrived in Africa centuries ago. Today, it is almost impossible to discuss Nigerian food without mentioning garri, ẹ̀bà and other cassava-based dishes. I doubt many Nigerians would consider ẹ̀bà culturally foreign simply because the crop from which it is made did not originate here.
Of course, the adoption of a food crop is hardly equivalent to the religious, political and cultural transformations associated with colonialism. The consequences are different. But the analogy raises an interesting question about what makes something culturally authentic. Must it have originated within a society, or can authenticity also emerge through the ways people adopt, adapt and transform what they encounter? Indeed, how many cultural practices can claim to have developed entirely without external influence? Cultures have always borrowed, exchanged, resisted and evolved. Even practices we now consider indigenous may themselves be the products of earlier encounters.
This brings me to decolonisation. If decolonisation and agency must coexist, then a postcolonial African society need not necessarily be one devoid of Western influences. It should also be possible for Africans to retain, reject or reinterpret aspects of that inheritance without every such decision being understood primarily through the history of colonial domination.
Granted, institutions shape the choices available to us. They influence what we consider legitimate, desirable or possible, and some alternatives carry significantly greater costs than others. We should interrogate those conditions. Yet the choices remain ours still. People are capable of exercising agency within inherited structures, even where they did not choose the circumstances through which those structures emerged. There is a danger in treating every cultural adaptation as evidence of continued domination. We may inadvertently deny postcolonial Africans the very capacity for self-determination that decolonisation seeks to restore.
I am reminded of Chinua Achebe’s declaration that African writers working in English intended to do “unheard-of things with it.” The language may have arrived through a particular history, but the writer is not condemned to reproduce the intentions of those who introduced it. There is some irony in the fact that I am writing this reflection in English, interrogating the cultural consequences of a history that also shaped my access to the language.
I do not think that makes the reflection any less mine.
Perhaps the measure of decolonisation is not how thoroughly we have rid ourselves of everything acquired from elsewhere, but how much authority we have recovered to determine what we make of our inheritance. The origin of a cultural influence matters. So does the history of its adoption. But neither should permanently foreclose the possibility of making it our own.