By Henry Akubuiro
Prolific Nigerian writer, Dr. Bukar Usman, has released his first set of books for 2023 – Conversations with Bukar Usman and My Literary Works: Reviews and Reports.
A 928-page tome, Conversations with Bukar Usman is compiled by the celebrated Kano teacher and poet, Khalid Imam, with Foreword written by Ambassador George Obiozor of blessed memory.
The book is a collection of interviews granted by Bukar Usman to the media from March 1996 to July 2021, a period of roughly 25 years. It contains 43 interviews with 27 local and foreign journalists.
Breaking the interviews further, Conversations with Bukar Usman (2022) features 18 print media interviews and 25 electronic media interviews, the earliest being an interview granted to Yusuf Tatu of Radio Nigeria in March, 1996.
The blurb reveals that the book contains an array of frank exchanges, ranging from socio-political debates and perceptive discussions about the civil service to exuberant chats on literature, folklore and history.
These interviews draw out so much to be treasured from Dr. Usman’s wealth of experience as a former permanent secretary in the presidency, where he carried enormous weight as a policy influencer and implementor.
They also echo his post-retirement roles as forthright social commentator, patron of art and culture, writer and historian. The interviews are based on a myriad of topics touching on the individual and his social milieu.
As with Dr. Usman’s other biographical books, where his life and public roles invariably become channels through which readers gain insight into important aspects of our social system, this collection of media interviews he granted during the last 25 years promise to delight and inform readers.
Khalid Imam, who compiled the interviews, hints that these interviews contain both his viewpoints as a government functionary and his post-retirement viewpoints, which can also be seen “as a record of the interviewee’s clarity of vision and consistency.”
The second book, My Literary Works…, a slightly voluminous whopper of 1127 pages, is edited by Bukar Usman himself. It contains 95 reviews of his books reviewed by journalists, scholars, public intellectuals, readers, among others, between 2006 to 2021. It also includes reviews of other people’s books done by the author.
Writing on the Foreword, Ambassador Iyorwuese Harry Hagher, says the “reviews are evidence of a rigorous public intellectualism without borders across many disciplines” and each of his writings is a reminder to Nigeria and Africa’s elite that we have been heading the wrong way after independence from the European colonisers.”
The blurb celebrates the book as probably the first anthology of its kind in Nigeria appraising all of Usman’s 32 books written in English, Hausa and Ajami.
Usman’s offerings featured in this book were reviewed by more than 23 reviewers and “each of the reviewers has a distinctive expository style and independent insight that altogether make this collection a valuable guide to the study and understanding of Dr. Bukar Usman’s books.”
Some of the reviewers include Ambassador George Obiozor, Okechukwu Uwaezuoke, Muhammad Nur Alkali, Osato Giwa-Osagie, Henry Akubuiro, Bayo Ogunmupe, Yemi Adebisi, Khalid Imam, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Ben Tomoloju, Nathaniel Bivan, Anote Ajeluorou, to mention a few.
Beyond his primary objective of compiling media reviews of his various books for the benefit of present and future researchers, Dr. Usman, in deeming it a matter of documental necessity to publish the reviews in this book, may have brought to the foreground the issue of inadequate indexing, abstracting and archiving of book reviews published in Nigeria media.