Oyinkan Braithwaite: After food and shelter, the next essential thing a child should receive is access to books

The Nigerian-British novelist and writer on growing up between Lagos and London, the loss of community in the UK, and why societies only change when children are taught to imagine lives beyond their own.

I’ve spent so much of my life moving between Nigeria and the UK that the idea of “home” has become something I feel rather than something I can plot on a map. People sometimes assume identity must be fixed, or tidy, or claimed in a single direction, but mine has always shifted. I grew up here, in England, then in Nigeria then here again. I did secondary school in both countries, A-levels and university in the UK, then returned to Lagos for a large part of my adulthood. I’ve lived long enough in each place to feel fully at home, and long enough away from each to feel like an outsider. And maybe that dissonance has shaped me more than anything else.

There was a period when I felt distinctly British – more British than Nigerian, even – because I was here during my formative years. But adulthood in Nigeria altered that. And of course, there’s the question of how the world sees me. No matter my background, I’m not perceived as British on sight. My accent has shifted. The markers people expect simply aren’t there. Yet I know more British history than Nigerian history. I speak English but not Yoruba. My bookshelves growing up were full of British and American literature. I’ve never had the neat identity that people assume.

What this has given me, though, is a kind of double vision. I can love both countries – and I genuinely do – while also seeing their blind spots clearly. That came home to me recently when I saw an advert in the UK about loneliness among elderly people. Later that day, I watched an older man bent over as he did his grocery shopping, struggling in a way that felt devastating. All I could think was: Where is everyone? Where are his children? His neighbours? His community?

In Nigeria, that sight would be unusual. Not because people live easier lives – far from it – but because you’re held by an invisible web of other people. Respect for elders sits deep in the culture. In Yoruba tradition, younger people kneel or prostrate when greeting someone older; that gesture is changing with time, but the underlying instinct isn’t. Community doesn’t end at your front door. Cousins, aunties, uncles – sometimes genetically unrelated – weave themselves into your life without being asked. When I got married, women I call “auntie” simply organised things. Someone took care of the drinks; someone handled another part of the ceremony. It wasn’t optional; it would have been offensive to refuse.

I wasn’t exposed to African literature till I was in my teens.

Care flows horizontally as well as vertically: children, neighbours, church members, people in your community all contribute in any way they can. If someone elderly is struggling, they step in long before the state ever would. And they step in cheerfully – indignantly, even – as though to say, Of course we do. How could we not?

You don’t realise the value of that until you see its absence. The UK has lost that shared responsibility, especially in cities. People age into isolation. Families atomise. There’s a sense that once someone reaches a certain age, their usefulness has ebbed away. But every time I speak to someone older who can recall events from 1960 with astonishing precision, I’m reminded how deeply wrong it is that we believe they have nothing to offer. Elders are knowledge keepers. Most of us don’t understand how much is lost when they disappear. I still wish I’d asked my own grandparents more questions. I knew so little about them and their experiences.

Creatively, too, moving between these two worlds has shaped me. Until I was about 18 or 19, I wrote mostly white characters. It wasn’t intentional; I simply mirrored what I’d been absorbing. My bookshelves were almost entirely made up of white authors. I wasn’t exposed to African literature till I was in my teens. So when I wrote, the worlds I created reflected what I had been taught to consider “literary.”

It took a conscious shift, and it was a hard one at first. I remember suddenly asking myself why my characters were white when their inner lives – their rhythms of thought, their speech patterns – were mine – a black girl. Their whiteness didn’t add anything to the story. It was simply a mimicry of what I’d grown up with.

Once the switch happened, it stuck. First I wrote Black characters in UK settings, then I began writing Black characters in Nigeria, and eventually I started writing about Lagos as I experienced it in adulthood. And even though Nigeria is my home, there’s a part of me that can still observe it as a non-Nigerian might. For example, the cultural insistence on saying “Come and join me” whenever someone is eating (and they are referring to the plate of food in front of them). The first time someone said it to me, I thought: Join you how? Sit, and eat from the same plate as you? It took me a while to accept that it’s etiquette – a reflex of generosity – not a literal invitation to share their lunch. But even now, there's a part of me that bristles when asked.

Another example: if I tell the average Nigerian their character dies in Act One of a play I’ve written, the person will inevitably respond, “God forbid.” I have to rephrase it – your character, not you – or they’ll take spiritual offence. Nigerians believe deeply in the power of the tongue, and the line between fictional doom and real-life invocation is perilously thin. It’s endearing, maddening, and utterly cultural. 

When your reading is narrow, your sense of the world contracts.

What I find striking, though, is how these cultural collisions show what shapes us creatively. Children absorb what they see. If I, as a Black girl with Nigerian heritage, instinctively wrote white characters because that’s all I saw in books, imagine how limited the imaginative world of a white child can be if every story they encounter mirrors their own face back at them. A bookseller in the US recently told me that white parents often avoid buying picture books with Black children on the cover – not consciously, not maliciously, but because their brains file those stories under “not for us.” If you’ve only been exposed to yourself, everything else feels foreign.

And that, I think, is the deeper issue. When your reading is narrow, your sense of the world contracts. You start believing your own experience is the default. As an adult, you can interrogate that; as a child, you simply absorb it.

This is why I keep returning to the idea that after food and shelter, the next essential thing a child should receive is access to books. Not as a luxury. As a right. Reading alters your internal landscape. It widens the horizon line. It gives you the capacity to imagine something different from what surrounds you.

I often think of the children in poorer communities – what do they dream of? How do you imagine yourself into a life you’ve never glimpsed?

Books create that first small crack in the wall; the possibility of dreaming before the possibility of doing. They let you travel without moving. They show you other worlds, other choices, other ways of being. Even in the UK, where the struggles are different, the principle is the same: if you don’t read, you only know what you can see. Variety creates nuance; lack of variety flattens it.

People sometimes tell me they feel they’ve “visited” Nigeria because they’ve read my books. Maybe they’ll go one day; maybe they won’t. But something in them has shifted. They’ve tasted Yoruba food on the page. They’ve walked through a city they’ve never stepped foot in. Literature creates a form of embodiment that film cannot. With film, you are watching. With a book, you are inside the narrative.

What I want, ultimately, is a world where children – all children – have the chance to see beyond the circumstances into which they were born. Where literature sits alongside food and shelter as a necessity, not a luxury. Where elders aren’t discarded because their bones ache. Where creativity isn’t the possession of a cultural elite but something that moves through a society freely.

Nigeria has taught me the value of community, even when the state fails. The UK has taught me the value of infrastructure, even when the community falters. I hold both lessons. And somewhere between them sits the obvious question: What kind of society are we trying to build?

If we want one that is fairer, happier, healthier – in the deepest sense – we have to widen our imaginative range. We have to expose ourselves, and our children, to lives beyond our own. Otherwise, our world shrinks to the size of what we can see from where we stand.

And no one ever changed anything from that vantage point.

This conversation took place on 30 November at the Hay Winter Weekend and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow. 

Oyinkan’s most recent book Cursed Daughters is available now.