[These remarks are excerpted from a variety of sources: principally a lengthy interview conducted in Austin by Professor Dapo Adelugba, a visiting scholar from Nigeria, on 25 October 1974, but also from discussions with students in African literature classes and from an interview on a radio program called “ The Inquiring Mind” conducted by Jessie Pena and Patsy Watkins and broadcast by the Longhorn Radio Network at The University of Texas at Austin on 16 December 1974.]

School days

I probably attended school for the first time round about 1931 since that's the admission age, when you are seven or turning seven, [but] I found a pretext for not going to school. I might as well get into this. I apparently had a fall and injured my nose, and it used to bleed profusely. It was thought I had a broken bridge, and I may well have had it, I don't know. But it was useful because every time I looked at books or bent over a slate my nose would bleed. This was a good excuse for not going to school. The truth of the matter is that if my nose didn't bleed, I would poke my finger up it until it bled to make sure I didn't go to school. So I found excuses for not going. I didn't like school.

I don't know how much of it was my own psyche or whether at that stage my mother was projecting onto me. She was a teacher in this little township at Dower Memorial School, where there was another teacher who was very dear to her.