Nana| Tweets are personal views only

I absolutely disagree with you @VascoDaGappah on all counts. And if they had asked me to do that rubbish I would have looked everyone in the face and told them to swallow rocks. I am 100% certain that if a Nigerian journalist had made that allegation the board chair would not have hired forensic experts to strip search their winner who they said they believed. They did not clear his name. They allowed someone they thought had institutional power to humiliate their winner. The journalist who made that allegation does not suddenly believe he is cleared. Who did they do this for? Not for African Writers. They showed a total lack of awareness of the matters at stake. Will you accept this for yourself? This is just class anxiety. In the end people show whose opinion they care about the most. The right thing would have been to trust their processes. That journalist did only one thing: put the story through Pangram. She does not read African writing. She does not care about the prize. They knew the writer. They spent time with him. The original publisher of the story also stood by him. But they chose to make him go through a forensic investigation in response to this. Nothing about this was right or human centered and it was cowardly to say the least. In general we are stuck in a cycle of cowardice. We cannot speak up when people and institutions we think have power might threaten the things we hold dear. We speak in whispers when we should be loud when we see either fellow highly placed writers or institutions are harming others. Which is one reason why we are generally where we are: at the mercy of those who hold the purse strings and keys to the gates we wish to pass through. Will they do this again if another western journalist makes this accusation? Is this the new standard?

“Independent and expert led metadata analysis”??? For a fucking short story prize? Because one person said someone in the Atlantic you essentially treat a writer like a criminal? And you want us to applaud you after one month of this criminal trial??? Loooooool!!!