Nigerian author Okey Ndibe grew up in war but comes to MPC today with a message about stories.

Like many people who are driven to live life fully, to find and propagate meaning out of it, Okey Ndibe grew up, as a child, in war. In his native Nigeria, it was the Biafran War, a conflagration of ethnic civil war and imposed famine in the late '60s that accounted for more than 1 million deaths. It was exacerbated by the arbitrary and divisive political boundaries imposed by the British Empire.

He moved to the United States on the invitation of Nigerian literary legend Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), who would become a mentor, and he studied and wrote and railed against injustice.

He earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He edited Achebe's acclaimed African Commentary magazine. He won the 2001 Association of Opinion Page Editors award for his essay "Eyes to the Ground: The Perils of the Black Student," about the lower standards expected of black students. He's taught at Connecticut College, Bard College, Trinity College and, as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Lagos.

He lives in New England with his wife and three children, but he's been back to Nigeria. And he's been arrested there for his writing.

He's on the West Coast as part of a Northern California tour as a guest of Monterey/Northampton poet Kathryn Petruccelli's program Literary Cadences ("a new kind of exchange between the Central Coast/Bay Area and literary-rich western New England").

Ndibe's itinerary is meandering through talks and signings at San Francisco State University, Books Inc. in San Francisco, Book Passage in Corte Madera and Moe's Books in Berkeley. The latter of which was yesterday.

He was slated to conduct an intimate storytelling workshop at Henry Miller Library this coming weekend, but that's been cancelled. But his reading and talk at Monterey Peninsula College, as part of the school's Guest Author series, is still on, 2:30pm today, Wednesday, at Lecture Forum 103. It costs $10. He's reading from his 2014 book Foreign Gods, Inc., about the adversarial relationship between Western and African values, capitalism and spirituality, played between a corrupt New York art dealer and a desperate Nigerian economist/cabbie. NPR named it one of the best books of 2014. 

Ndibe responded, in writing, to a series of questions by email, and called this morning to amend one of his responses to the question about the importance of stories: "To be able to share your stories with the community, it's a privilege."

Then he had to hang up to attend to a finicky GPS app and navigating Bay Area highways and freeways as he heads our way.

Weekly: Why are stories important? In particular, why are they important for non-writers?

Okey Ndibe: I'd suggest that the capacity for telling stories is the single most important distinction between humans and animal species. We use the broad economy of stories to keep our memories alive, to wrestle with—and often resolve—our ethical challenges, and to keep the relationship between the past and present vital. Among other things, stories define us, shape our identity. They embody ethical and moral outlook. They enhance our innate human desire for aesthetic pleasure, and they offer us one of the best ways for posing the most important challenges of being human. I'd go as far as contending that any society that's indifferent to stories—or permits the repression of them—is to that extent impoverished, weakened, vitiated.

What will you tell people at Monterey Peninsula College?

I'll remind them why stories are at the heart of being human. And I'll use my own stories as well as my Igbo society's strictures and stipulations on stories to underscore the point.

When was the last time you were in Nigeria? You've been arrested for political reasons 5 times in Nigeria. What were the circumstances?

I was last in Nigeria last December. Well, in 2011, Nigeria's security agents arrested and detained me at the international airport in Lagos. The reason? My name had been included on a list of "enemies of the state" on account of my weekly column, which I began to write in 1999. I guess that the column's unsparing denunciation of corruption in Nigeria—and of the contemptible political class that's all but ruined the country—finally riled some beneficiaries of corrupt power. The airport detentions—there have been five in all, for anything between two and 10 hours—represent the government's mode of push-back. No question, the idea is to intimidate me. But I won't be intimidated. Fear is a choice, and I have chosen not to fear.

I understand there was an attack in Nigeria by Boko Haram [yesterday]. What needs to happen for Nigeria to find peace? What do you do in toward that end?

Boko Haram incessantly explodes suicide bombs and carries out other kinds of violence, including arson, kidnappings and videotaped killings. For Nigeria to find peace, the military should be equipped and trained to fight and defeat Boko Haram and other groups that use violence against innocents to achieve their ends. That's in the short run. In the long run, we must refashion Nigeria as a society based on the rule of law—where the law operates in a blind manner, indifferent to ethnicity, status, religion or such like. At the moment, Nigeria is something of a legal jungle where the biggest, most egregious criminals—those who betray their high political and corporate offices—are hardly ever prosecuted. Once we establish a society where public resources are used, in the main, for public purpose—rather than to serve the greed and gluttony of a few—then the Nigerian state is bound to witness a dramatic reduction in organized violent crimes, even those fueled by religious fundamentalism.

There are many people in Monterey County whose first language is Spanish or something other than English. What is your advice to people who are trying to improve their grasp of the English language?

I'd suggest that they bear in mind that the acquisition of any other language, in this case English, is a marvelous undertaking. It'd be a shame if they saw the issue as a contest, say, between Spanish and English. They should grow in Spanish whilst trying to master English.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is the story of William Kamkwamba from Malawi [who] went to Dartmouth. Have you seen the film? Are there similarities in both of your experiences?

I have heard about the film, but no, never seen it.

What authors are popular in Nigeria? John Steinbeck?

Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka are the most well known authors in Nigeria. Of the Americans, years ago, it used to be such African American giants as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison. Also writers like William Faulkner, Steinbeck, Irving Wallace had their following. But the landscape of leisure reading has changed drastically. I'd hazard that, today, the most popular texts are religious books, Christian and Islamic, as well as "how-to" books. Readers are terribly interested in "how to" find wealth, health, happiness. Of course, bestselling American writers, like John Grisham, have their appeal.