Chinua Achebe talks about the importance of telling children stories.

[00:00:00]You took a period of your life away from writing novels and and wrote for children. Why?

[00:00:05]>> Well, because I think it's very very important. It is very very important. I I had some very um interesting and very strange experiences, too, uh bringing up my own children.

[00:00:19]Uh that really confirmed my my fears about about about the danger, the predicament we are going through in not telling our children stories. You see, our fathers did. Our grandfathers did.

[00:00:33]But once writing came, um children we more or less forgot that responsibility to tell children stor- We were very young parents, so we really had no experience.

[00:00:46]And we used to go into the supermarket in Lagos and then pick up a glossy, nice, big-looking or colorful story. We never read children's stories ourselves, so we didn't know what was was in them. Um but then we discovered, my wife and I, that our daughter was beginning to have very strange ideas. You see? And it was at that point that we began to look carefully into into what she was reading.

[00:01:14]And really, there was a lot of poison.

[00:01:16]There was a lot of poison there.

[00:01:18]Stories full of racism, full of all kinds of full of of ideas of Africa again as as the other place, as the back of the world. And uh and this is what we were feeding >> So you just hadn't told >> So we decided I decided then, well, I didn't decide then to write, but I I knew then the importance of children's stories. And I knew that we were failing as parents in not bringing round the children after dinner as our as our forefathers did um to tell them stories.

[00:01:55]I had not written any before. I didn't know how it was going to work.

[00:01:59]Uh but I was ready to try.

[00:02:01]And that started me, you know, in that direction.