CALABAR — Cross River author and politician, Orok Otu Duke, Ph.D., will present five new books in Abuja on November 5, with the state governor as chief host.
Duke announced the presentation on Wednesday at the Ernest Etim-Bassey Press Centre while addressing journalists.
The titles are Treasures: (Calabar Festivals, Idim Uyo, Forbidden Streets and other Poems), Winnowing: (Duke Town, So, The Sky Stayed and other Poems), Welcome to Uyo: The Nigerian Civil War through the eyes of a Calabar child, Oluchi’s Journey: Three Generations of the Okerekes in Calabar: Before, During and After the Nigerian Civil War, and Calabar Modern Stories.
He described Welcome to Uyo as the centrepiece of the collection. The book records his childhood experiences during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970, when Uyo served as a major refugee and relief centre for people from the former South-Eastern region.
“I documented my experience,” Duke said. “If we were outside the country, we would have needed some form of counselling and psychiatric treatment. Millions, thousands were dying every day. You see your classmate in the morning, the next day the classmate is dead.”
He said he wrote the book because minority groups had not adequately documented their own accounts of the conflict.
“Until the lion learns how to write his own story, the story of the hunt will always celebrate the hunter,” he stated. “Most of us in the minorities… more people in the minorities died in the civil war… The fact that the war started in Gakem in Cross River State, and most of the atrocities were committed in the minority areas.”
Duke, who has published 10 books, also donated copies of his five earlier works — Clementines, Sentinels, My Song, Dances on the Plains and Ellipses… — to the Nigeria Union of Journalists library in Calabar.
He invited journalists to the Abuja event and urged others to record their personal and communal histories, noting that publishing a book in England costs between £7,000 and £10,000 but ensures the material remains accessible globally for at least 400 years through registration at the American Library of Congress.
