Ibadan: The penkelemes years : A memoir: 1946 - 1965

Ibadan does not pretend to be anything but faction, that much abused genre which attempts to fictionalize facts and events, the proportion of fact to fiction being totally at the discretion of the author. My adoption of the genre stops short of the actual invention of facts or events, however, or the deliberate distortion of the history or character of any known figure. It has become one of the hazards of having a public name, when this licentious principle is not only put into practice, but is defended by some writers and critics, perhaps in the belief that public figures – especially if they are unfortunate enough to have died recently – have no further right to their authentic existence. In recent times, in the United States most notoriously, it would appear that such writers cannot even wait for the blissful translation of the victim to the limbo of indifference. And sometimes, of course, such practitioners are not even of the breed who profess the vocation of fiction, or faction, or indeed literature of nay kind: their mission is anything but the establishment of truth or the elevation of the imagination.