“Suspended in Vast Plain” went to the largest book fair in the world, Frankfurter Buchmesse – Frankfurt International Book Fair 2022, in the past October. This week I learned that my book was picked up for physical bookstore distribution as one of only three books in English. Isn’t it exciting?! 

Ten large bookstores, most of them in Berlin, also in Munich, Frankfurt and Nuremberg, ordered copies. So if you travel to Germany and walk to one of the bookstores, you may get the book straight from the shelf.  

Heinrich Barth, a German explorer was first European to visit Yola

In the book, I hitch with Germany, not once but twice. On the day trip from Yola to Maiduguri, to the university headquarters, I hear about Heinrich Barth, a German explorer of Africa. In 1851 he crossed the Sahara from the North and traversed the lands of Fulani, Hausa and other tribes not yet claimed by the British or French colonial powers. He reached Maiduguri and ventured further south to Adamawa. Barth was captivated by the Mandara mountains located east of the route on the current border with Cameroon. He looked at the white tops, perhaps covered in clouds, and thought it was snow, as his journal reveals. Imagined Snows of Mandara! Then he arrived at the capital Yola. The Lamido and the Fulani ruling class of the newly established kingdom did not receive Barth well. They feared visitors from Borno. Although Barth spoke their language and knew their customs but failed to convince, win their trust and befriend the establishment in Yola. Finally, he got sick and had to retreat north to Maiduguri.  

Yola always afraid of invasion from the North, haha!

I found a parallel between Barth’s adventure and the merger of FUTY, my university, after staff reduction, into the University of Maiduguri. I felt betrayed and wanted to resist the remote rule from a distance of 500 km. But history repeated itself after I left. In the following years, FUTY rebuked the “invaders” from the North, raised from the ashes and returned to its former glory. It expanded and was recently renamed Modibbo Adama University of Technology, MAUTECH, with Operations Research – my teaching field back then – as one of the offered programs.

Liz, my friend, explored Africa and she was an inspiration for me

Before I went to West Africa, I had a friend named Liz. She was a reincarnation of Heinrich Barth, and around 1980 she travelled across the Sahara to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. Also she climbed Kilimanjaro. She told many stories about Africa, which motivated me to see the land, listen, smell, and sense it by myself. Liz’s mother was German, and Liz visited her family in both German states then. I thought she had emigrated to West Germany during the Polish troubles of the 1980s. But she did not, I found out recently. She lives in Gdansk very actively, constantly travelling and doing good things.