Past Event

Book Presentation : Postcolonial Life-Writing & Public Service in Africa: Nasir El Rufai’s The Accidental Public Servant

In the context of the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) Annual Conference, The Institute of African Studies, Carleton University is organizing the public presentation and unveiling of Nasir El Rufai’s memoir, The Accidental Public Servant on

Thursday, May 2
7:00 pm –9:00 pm
Tory Building, Room 360
Carleton University

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Professor Harry Garuba, Director, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. The book presentation will be followed by a roundtable on Public Service and Democratic Governance in Nigeria: The Road to 2015, featuring Pastor Tunde Bakare and Mallam Nasir El Rufai.

Featuring:

Nasir El Rufai (Author)
Easily one of Nigeria’s most prominent public personalities, Nasir El Rufai has been at the centre of public discourse in Africa’s most populous country for close to two decades. He has combined a sterling public career with the challenging functions of the public intellectual. He was a former Director General of The Bureau of Public Enterprises, the head privatisation agency in Nigeria, and also the former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, from 16 July 2003 to 29 May 2007.
Since its publication in January 2013, The Accidental Public Servant has gripped Nigerian public discourse and imagination, exciting vigorous debate and passion among those who love it and those who vehemently disagree with and challenge it. It is one book that has not left any Nigerian indifferent. Beyond its political tenor, the memoir throws up issues germane to contemporary theoretical discussions of life-writing as postcolonial genre in Africa and the reviewer, Professor Harry Garuba, will frame his lecture along those lines.

Tunde Bakare (Special Guest of Honour/Roundtable panelist)
Lawyer, social critic, public intellectual, democracy, good governance, and civil rights advocate, Pastor Tunde Bakare looms large over Nigeria’s contemporary public sphere. He is the General Overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly (Lagos), and Convener of the Save Nigeria Group (SNG), one of Nigeria’s most prominent democracy and good governance advocacy outfits. Pastor Bakare was the running mate of General Muhammadu Buhari in the 2011 presidential elections in Nigeria.

Harry Garuba (Reviewer)
Currently a Visiting Professor at Emory University, Atlanta, Harry Garuba is the Director of the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. In addition to being an author and poet, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the editors of the newly established electronic journal Postcolonial Text. He has an active interest in African and postcolonial literatures and has published a volume of poetry Shadow and Dream & Other Poems, and has edited another Voices from the Fringe.

Pius Adesanmi (Convener)
Pius Adesanmi’s book, You’re Not a Country Africa, won the Penguin Prize for African Writing in 2010. He is an Associate Professor of English (with a cross-appointment at the Institute of African Studies) at Carleton University

Free admission

For more information please visit: http://carleton.ca/africanstudies/events/caas-2013/