The first time I met you, not face to face, but through your words, was when I read The Wedding Pistol in an anthology of short stories written by women. This was back in the 1990s. To me, your voice was the most compelling, your story the only one transparent and in 3D. I remember I had my period while I was reading. It must have been the second or third day, after the tension and the cramps had subsided and what was left was the gentle steady flow. It relaxed me almost to the point of sleepiness. But I was not sleepy at all, I was fully alert to your voice, pulled down and immersed in the here and now of the pages in my hand. I gave in to the serene sense of my reproductive organs existing in passive mode, my days off, the secret celebration that I was not pregnant; another month’s reprieve. I sank into the armchair, into myself and I took your story understanding every reference, getting every joke. I hummed the tunes of songs you mentioned, I saw maps of the streets you pointed out. I was your perfect reader and I was too rapt to even stop and think that I don’t want this to end.

This was the first time I recognised myself in fiction. Not my inner self, I was able to do that between the most unlikely covers, novels written by men from other centuries or set in places I didn’t even know existed. But in your work I saw my country, my values and the social circles I grew up in. Of course I had read African literature before, the classics in which I recognised the people, weather, the landscape, the great panorama of life. But your story was different. Unashamedly you wrote about the top ten percent. A privileged childhood similar to mine. A highly educated family who could afford to travel to London for holidays and degrees. A family in which the children were brought up to dress, eat and speak differently (i.e. more Westernised) than their elders. I knew all about the outcome of this, the mixture of pride and opportunism; the growing impatience with needing to explain, the compulsion to stop and assign value.

I was in my twenties when I first read you, and I was voluble and impressionable. Immediately I wanted to be your friend. We had so much in common, both of us here and both of us from there, although you a decade older than me. I was eager to talk to you about your story; I felt that I already knew you and that sooner or later we would meet and the conversation would sparkle between us. Your story was a bridge to a world I had left behind after marriage and migration. A world I was losing, but through your words it became vivid again and I could inhabit it.