Communiqué 120: The gospel of narrative non-fiction, according to Eghosa Imasuen
What it takes to build a canon.
This essay is part of a series. If you missed the first part, you can read it here.
1. Counting the cost
Three years. Two dozen interviews. Hundreds of pages of transcripts. Multiple rounds of rewriting. That is what it took for Nigerian author and publisher Eghosa Imasuen to write The Challengers, a narrative non-fiction account of how a group of young people came together to build VFD Group into one of Nigeria’s most successful financial institutions.
In Communiqué 119, we defined the problem:
“Despite producing some of the continent’s most consequential companies over the last two decades, the African tech ecosystem has generated remarkably few book-length accounts of how those enterprises were built. The stories exist, but they are often fragmented across interviews, conference panels, podcasts, newsletters and news reports. Rarely are they assembled into a single narrative that captures not only what happened, but why it happened.
“This absence becomes increasingly striking as the ecosystem matures. The current iteration of Africa’s tech ecosystem now has its own generation of founders, investors, operators and institutions. It has produced several billion-dollar companies, landmark acquisitions, spectacular failures and defining regulatory battles. Yet many of these stories remain undocumented beyond the news cycle that first reported them.”
But it is one thing to notice that a canon is missing. It is another thing entirely to build one. The question we left unanswered is: what would it actually take to write these books into being, and to revive the kind of narrative non-fiction tradition that could carry them?
To begin answering it, Communiqué sat down with Eghosa Imasuen. He is, in one sense, an unusual person to ask, and in another, exactly the right one. He is both the novelist who has just produced a work of narrative non-fiction and the co-founder of Narrative Landscape Press, the publisher who must decide whether books like it are worth making at all. He sees the problem from both sides of the desk: the writer who does the work and the house that funds and tries to sell it.
2. How to kill a book
According to Imasuen, the first thing that needs to change is Nigeria’s litigious culture. Narrative non-fiction is the tradition in which the canon resides. It occupies the territory between the novel and the news report, using the tools usually reserved for fiction: scene, character, conflict, and the patient accumulation of detail, until a real-life account reads with the force and coherence of a fictional story.
Nigeria has a rich tradition of this kind of writing. During the military era, newspapers and magazines kept it alive under impossible conditions. Publications like Tell and Newswatch produced gripping, scene-driven accounts of power and its consequences. A good example is Tell magazine’s account of the final hours of former Head of State Gen. Sani Abacha.
But this tradition was strangled, first by government intimidation, then by a legal culture that made telling true stories about real people an act of financial recklessness. Private individuals discovered they could use the courts not to seek justice, but to delay publication indefinitely. In Nigeria, an injunction is easy to obtain and almost impossible to resolve quickly. That combination is lethal for books.
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Imasuen learned this firsthand in 2014, when he worked as the project manager for the publication of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s memoir, My Watch. Before the book could reach readers, a former associate of the President, Senator Buruji Kashamu, obtained a court injunction to stop its publication because he suspected the book contained comments that might be injurious to his person. A Federal High Court granted the injunction, and about 9,000 copies of the book were impounded at customs pending resolution of the suit.
Eventually, the courts struck out the case. But victory came at a cost. By the time the injunction was lifted, the publishers had accumulated ₦15 million ($91,000) in demurrage fees at the port. The lesson for publishers was hard to miss. Narrative non-fiction is already an expensive undertaking. It requires years of reporting, editing and fact-checking before a single book is sold. If a publisher must also factor in the possibility of lengthy legal disputes, impounded books and substantial financial losses, many will not take the risk.
In the absence of a strong narrative non-fiction tradition, another form has flourished: the memoir. Some of the most successful business books published in Nigeria in recent years have been memoirs. Books like Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede’s Leaving the Tarmac and Femi Otedola’s Making It Big, which has sold more than 65,000 copies, demonstrate that there is no shortage of audience appetite for stories about how institutions and fortunes are built.
But memoirs solve a different problem. A memoir is fundamentally a first-person account. The author controls the narrative and tells the story as he experienced it. A narrative non-fiction account by an independent author attempts something more ambitious. It reconstructs events from multiple perspectives, interviews participants, examines documents and seeks to understand not just how the protagonist remembers what happened, but how it happened.
That distinction matters because memoirs are generally less vulnerable to some of the legal and reporting challenges that accompany narrative non-fiction. The author is primarily speaking about his own experiences, decisions and observations. An independent narrative non-fiction writer, however, must make claims about other people, their motivations, their actions and the consequences of those actions. Every additional character introduces another potential source of dispute.
As a result, memoirs have become a safer vehicle for preserving business history. They tell important stories, but they rarely provide the kind of independent, multi-perspective account that ultimately forms the foundation of a canon.
3. The reputation flywheel
Even if the legal environment were more hospitable, a second problem would remain: access.
In Communiqué 119, we established that canonical books are built on access — that without the willingness of founders, early employees and investors to speak candidly, there is no book. What we did not examine is how that access is actually obtained. The answer, according to Imasuen, is less about skill than it is about status. “If Chimamanda Adichie wanted to tell the VFD story and I wanted to tell it, she would likely be the one that got the best access,” he told Communiqué.
Not necessarily because she is a better interviewer, but because her previous work has established credibility. People know the quality of the final product is likely to justify the time and vulnerability required. This creates a compounding effect. Great books lead to reputation. Reputation leads to access. Access leads to better books.
The problem is that Africa’s narrative non-fiction ecosystem has too few writers operating at that level. There are accomplished novelists, journalists, and biographers, but not enough people with a track record of producing deeply reported, book-length narratives about contemporary institutions. As a result, many of the continent’s most important founders, executives, and decision-makers rarely encounter writers whose reputations alone are enough to persuade them to open up.
In other words, building a canon is partly a talent problem but also a reputation problem. The ecosystem needs its first generation of successful narrative non-fiction writers. Their books will not only document important stories; they will create the credibility that makes future stories easier to access and tell. Once that flywheel begins to turn, access becomes less of an obstacle and more of a competitive advantage.
4. Someone has to pay for the truth
The final piece of the puzzle is the publisher. A writer can have the talent, the access, and a story worth telling, but someone still has to pay for the years of reporting before a single copy sells. That is the publisher’s role, but the appetite to publish these types of stories is only just beginning to emerge.
The economics of this will never be straightforward. When asked to make the commercial case for narrative non-fiction, Imasuen’s answer was disarmingly honest. “It is almost impossible to make a commercial case for these stories beyond the fact that there will always be people who want to read stories that are well told. I publish what I want to read, and believe strongly that there are many people like me who also want to read that work,” he said.
A publisher who waits for proof of demand will wait forever. The job is to recognise the gap and back the work anyway. That, in the end, is what building a canon takes. Not one fix but three: a legal culture that does not punish the truth, writers with the talent and standing to be let in, and publishers willing to fund books on conviction rather than certainty. The companies have been built. The stories are already there. What has been missing is the will to bear the cost and the risk of writing them down.
An engaging insightful read, as always.
So, who will bell the cat? 😮💨