A Celebrated Writer: Mabel Segun
Mabel Segun, a household name in Nigeria, is known for her extensive literary prowess. Born in 1930 into a creative family in Ondo Town, (a writer-historian Reverend for a father, creative-writer brothers and a sister who was a children’s television producer), there are many places one can point to as sources of Mabel Segun’s creativity. No matter the source, what's clear is that Mabel Segun flourished in artistic community and that she expressed hers in a multitude of outlets: poet, children’s literature author, sportswoman, coach, editor, teacher, broadcaster. With a formidable work ethic and a humility to understanding readers’ psychology, Mabel Segun has written a range of wonderful books still read today.
Mabel Segun holds a fascinating and awarded history in sports, including becoming an ‘honorary male’ at a Men’s Singles Tournament at then-University College, Ibadan, where she was classmates with Chinua Achebe, Grace Alele-Williams and Christopher Okigbo. But after her short story, “The Surrender,” won the first Nigerian Festival of the Arts Literature Prize, Mabel Segun went on to show the spectrum of her imagination with poetry (for children and adults), children’s books, radio talks and adult fiction. Her work has been anthologized and translated many times.
It is a misconception that writing children’s books is easy. Mabel Segun did not come to the work lightly. To write books for children, she believes, one must know children, learn the different psychologies of different ages, and never condescend. “When you write children’s literature, you write for different ages,” Mabel Segun says. Beyond this research and knowledge seeking, she also believes in sound, in the rhythm of words. It is no wonder her autobiographies, My Father’s Daughter (1965) and My Mother’s Daughter (1986), became popular in homes and on school reading lists, in Nigeria and abroad. Mabel Segun has written, co-authored and edited about eleven children’s books.
One of the books in Segun’s oeuvre is a cultural cookery book which took her eighteen years to create. “I like to revise my works to be as near perfect as possible,” she said in an interview. The book, Rhapsody: A Celebration of Nigerian Cooking and Food Culture (2007), is a cultural compendium on Nigerian customs, proverbs, taboos, recipes, etymology and history about food.
She won the LNG Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2007, and was a recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for lifetime achievements in 2009. Segun founded the Children's Literature Association of Nigeria in 1978 and set up the Children's Documentation and Research Centre in 1990 in Ibadan. Her legacy, then, does not end with her important books, but expands towards encouraging more voices in her industry, emphasizing the strength of many, of community.
