The literary community, bibliophiles and the wider public will gather on Saturday, 12 September, at the Mövenpick Hotel, Alfred Rewane Road, Ikoyi, for the formal presentation of a book of the moment: Dr Chidi Amuta’s Homage: Return to Familiar Places.
Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi — former Rivers State governor, former minister, and Dr Amuta’s former student — will be the Special Guest of Honour. Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi will chair the event, and ThisDay’s Segun Adeniyi will serve as the official book reviewer.
A memoir that refuses the usual apology
In his autobiography, Homage: Return to Familiar Places (2025), Dr Chidi Amuta does something rare in Nigerian memoirs: he treats journalism not as a vocation defined by hunger and compromise, but as the only arena large enough for a life of ideas. The book upends the familiar stereotype of the poorly paid reporter, the mortgaged editor, and the columnist who writes because there is nothing else to sell. For Amuta, the newsroom and the editorial board were places where intellect could move beyond the seminar room and enter public life.
It is one of a few that celebrates rather than laments the life of journalism and its financial and lifestyle benefits. Another is a prominent journalist, Aremo Olusegun Osoba’s Battlelines: Adventures in Journalism and Politics.
