Booker Prize-winning Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri calls oral storytellers verbal magicians.

Long before he moved to England permanently to study at Essex University and publish the 1990 novel The Famished Road – which tells the story of spirit-child Azaro, living in an unnamed West African country of colliding spiritual and material worlds – he had heard the seers firsthand.

“I grew up with a sense of the world being rich with stories,” he says, deep voiced, but with a childlike brightness behind the authority, speaking from his office in London.

“No one forgets the stories they are told as a kid. That’s the whole point. They stay with you for life.”

He moved to England two years after his birth in 1959. His father, Silver, wanted to study law. Ben’s early experiences in the West were at school in Peckham.

The family returned to Lagos in 1968. Silver used his new skills to offer discounted law advice to the underprivileged. Back in Nigeria, Ben grew up amid two storytelling traditions: the written tradition and the oral storytelling tradition.

“The oral storytelling tradition has been important to my writing and me as a human being.

“In Nigeria as a kid you are told stories by your parents; you are not read to from books.

“You are told traditional tales from the family, from the group or from the tribe that go back hundreds of years and are passed down by word and by mouth and embellished.

“There are also stories the elders tell you when you go back home to the village. Then there are the stories we kids told one another.”

It’s easy to imagine the scene, the hubbub of chatter in the shade. In that part of Africa there is always time to talk. The heat slows everything down.

And because, as Okri says, “most Africans if you scratch them would create a story for you. It’s an essential part of the universe to be able to tell stories to make something alive, nobody I know would just say I went to the shop earlier – no, no, no.”

He wishes children in the England were taught storytelling rather than being made to read from books. He wants to see kids’ storytelling skills awoken “because stories are living things, they are not just things you tell in a formulaic way. They have to do with the activation of personality. ”

Still, the oral tradition in Nigerian society is changing. It is not disappearing but diminishing with the growth of the written word. Why, though, is it so important to maintain?

“It has a great impact on the way one writes. It brings an additional dimension of all the senses because, when you are told stories as a kid by a traditional storyteller, it is not just verbal – they perform it; they use their eyes, their personality.”

Great novelists take a story from off a book’s pages. But writing to be published is a solitary activity. Hours spent alone with only a screen and a view through a writer’s room window are the norm.

Okri, who is one of the great African writers alongside Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, Buchi Emecheta and Ayi Kwei Armah, argues the two disciplines are linked by certain laws.

“A great living storyteller is as much a master of the art of making real as a great written storyteller.

“There is an intuitive grasp of, first, how to hold people’s attention. Then there is the grasp of how to make a world in a story and make people believe the characters are real. Then there is the mystery of storytelling itself, with great storytellers’ sentences hooking you from the beginning, because they have the power of the voice and the voice is as true for oral storytelling as for the written word.”

Difficult beginnings

When Okri first arrived in England to study comparative literature at Essex University, he had been awarded a grant from the Nigerian government. When the funding fell through, he had to sleep in parks, stay for long periods with friends, fight to survive.

He described this period as essential for his work. But he dismisses adversity as the sine qua non for writing literature.

“Many people go though adversity but wouldn’t see the story in it.

“You may already be inclined to see the world as a story, but we don’t require great adversity or great experience: it’s a real fallacy that you need great experiences to write a good novel or short story.

“We can all do it. It will free our imagination.

“You just need to be observant of your life and to observe the lives of others. I would say observation is important, but without imagination too it is pretty flat. But, then, imagination without observation is pretty hopeless.”

At the festival

Okri will deliver a keynote address on the power of oral storytelling at the Everything Under The Sun festival. He hopes to show how imagination is being overpowered by modern technology and wants visitors to leave mobile phones at home.

In his eyes, the West has become unbalanced: we should cultivate our cultural and artistic sides, swing the pendulum back from technology.

“We are leaning too much towards one side and this is not good for us. It will eventually become evident, if it isn’t already. Imagination is one of the things we are increasingly being deprived of or being discouraged to possess.

“We are encouraged to be a people of facts, of specific knowledge, to be a people of detail or of logic. We are not encouraged to be a people of imagination, yet imagination seems to be the fact that makes the real difference. Knowledge is something all societies can have equally, imagination is not so. It is a very special quality.”

Drawing on his Nigerian roots, he says, “the act of storytelling in a tradition is the act of awakening and strengthening and enhancing the imagination of its people. Imagination is one of the most vital ingredients of a society and civilisation.”

There is a generation of new imaginative African voices coming through. Writers such as Leonora Miano, HJ Golakai, Ondjaki, Chika Unigwe. As novelists, though, the problem they face is leaving the continent to be published – despite the internet providing a platform.

There is a class aspect to reading and writing in Africa, however, and the oral storytelling tradition is separate. It is about tradition and family and villages.

“One is the life of a culture. The other is the literary aspirations of a people.”

Painting a picture

If anyone can tempt people to return to the oral tradition it is Okri. He has spent the past year travelling to art galleries around the UK with William Hoare’s portrait of the freed slave, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, as part of a National Portrait Gallery Commission.

The painting is the earliest known British portrait of a black African Muslim and freed slave and the first portrait in this country to honour an African subject as an individual and equal.

Okri’s 2007 novel Star Book dealt with the subject of the slave trade. His latest commission is to write a new poem to complement the portrait’s opening in London on September 20.

“It is an extraordinary painting. I’ve been taking it around the country getting people enthusiastic about it.

“I’ve never done anything like that before, but it opened up a whole new kind of cultural, artistic sub-milieu, which was very interesting, especially because of people’s phenomenal responses to it.”

Which leads us back to where we started.

“Just getting people to look at a picture is a great thing and, just like with this storytelling festival, to get people to listen is essential because storytelling cannot exist without good listeners. And you cannot be a good storyteller without listening.”

Everything Under The Sun takes place at Emerson College in Forest Row, East Sussex from tonight (August 23) until Monday, August 26. Visit www.schoolofstorytelling.com for more information