“Flora’s Love Colony”: Tares Oburumu Turns Nigeria’s Colonial Past Into Poetry

When History Becomes Poetry

TARES Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony begins with history but refuses to remain confined to the past.

The poetry collection examines the forces that shaped Nigeria before, during and after British colonial rule, while connecting those historical experiences to questions still confronting Nigerians today.

For Oburumu, poetry offers a way of recovering connections that conventional historical narratives can sometimes separate. The slave trade, colonial conquest, the naming of Nigeria, the 1914 amalgamation and the post-colonial experience become parts of one extended inquiry into identity, power and belonging.

The collection has earned a place among the three finalists for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature, alongside Ogaga Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need a Gun? and James Ngwu Eze’s Unbind Me Now. The three books were selected from 223 submissions in a poetry-focused edition of the prize.

Flora Shaw & the Making of a Name

The title Flora’s Love Colony immediately points towards Flora Shaw, the British journalist who proposed the name “Nigeria” in an article published in The Times in 1897.

The name was initially suggested for territories associated with British influence around the Niger. Seventeen years later, the British colonial administration carried out the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914 under Frederick Lugard.

For Oburumu, those episodes provide more than historical background.

They raise questions about who named the country, who constructed its political boundaries and how colonial decisions continue to influence the identity of the people who inhabit the resulting state.

The poet consequently turns a historical detail into a literary doorway.

Before 1914: Recovering the Deeper Past

Oburumu does not begin Nigeria’s story with the amalgamation.

His collection reaches further back, engaging the history of the slave trade and the societies that existed before colonial rule.

That distinction matters because the political entity called Nigeria is relatively recent, while the peoples and cultures within its present borders have much longer histories.

Historical accounts document sophisticated pre-colonial political systems and kingdoms, including Benin, Oyo, Ife and Kanem-Bornu.

Oburumu’s literary project therefore asks a fundamental question: what identities, memories and systems existed before colonial intervention, and what happened to them afterwards?

The question becomes particularly significant when viewed through the lens of cultural identity.

Searching for a Missing Link

Oburumu describes Flora’s Love Colony as an attempt to identify what he regards as a missing connection between pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial Nigeria.

The periods are historically different.

Yet the poet sees a recurring relationship between those who exercise power and those who experience its consequences.

That interpretation gives the collection its political and historical tension.

Rather than treating colonialism as an isolated episode that ended with independence, the poems examine its possible continuities in language, culture, institutions and social aspirations.

The result is a literary investigation into how history survives after the historical event itself has passed.

Research Before Imagination

The collection also emerged from an unusual creative process.

Oburumu says research came before much of the poetry. Without a large personal library, he depended on whatever historical materials he could locate.

One slim newspaper publication associated with Flora Shaw proved particularly influential.

Its size, he recalled, was less important than the possibilities it opened.

A relatively small amount of information expanded his imagination.

That experience captures one of the central tensions in historical poetry: the writer needs facts as a foundation, but poetry must transform those facts into emotional and imaginative experience.

From Archive to Poem

Oburumu describes the writing process as a difficult movement between imagination and paper.

The challenge was not simply to discover what happened historically.

He also had to imagine the people involved.

What might Flora Shaw have been thinking?

How might Lugard have understood the territory he was administering?

What circumstances surrounded the naming of Nigeria?

And how could these historical questions be transformed into poems without reducing poetry to a history textbook?

Those questions pushed the poet towards empathy.

He had to enter historical circumstances imaginatively while remaining conscious that poetry is not the same thing as archival history.

The Voices Beneath Colonial History

The collection’s published excerpts demonstrate this approach.

In “Opobo, Notebook Island”, Oburumu moves through images of rivers, conquest, slavery, the Royal Niger Company and King Jaja of Opobo, before connecting those historical references with contemporary migration and development.

The poem therefore does not move along a simple chronological line.

History overlaps with the present.

The sea can carry memories of slavery while also carrying contemporary migrants. Colonial encounters can appear beside modern skyscrapers. Historical figures can become mirrors through which contemporary Nigerians examine themselves.

That collapsing of time is central to the collection’s method.

Colonialism After Colonial Rule

Oburumu’s historical inquiry eventually reaches contemporary Nigeria.

He argues that colonial influence remains visible in areas such as language and cultural preferences. He also connects the contemporary desire of many Nigerians to leave the country with what he describes as a form of neocolonialism.

His interpretation of “japa” is therefore broader than migration.

For him, the phenomenon raises questions about aspiration, identity and the psychological relationship between Nigerians and former colonial centres.

The argument is his interpretation rather than an established historical consensus. Nevertheless, it gives the poetry a contemporary point of entry.

The past becomes relevant because it continues to influence how people imagine the future.

Poetry & Mental Emancipation

Oburumu responds to that problem with what he describes as mental emancipation.

The concept suggests that political independence does not necessarily end every form of inherited influence.

For the poet, recovering Nigerian origins and identities becomes part of a wider process of questioning assumptions inherited from colonial structures.

This does not require rejecting every foreign influence.

Instead, it raises questions about agency.

Who determines what Nigerians value?

Whose history is remembered?

Whose literature becomes central?

And what happens when a society begins to understand itself primarily through categories inherited from elsewhere?

These questions give Flora’s Love Colony its postcolonial dimension.

Why Poetry?

Oburumu deliberately chose poetry because he wanted to communicate complicated historical ideas in a form that could reach readers beyond specialist historical writing.

That decision is significant.

Poetry compresses.

It allows a historical event, an image, a personal memory and a contemporary reference to exist within the same literary space.

The form also gives the poet freedom to move between fact and imagination.

In Flora’s Love Colony, history is therefore not merely narrated.

It is remembered, questioned and reimagined.

The Human Writer in an Age of AI

Oburumu’s reservations about artificial intelligence introduce another dimension to his understanding of creativity.

He prefers to write by hand before transferring his work to a computer.

His concern is not simply technological.

It is philosophical.

He associates creative writing with originality, human emotion and individual experience. For him, those qualities distinguish human artistic expression from machine-generated material.

The position complements the historical purpose of his collection.

If Flora’s Love Colony is concerned with recovering human identities from historical narratives, its author is equally interested in preserving human agency within contemporary creative practice.

Books as a Way Out of Poverty

The poet’s relationship with books is also personal.

Oburumu recalls encountering works such as Treasure Island, Chinua Achebe’s Chike and the River and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist when he was about 14.

Those books opened a new world for him.

That experience now informs his plans for the prize money.

If he receives the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, he says part of it would go towards improving children’s access to books.

He has already participated in efforts to build and stock a library for children in his village.

The proposal transforms his literary journey into a wider argument about access.

A child who encounters a book may discover possibilities beyond the circumstances immediately around them.

From Historical Memory to Future Imagination

The deeper purpose of Flora’s Love Colony lies in its refusal to separate yesterday from tomorrow.

Its historical references reach into the slave trade and colonialism.

Its contemporary concerns include migration, cultural identity and “japa”.

Its future-facing argument centres on what Oburumu calls a possible mental revolution.

The poet’s belief is that critical engagement with history can change how Nigerians understand themselves.

Whether readers accept all of his interpretations or not, the literary project establishes an important question: can a society imagine a different future without confronting the history that helped shape its present?

A Collection That Reopens History

Flora’s Love Colony consequently works at the intersection of poetry and historical memory.

It does not simply retell Nigeria’s colonial story.

Instead, it asks what that history means when viewed through contemporary Nigerian eyes.

By bringing Flora Shaw, Lugard, pre-colonial societies, slavery, migration and modern identity into the same poetic conversation, Oburumu creates a deliberately unsettled timeline.

The past remains present.

The present continues to reinterpret the past.

And the future, in turn, depends partly on how that relationship is understood.