By PRISCA SAM DURU
He witnessed the Warri crisis during Abacha’s regime and that changed his entire being. Born and raised in Warri, Delta State, Efemena Agadama, a UK based Isoko writer, got his National Diploma in Mass Communication from the Federal Polytechnic Oko before proceeding to University College Kensington, London where he bagged a Higher National Diploma in Computing. The writer who later got his Masters in Information Technology at the Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales, in this interview, shares the transformation his writings have undergone over the years. Excerpt.

At what point did you decide to become a writer?

I started writing while in secondary school but they were comedies. I was a comedian so had to write comedies to make people laugh and that continued while I was in Federal Polytechnic Oko. But the turning point came during the Warri crisis, between the Itsekiris and the Ijaws. The crisis was horrible. It was bloody. Every night, we awaited the cry of massacre somewhere. No one deserved to witness such a bloody conflict again.

We saw youths with double barrel guns, AK47, axes, machetes and charms hunting their fellow mankind. Humans were hunted like goats. The most terrible thing of all was that our very compound, where we lived, shared the same fence with the Meinbutu boys. The most dreaded and scary militant youth of that crisis. Those Meinbutu boys sacked the occupants of that very compound and occupied it. It became their headquarters. They brought their juju priest and armoury. And our backyard became their training ground. You either wake up with the sounds of sporadic gunfire or you sleep with gunshots echoing everywhere. There were things the eyes saw that the eyes should never have seen. I knew my childhood, teenage years and adulthood were painted with conflicts and bloodshed in Warri but that Abacha’s instigated conflict of the mid 90s was the mother of all conflicts that changed my writing from comedy to tragedy.

- See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/11/warri-conflict-bloodshed-changed-writings-efemena-uk-based-writer

somebody copy and paste the rest before I comment.