About
Our Mission
OlongoAfrica is a literary and cultural interest space dedicated to the documentation of African life, geography, and imagination. We publish long-form journalism, travelogues, essays, poetry, and photography that engage with the concept of “place.”
Unlike traditional literary magazines, our focus is on mapping the African experience—whether on the continent or in the diaspora—through a lens of mobility, memory, and language.
The Name
“Olongo” refers to the Orange-cheeked Waxbill (Estrilda melpoda), a small, nomadic bird found in West Africa. It symbolizes our commitment to travel, freedom, and the “flight” of ideas across borders.
History & Publisher
OlongoAfrica was founded in 2020 by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún as a founding member of the Brick House Cooperative. He remains its publisher. Today, OlongoAfrica is a transatlantic project published jointly by two sister organizations: Olongo Publishing LLC (Minnesota, USA) and Olongo Publishing Ltd (Lagos, Nigeria).
The Managing Editor is Ọlájídé Salawu but our contributors include a wide range of writers, editors, photographers, and scholars from across the African continent and beyond. In 2025, Mọlará Wood joined us as the editor-in-chief of the Black Orpheus Revisited project. See below.
We occasionally accept interns or volunteer editorial assistants; if you are interested in joining our work, please contact us.
Special Projects & Archives
The Black Orpheus Revisited (2025)
Supported by Open Society Foundations, this digital archival initiative has recovered, digitized, and made publicly accessible the complete run of Black Orpheus (1957–1993), the legendary journal that defined African modernism.
[Access the Virtual Archive here].
The Guest Artists Space Foundation in Lagos Nigeria holds the physical copies of our original journals from the project, on a renewable loan. Please reach out to them if you need physical access. Read more about the collaboration here.
Essays interrogating the Black Orpheus archives that were published in 2024/2025 can be found here.
Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory (2024)
A feature documentary directed by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory archives the 1960s era in the life of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka through a university bungalow he lived in shortly before he was arrested during the Nigerian Civil War.
Tagline: “How do we preserve not just what we remember ut the physical markers of such transient memory?”
The film won six international film festival awards, and selected for fifteen more.
- Watch: Available now on Vimeo.
- Read about the film on IMDB or on Wikipedia or on the Ebrohimie homepage. Trailer here.
- Institutional Access: Acquired by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, and others (see above). Professors and Librarians can request a license (either in digital file or DVD) at ebrohimie.olongoafrica.com/license.
- Check WorldCat to see if your university already has it.
An African Abroad (2022)
In November 2022, we brought Ọlábísí Àjàlá’s classic 1963 travel memoir, An African Abroad, back into print after decades of obscurity. This annotated new edition, produced in collaboration with the author’s family and published in collaboration with Masobe Books, features a foreword by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and a new introduction by Joane Àjàlá (the writer’s surviving widow). An African Abroad captures the global adventures of the “restless Nigerian adventurer” who met world leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Golda Meir.
Read a review of An African Abroad in The Paris Review.
- Buy An African Abroad on Shopula ($22.99/$19.99)
- Buy An African Abroad on Amazon $24.99/$18.99)
- Buy An African Abroad on MasobeBooks (₦15,000)
Your patronage supports our publishing & community work.
Our dedicated portal for African language literature-in-translation — featuring original stories, translations, and audio — aims to challenge the dominance of English in African publishing, support local translators, champion language revitalization in literature and on the web, and expand the audience of our stories. The inaugural edition in 2023 was supported by Sterling Bank Nigeria.
Brown Bamboo & OlongoTalks
We host regular virtual events, including Brown Bamboo, our sponsored monthly poetry reading series with lead conversationalists: Adédayọ̀ Agarau, Hussain Ahmed, Rasaq Malik Gbọ́láhàn, and Ìyanuolúwa Adenle. Each session features invited poets and their readers for an intimate hour of performance and conversation. See one here.
We also host OlongoTalks, a series of cultural debates and interviews.
Past sessions are archived on our YouTube Channel.
Contact & Support
We are an independent platform supported by grants and reader donations.
- Read and share: Please our work widely.
- Donate: Support our work via PayPal. >>scan QR>>>
- Partnerships: For institutional funding or archival/documentary collaborations, please contact us.
- Corrections: To report a factual error in our journalism, email us with the subject line “Correction.”
- General Inquiries: publisher@olongoafrica.com
- Fiscal partner: Our nonprofit fiscal partner is Participatory Politics Foundation. You may donate to us through them, too.
OlongoAfrica is published twice weekly — when we can. Read more on the FAQ page about what we like and we’re about.