Olongo Africa

It gives us some pleasure to present the digitized copies of Black Orpheus journal to the public for the first time. Over the last six months, we’ve worked with Archivi.ng, a Nigerian nonprofit digitizing newspapers and other culture materials, to scan all the copies of Black Orpheus journals we obtained as part of the Black […]

We were thrilled by the response to our Black Orpheus Fellowship announcement late last year.  We got 59 applications, all of them fascinating and some quite ambitious. It took a while to read and assess all of them, but thanks to our five judges (editors, curators, academics) who read through the entries, rated them, and […]

OlongoAfrica is offering long-term and short-term opportunities to support quality research and writing on the history, politics, and influence of the Black Orpheus journal and the Mbari Club generation. We are offering both in-person fellowships on the ground in Lagos Nigeria, as well as remote fellowships in Nigeria and elsewhere around the world involving independent […]

Between October 31 and November 4, 2024, we unveiled an exhibition at the Art X Lagos showcasing the original covers and content of Black Orpheus journals. The exhibition, managed by JCAA Lagos, introduced attendees to a one-year project at OlongoAfrica which aims to unearth the history and legacy of Black Orpheus as a pan-African journal […]

Please join us from October 31 to November 3 at ART X Lagos for the unveiling of Black Orpheus Exploration Project our year-long project to explore, examine, and engage with the legacy of Black Orpheus to African literature, art, and culture production. Read more about the project here. The ART X Exhibition, featuring a few […]

August, 2024 OlongoAfrica.com presents a year-long project to explore the legacy of the Black Orpheus journal on literature and culture documentation around the African continent. The Black Orpheus Journal of African and Afro-American Literature was first published between 1957 and 1975. It was founded by Ulli Beier, a German-Jewish expatriate whose work in the arts […]

[Lecture delivered on September 1, 2023 at the Freedom Park, Lagos.] ÌSẸ̀ṢE has come, but not gone. We salute all those – human rights activists, community leaders, affronted citizens, advocates of equity, and all –  but the state governors most especially – who have taken history to task and boldly formalized a level praying ground […]

In the words of Nigerian poet, Odia Ofeimum, “A city is like a poem. You enter it and you enter into a world of concentrated time.” Odia’s observation makes us think of the city as malleable, changing from time to time, switching tempo from moment to moment. The African city, we guess, can be fast […]

We have published a lot of incredible stories this year spanning different tastes and genres in African literature. As we approach the year’s end, we have compiled a list of our top stories for 2022 strictly for your leisure reading this holiday. At the top of our list is this piece by Mọlárá Wood which […]

Romeo Oríogun is the author of A Sacrament of Bodies and Nomad, and a few other poetry chapbooks. Nomad has now been shortlisted for the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature (poetry category). In this conversation with OlongoAfrica, conducted over zoom by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and Olajide Salawu, he talks about his motivations and influences. The conversation […]