Tolu Daniel

The False Crisis of African Literary Estrangement

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It has become fashionable, in the last decade, to lament what some critics see as the estrangement of contemporary African literature from the continent it supposedly serves. This claim, which recurs with tedious regularity in festival panels, online debates, and academic essays alike, insists that African writers today have turned their gaze too decisively outward: […]

Thinking Erasure in African Literature

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There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other people’s stories. Mohamed Mbougar […]

A Danquah’s Account of Uxoricide

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  In one of the most chilling stories of the true-crime genre, John List’s 1971 gruesome murder of his family stands tall, and this is not the most disturbing aspect of the story. Much later after he was found and arrested – almost two decades later – the question on the lips of most people […]

In Search of Beauty

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 Even though I walk through the valley  of the shadow of death,  I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.  -Psalm 23:4 On the street where Panseke passes the baton to the uneven boomerang-shaped suburb of Quarry Road where I live, Abeokuta presents itself as a town under. Houses, small shops, primary and […]