Arts/Culture

The off-Broadway premiere of Wole Soyinka’s 1958 play, The Swamp Dwellers, offers at least two reasons to be excited, and hopeful. The first comes from a point that is almost over-made in the American media, with theatre critics describing the event as some sort of lost-and-found moment. The New York Times reported the playwright himself […]

On re-counting history 68-sh, 50-sh years later I It is easy to miss the moment when an intellectual tradition starts to wither: there is no bang, no funeral, no obituary. Nothing grand. It just disappears, and one day, you look around and realise that everything is gone, via a slow, suffocating erosion. Black Orpheus was […]

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 […]

By Tádé Ìpàdéọlá Poets who are also scholars of poetry occupy a peculiar niche in the ineffable enterprise of memorable music and words. They are not rare birds in the West (or the Orient), but here in Africa, the sighting of one such personage is something to cherish. If granted the further pleasure of not […]

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 […]

On Re-Presenting History 68-sh, 50-sh years later I. Last year, November, I was in Lagos for the onboarding process for my research fellowship at Archivi.ng. This was coming after all the ‘Hello, we’d love to hear more about your project,’ ‘Tell us about yourself/your history of knowledge work production,’ and ‘You will hear from us’ […]

“The work itself is a study in how the ideology of the novel works, I think.”  —Akin Adeṣọkan, 2013.  Chief Isaac Delano was one of the most important Yorùbá writers of the 20th century. The ‘Chief’ in his title and the spelling of his surname “Delano” may carry American echoes but they are emphatically African. […]

On December 29, 2024, OlongoAfrica hosted a highly anticipated holiday screening of Ebrohimie Road: A Museum of Memory at the J.Randle Centre in Onikan, Lagos. The film, which premiered in July 2024 as part of events to mark Wole Soyinka’s 90th birthday has had a global tour, screening in London, Mexico, and parts of the […]

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 […]

Foluso Agbaje’s remarkable debut, The Parlour Wife, is likely the first novel many will read that focuses on the impact of the Second World War on an African population, with African characters squarely at its centre, and by an African author. The main setting is Lagos, the coastal city that was at the heart of […]