Arts/Culture

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Ibrahim Fawzy as OlongoAfrica’s Translation Editor. In this role, Fawzy will head our Lingua project and other translation-related projects at OlongoAfrica. Ibrahim Fawzy comes with a ton of experience, passion, and ambition in literary translation and African literature. He is an Egyptian writer and literary translator working […]

In the early rainy season of 1975, a battered Volkswagen Beetle carrying two young academics crossed the Togo-Ghana border. The car’s owner, a thirty-year-old lecturer at the University of Ìbàdàn named Biodun Jéyǐfò, had embarked on what he would later call a “special mission”—a journey from Ìbàdàn to Accra to persuade Wọlé Ṣóyínká to end […]

The Volume 2 of OlongoAfrica’s multilingual anthology project was released on February 21. This launch, which coincides with this year’s International Mother Tongue Day, represents OlongoAfrica’s commitment to a future in which literature on the continent is not limited to those produced in colonial languages but includes all languages of expression on the continent. This […]

By Sọlá Adéyẹmí (University of East Anglia, UK) There are scholars whose passing feels like the quiet extinguishing of a star; and there are others whose departure alters the very atmosphere of intellectual life. Bíọ́dún Jéyǐfó belonged firmly to the latter category. His death at the age of eighty is not simply the loss of […]

In 2025, OlongoAfrica embarked on a historic journey to recover, digitize, and restore the complete run of Black Orpheus (1957–1993). For the first time in decades, the journal that defined African modernism—publishing the early works of Leon Damas, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Christopher Okigbo, J.P. Clark, Chinua Achebe and many others —was made freely […]

One October evening in 2000, there was a major upset at the FA Cup final in Nigeria. With sheer grit and resolve, Niger Tornadoes, a second-division team stunned the mighty Rangers of Enugu, beating them to lift the historical trophy after an own goal by one of the Rangers players. I remember going to the […]

When Oris Aigbokhaevbolo declared Nigerian literature dead, he did not do so casually. He was not lamenting a temporary lull or the disappearance of a few magazines. He was naming what he saw as a fundamental failure of formation. There was, in his account, no stable literary life to grow into. Writing appeared intensely, briefly, […]

Long after the last fire was put out in this old restaurant, the pot goes on smouldering. The band is in the area designated as the stage, tuning instruments. In a corner, a handful of young artists and intellectuals are arguing over some tedious philosophical point. Eau de Bohème, Édition Afrique. Liquor chases down smoke […]

Reviewer: Mosunmola O. AdeojoDocumentary: When I Say AfricaDirector: Cassandra HerrmanProducers: Cassandra Herrman, Linda Peckham, Kathryn Mathers Africa as backdrop. Africa as a stage. Africa as the set upon which someone else’s life story unfolds, their moral awakening performed, their benevolence practiced. In Cassandra Herrman’s documentary When I Say Africa, we are invited to confront this […]

Only the dead have seen the end of war- George Santayana Book: The Road to the Country, Author: Chigozie Obioma Publisher: Masobe Books, Lagos Year: 2024 The Nigeria civil war (1967-70) has produced so many literary works that it would be a surprise if definitive course (s) on the war is not already in our […]