Arts/Culture

In the evening of 12 September 2023, social media was awash with what was thought to be a wild rumor. Afrobeats star, Ilerioluwa Promise Aloba was claimed to have died. Within hours, it went quickly from rumor to fact: Mohbad was dead. Before his demise at 27, he was most popular for his  smash hit, […]

[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 […]

My teacher and friend. A memorial was held today 8 August, 2023 in South Africa where he settled for most of the past 30 years. Kole was one of the earliest Nigerian academics to move to SA. He left Nigeria as soon as apartheid started thawing, ahead of independence. I first met Kole as a […]

On the first anniversary of Orlando Julius Ekemode’s death, I found myself reflecting on his contributions to Nigerian culture and society. A pioneer of Nigerian popular music, Orlando Julius is known for his expert fusion of Highlife, jazz, and funk. Born in Ikole Ekiti in 1943, his musical influences included his mother Tinuola, Ghanaian Highlife […]

The opening scene of Shanty Town, the mini-series currently running on Netflix, was rather long, graphic and brutal. Loud explosions, the rat-at-tat of guns, raining sand, frightened people running helter-skelter, heavy objects connecting with unprotected heads, more violent people with more guns that went on and on… but, no body parts flying through the air, […]

On a sunless afternoon in early 2000s suburban Magodo, a routinely squalid existence in one of the city’s slums is interrupted by gunfire and rapid explosions. A woman and her two daughters are almost robbed and violated in the ensuing chaos but for the timely intervention of a neighbour, whose heroics come at the cost […]

Stirring pain, it would seem, marks one of the textual resonances in Nigerian poetry. This pain, which takes on grief grafted onto memory, for most Nigerian poets, is as personal as it is public. In his debut collection, How Morning Remembers the Night (HMRTN), Ifesinachi Nwadike captures pain-grief and poetics of verdant reminder. The treatment […]

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 […]

Or How to Render Metaphysics in Film There is now the quartet, in film, of Ernst Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter), Cary Joji Fukunaga (James Bond, No Time to Die) and Biyi Bándélé, (Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba), who in my opinion, have brought something special to the understanding of the human condition, […]

To a generation of Nigerians, the character Àjàlá might as well be an urban legend. Fictionalised in film, memorialised in music and romanticised in folklore, Ajala has become a common noun, a term in popular Nigerian usage for something part Don Quixote and part Don Juan. Over the last few decades, Olabisi Ajala’s legend has […]