Arts/Culture

You cannot predict Nollywood: it transforms itself like a chameleon changing color. Like the sprawling Nigeria landmass, Nollywood is increasingly becoming so vast that it is hard to keep up with the latest releases. But thanks to global capitalism that makes online streaming possible, one can always catch up with the new releases on Netflix, […]

[NOTE: I first learnt of Biyi Bándélé thanks to Ayọ̀ Arígbágbù, who never stopped gushing over The Man from the Back of the Beyond. I took interest and sought out the writer. When his book, Burma Boy was published in 2007, I reached out to him that I had written a review of the book […]

It appears that the news is true, that the writer-director, author of Burma Boy, Biyi Bandélé, has passed. This is a heavy sentence to type because I knew him. Harder to refer to him in the past tense; we still talked on the phone over a week ago, planning to meet in Lagos whenever he […]

In writing the nine stories in God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, Arinze Ifeakandu spent time with each character, keenly observing, asking the right questions, and learning their pleasure, history, joy, and rage. He delicately brought them to life in shops, clubs, bedrooms, and in the streets as they moved through spaces in their unapologetic […]

Joshua Chizoma’s “Collector of Memories” weaves the epistemological to challenge the principles of our moralities while also entangling that with personal identity. In the “Collector of Memories”, one of the shortlisted stories for the prestigious 2022 Caine Prize for African Writing, Chizoma draws us to carefully read this poignant and visceral story that questions the […]

Certain trends have emerged on the AKO Caine Prize For African Writing shortlists over the last decade. One of the more productive ones is its affinity with the Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) shortlists, stories from the latter showing up on the former four times over a nine year period—one in 2018 and 2022, two […]

Hannah Giorgis is an emerging voice in African diaspora circles, but also in the wider international scene for her miscellanea of journalistic pieces. She writes mainly movie and book reviews, women and human rights advocative pieces that take up a broad array of  issues such as race relations, women’s oppression, blacklives matters and many others. […]

  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 2011, Dami Ajayi successfully completed his first collection of poems, Clinical Blues, and it marked for him, the completion of an epiphany which began in 2007, when as a young medical student, a new vision of the world caught up with him. This new vision afforded him the clarity to see the world afresh […]

In Nigerian popular culture, ‘double wahala’ is a Pidgin English phrase that was made popular by ace Afrobeat musician and activist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. To repeat it by adding ‘double trouble,’ the English variant  emphasizes the severity of the troubles. Nigerian literature has repeatedly featured the disorder and troubles that characterized postcolonial Nigerian life. Double […]