Arts/Culture

Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art describes language as “home of being.” He also describes poetry as a form with powers to disclose “being.” Saddiq Dzukogi’s collection of poems, Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which is occasioned by the death of his daughter, Baha, wades through a […]

Romeo Oríogun is the author of A Sacrament of Bodies and Nomad, and a few other poetry chapbooks. Nomad has now been shortlisted for the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature (poetry category). In this conversation with OlongoAfrica, conducted over zoom by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and Olajide Salawu, he talks about his motivations and influences. The conversation […]

Romeo Oriogun has always regarded his life as some form of “protest”, and in many ways, he’s not far from the truth. As an artist, he has had to go against the grain, hone his craft and churn out the kind of poetry that was (derisively) described by (older) literary purists as “trauma porn”, all […]

In 1997, a young Ike Nnaebue, along with free of his friends, left Lagos, Nigeria for a journey across West Africa, hoping to get into Europe by road (and ultimately) by sea, but a fortuitous encounter at Mali’s capital city caused him to make a detour, one that would change the trajectory of his life […]

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 […]