Arts/Culture

Uwem Akpan is not an unfamiliar name in the annals of African literature. His debut collection of short stories – Say You’re One of Them – made the New York Times bestseller list, won the 2009 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the 2009 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region, 2009 Beyond Margins Award and […]

In the process of organising one of the biggest virtual literary readings in Africa in the first quarter of 2022, my priority was to bring together the big names in the industry; publishers, critics, renowned poets, artists and academics, all in one single virtual space. But the central priority — the priority of all priorities […]

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined. – Toni Morrison What does it mean to bring a city to life? To show its shapes and contours without yielding to the oft-tendency to romanticise? Eloghosa Osunde’s riveting debut, Vagabonds!, answers through a set of interlinked stories which can be read as a whole or independently, […]

Nigeria’s movie industry, Nollywood can no longer be regarded as a nascent industry, even though theorists and film historians are now defining the current age as the age of ‘New Nollywood’ because of advances in storytelling and cinematography. Still, the industry finds it difficult to move away from weak high society stories and romantic comedies. […]

People who have followed me on Twitter may have come across occasional posts of mine with nothing more than the photo of a book and the #Mood hashtag. It had been my own way of sharing the discovery of particular books that have sentimental value to me, to the culture, or books that could, at […]

NIGERIAN SUBSIDY AND THE REAL  SUBSIDISERS Here, in plain, unsubsidized language      Are the basic facts   About the fabled Nigerian “subsidy”      Whose endless lies have besieged our ears We the Nigerian people subsidize      The rampant CORRUPTION of our rulers We the Nigerian people subsidize      Their fatal incompetence and prodigal greed We the Nigerian people subsidize      Those […]

Secrets. Every family has them. For filmmaker Jide Tom Akinleminu, it would seem that his not-quite-blended family is nursing more than their fair share.  As the mixed-race son of a Nigerian father and a Danish mother, Jide Tom Akinleminu spent his life straddling both often extreme worlds. His parents met and fell in love while […]

Madness is often associated with the extent that an observed behaviour deviates from what is expected. This difference may also extend to distance – how far away observations are from expectations. In the realm of those classified as “sans sense”, this distance has physical manifestations. We cast away those who display actions counterpoint to normative […]

For Ayọ̀ Bámgbóṣé at 90 When I called him the “doyen of African linguistics”  in my valedictory lecture at the University of Ibadan in July 2005 (a celebratory oríkì which, to my greatest delight, has caught on since then),  I did so with not the slightest fear of exaggeration or effusive adulation. Pioneer, pathfinder, scholar, teacher, […]

Disruption, the 2021 anthology of Short Story Day Africa, with its themes and carefully chosen title, couldn’t have arrived at a better time. 2021, like the preceding year, will go down in history as one of the weirdest years in humanity — a rather ordinary year disrupted by pandemic and human follies.  With stories from […]