Arts/Culture

Everyone likes the idea of home as a safe place, a comforting, anchoring soundness. But sometimes this safety lies not in the familiar but in the complex challenge of exploring new vistas, away from all that was previously held dear. Especially when home is that place that takes instead of gives. The upbeat documentary, Blind […]

You don’t send out invites to these things. So obviously no RSVP’s in return. It’s all guess work. There’s a metaphor somewhere in there. I’ll work it out in a minute.  – Aduke Gomez There is, among the Bambuti of the Ituri forest in the Congo, the impossible music of the bamboo flute. This flute […]

When you enter the world of Rémy Ngamije’s ‘Giver of Nicknames’, you’re probably not thinking of how teenagers perceive injustice. To reduce the story set in a Catholic school in urban Namibia to this one theme is to do injustice to the writing. The shortlisted stories in the 2021 AKO Caine Prize For African Writing […]

This is the second time Meron Hadero, the Ethiopian American writer, has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. She made the shortlist in 2019 with her heartbreaking story “The Wall,” though Lesley Nneka Arimah, the Nigerian American, would win the prize with “Skinned,” a riveting, eerie story about gender inequality. Hadero is […]

‘Like a hum in the forest’, these words are swirling around in the deep recess of my mind asking to be let out. It took a while but it finally found an exit – these winged words set a flight reading The Separation by Iryn Tushabe. They make their unhurried way out of my mind, […]

“We were clowns, children, things….” So starts Rémy Ngamije’s The Giver of Nicknames, where readers are launched into the mind of a hyper-literate narrator who recounts his teenagehood at a private Catholic School in Namibia. From the beginning, Ngamije’s sets out to make the reader aware of the title character’s deft use of language, more […]

“Is your VPN on?” asks Anthony Azekwoh. We’re on the now-familiar Zoom app, attempting to get into a meeting together. Days before our call, the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari declared an unconstitutional ban on Twitter, forcing millions of Nigeria-based users to access the social platform through a VPN interface, which is able to bypass territorial […]

“Lucky,” by Doreen Baingana, is a historical-memoir short story that addresses the subject of war and its devastating effects on human society. The immediate allusion to “Gulu District, West Nile” paints in the reader’s mind the impression of the 1980 insurgency⎯which occurred after Idi Amin was toppled a year earlier⎯and places the story perfectly to […]

My encounter with Troy Onyango’s story in Origami was love at first sight. Struck by the story’s opening sentence: First, he plucks a small part of himself and folds it in half; I surrendered to the intimacy of those words that pronounced Onyango as a writer that cares about the efficiency of a sentence. But […]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is deeply and unapologetically Nigerian. You get reminded of it when she laughs and her whole shoulders shake. When she speaks Igbo in that fast, accentuated clip you never look far for the Nigerian in her; it’s there, as apparent as the fabric on her neck. When she tells Ebuka Uchendu in […]