Arts/Culture

“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 […]

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe’s debut novel, The Son of the House, won the award for Best Fiction Writer at the 2019 Sharjah International Book Fair. Uche: Congrats on The Son of the House—a heartrending novel dealing with rape, teenage pregnancy, treachery, and female oppression. What was it like writing it, and how did it start? Cheluchi: Thank […]

One of the most gripping moments at this year’s Sundance film festival was the screening of the jury prize winning short, Lizard. A naughty kid is kicked out of her Sunday school class embedded in one of the popular Pentecostal churches in Lagos. She spends the free time wandering around the expansive compound, stopping short […]

Shortly after the lockdown began in March 2020, I began buying more books. This started innocently perhaps facilitated by boredom; there were some new titles that had just been released that I wanted to read. Some were books of writer friends I was interested in supporting or reviewing. Others were titles I had come across […]

For World Poetry Day 2021 today, we ask some of our leading contemporary writers to give their thoughts on what work of poetry they will recommend that everyone read at least once in their lifetime. Here are the responses: There is a long and rich history of poetry coming from all the different countries and […]

When the announcement was made that a sequel to the 1988 box office hit, Coming to America was going to be released, there were some positive expectations from the audience of this Black Hollywood movie classic as well as a disappointment that a work of such seeming perfection is about to be damaged. One factor […]