Essay

Novels often build toward closure, offering readers a resolution or tying loose ends, but in Dream Count, Adichie resists this expectation. She leaves you with crescendoed emotions, emphasising her central concern: the elusive nature of dreams as mediated through memory. This, alongside the novel’s interrogation of how privilege grants and strips women of agency, forms […]

For a very long time, what is termed history of Africa or documentation of the people of the continent had been snippets of often biased and racist conjectures cobbled together by some early explorers who visited the continent and thought they knew it more than the people they met on the ground. It was the […]

On a humid afternoon, after a few years back from Germany, in our house in Nigeria, where my childhood had its formative years, I found a book lying on our dining table. Its cover showed a pair of drumming hands, brown against the dim yellow and blue of the jacket, and just beneath them, my […]

Long after the last fire was put out in this old restaurant, the pot goes on smouldering. The band is in the area designated as the stage, tuning instruments. In a corner, a handful of young artists and intellectuals are arguing over some tedious philosophical point. Eau de Bohème, Édition Afrique. Liquor chases down smoke […]

E. E. Sule, the renowned writer, critic, and scholar, in his instructive keynote address titled “BM Dzukogi as an Archive: Literature, Activism and Mentorship,” delivered at the national literary colloquium in honour of BM Dzukogi’s 60th birthday celebration in Minna, in January 2025, postulated that the “Nigerian writer must necessarily be an activist. Given the […]

Reviewer: Mosunmola O. AdeojoDocumentary: When I Say AfricaDirector: Cassandra HerrmanProducers: Cassandra Herrman, Linda Peckham, Kathryn Mathers Africa as backdrop. Africa as a stage. Africa as the set upon which someone else’s life story unfolds, their moral awakening performed, their benevolence practiced. In Cassandra Herrman’s documentary When I Say Africa, we are invited to confront this […]

Nigeria’s battered global reputation has been attributed to the nefarious activities of internet fraudsters and corruption perpetuated by unscrupulous political leaders who embezzle public funds and store them in offshore accounts abroad. These unfortunate social vices have led to the global victimization of innocent and hardworking Nigerians in legitimate businesses around the world. Nigeria suffers […]

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz – Ben Okri (A review of South Side, Akin Adesokan, Parresia Publishers, Lagos, 2025) Abel Dankor is an itinerant writer whose life reads like the typical life of every or most Africans; stateless and always in […]

The Conflict of Cultures in West African Poetry, Ulli Beier’s first essay in the maiden edition of Black Orpheus (September 1957), raises a crucial question that haunted the beginnings of African literature, one that has persisted till date. While the African writer fights against colonial subjectivization, he does so within the ambivalence of using the […]

On re-usiting history 68-sh, 50-sh years later I The moment you use something, you initiate its death. II The most significant threat to historical work is not its inevitable decay (which is often how it appears in academic and public discourse), but the fact that said interventions become dated and fall out of use. In […]