Essay

In 1962, the Heinemann African Writers Series began publishing inexpensive paperback editions of African literature that would define a generation of readers across the continent. Readers in Lagos, Ibadan, Nairobi, and Accra could read writers like Chinua Achebe in editions designed specifically for Africans. These books circulated widely in schools, teacher training colleges, and public […]

In the early rainy season of 1975, a battered Volkswagen Beetle carrying two young academics crossed the Togo-Ghana border. The car’s owner, a thirty-year-old lecturer at the University of Ìbàdàn named Biodun Jéyǐfò, had embarked on what he would later call a “special mission”—a journey from Ìbàdàn to Accra to persuade Wọlé Ṣóyínká to end […]

By Sọlá Adéyẹmí (University of East Anglia, UK) There are scholars whose passing feels like the quiet extinguishing of a star; and there are others whose departure alters the very atmosphere of intellectual life. Bíọ́dún Jéyǐfó belonged firmly to the latter category. His death at the age of eighty is not simply the loss of […]

The digital media space in Nigeria is an unrelenting arena of attention-grabbing spectacle, as hardly does an issue surface before others pull you to them. Digital netizens understand this economy of attention well and try to maximize visibility through a range of tactics. The recent online exchange between Nigerian music stars Ayo Balogun (Wizkid) and […]

Among the genres, poetry is still king in the Nigerian literary space. It might not be hyperbolic to say a poetry collection or chapbook is published every other month. Last month, Facebook informed me of Bakandamiya: An Elegy, a new poetry volume by Sadiq Dzukogi. This month (December 2025) is the turn of Tares Uburumu’s […]

One October evening in 2000, there was a major upset at the FA Cup final in Nigeria. With sheer grit and resolve, Niger Tornadoes, a second-division team stunned the mighty Rangers of Enugu, beating them to lift the historical trophy after an own goal by one of the Rangers players. I remember going to the […]

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 […]