Review/Criticism

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Only the dead have seen the end of war- George Santayana Book: The Road to the Country, Author: Chigozie Obioma Publisher: Masobe Books, Lagos Year: 2024 The Nigeria civil war (1967-70) has produced so many literary works that it would be a surprise if definitive course (s) on the war is not already in our […]

John Pepper Clark, the renowned Africa poet, playwright and scholar, in his acclaimed poem “The Casualties” offered a profound postulation on the complexity of war and victimhood when he remarked that “The casualties are not only those who are dead…” as a response to the divisive rhetoric and counter accusations that trailed the Nigerian civil […]

 If his debut collection, Where the Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, enacts place-centric imagination and diasporic consciousness, James Yeku’s latest work, A Phial of Passing Memories, articulates further “memoir-poetic” narratives in 60 poems coordinated in five sections that detail diverse encounters in moments and places. His poetry picks on well-ranged, everyday experiences: birth, parenting, death, […]

See, I’m full of the blues, holy water too – Preacher Boy At the time of death, legendary Delta blues musician, Robert Johnson, was only 27. He had disappeared quietly, so quiet that the world did not hear a word about it until nearly three decades later, when a researcher stumbled upon his death certificate […]

There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other people’s stories. Mohamed Mbougar […]

“The work itself is a study in how the ideology of the novel works, I think.”  —Akin Adeṣọkan, 2013.  Chief Isaac Delano was one of the most important Yorùbá writers of the 20th century. The ‘Chief’ in his title and the spelling of his surname “Delano” may carry American echoes but they are emphatically African. […]