Review/Criticism

A poet and his nation in flight. First, the poet’s country, Uganda – an ill-fated Icarus – flew with delirium, overreached itself mid-flight, and plunged into the abyss of postcolonial chaos. The other, the poet – a reclaimed Icarus–is pulled into exile by the instinct for survival and escape from state victimhood. This is the […]

Idi Amin once promised to “make Uganda move once again.” The slogan never caught on like today’s political catchphrases, but the ambition feels familiar. In a moment when strongman politics is resurgent around the world, historian Derek Peterson asks a simple but unsettling question: why did so many ordinary Ugandans believe in Amin – and […]

A few years ago, I was in conversation with Odoh Diego Okenyodo, a former literary journalist and poet who has since left the sphere of literary journalism and established himself as a development communication and media expert, about the dying culture of literary anthologies in Nigerian literature. Our conversation was triggered by my recollection of […]

In Adedayo Agarau’s new collection The Years of Blood, boundaries blur and collapse. Life bleeds into death. Self merges with the other. Ritual and violence collide. This collision produces what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, that which exists at the border of our identity, neither fully self nor other, neither clean nor unclean. Adedayo Agarau […]

At the Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium during the 2026 AFCON final, Morocco’s Brahim Díaz attempted something almost unheard of in the 68-year history of the Africa Cup of Nations: a Panenka penalty. Rather than diving early as the technique’s logic dictates, Senegal’s Edouard Mendy chose to stay put, unmoved by the vociferous roar of the […]

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 […]

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 […]