Review/Criticism

The immaculate Brother Jero, the velvet-hearted Brother Jero, the one and only articulate hero of Christ’s crusade: I have seen many actors bring this suave prophet of Wole Soyinka in The Trials of Brother Jero to life on the stage, most notably Ropo Ewenla during his Ibadan PlayHouse run. So, from the moment I saw […]

How can one become a worthy citizen of the world, a patriot of his country, and an active member of his community if he or she has no knowledge of his or her ancestry? This appears to be the implied question which Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s full-length poetry collection, The Naming (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) profoundly […]

What happens when a family believes so deeply in a curse that the belief itself becomes so indistinguishable from the curse? The result of such an occurrence is a devastating yet thoughtfully written portrayal of generational trauma, one in which the shadow the characters spend their lives running from, is as much inherited as it […]

Ayotola Tehingbola’s Lagos Will Be Hard for You, a short story collection, published in the UK by Jacaranda Books (2026) and in Nigeria by Masobe Books (2025), begins with a death that refuses to stay contained. In “abba father,” the opening story of the collection, Ibrahim Mohammed learns, by way of a curt text message, […]

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 […]