Society

Nairobi, that October.  The year is 2019; shortly before the Covid-19  must force the world to a compulsory holiday. We sit at Mama Asante’s restaurant—a cosmopolitan Ghanaian delight in the heart of Nairobi. Three of us; young homegrown African scholars from different parts of Africa unwinding after many days of rigorous intellectual labour. I sit […]

One of the numerous reasons the German word, Kampf, has remained popular is its usage by the failed Austrian artist and dictator, Adolf Hitler. The word itself, ‘kampf’, from old High German, is borrowed from Latin, Campus; more familiar to us in its modern English form, ‘camp’. Camp—not a mode of sensibility as in Susan […]

The searing reality of grief began to creep into my life the year I lost my friend to death. It was on a cold-ridden morning in Benue, when a phone call from a friend from home broke the news to me. Stunned by the gloominess that pervaded the voice that delivered the news to me […]

The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness – Gueorgui Pinkhassov I am on Instagram fiddling through images. I am looking at pictures by Fati Abubakar. The account @bitsofborno is titled Yerwa. Maiduguri, also called Yerwa by the locals, is the capital and largest city of Borno State in North-Eastern Nigeria. These images are […]

The news from Saint-Louis was shit. Literally. The smell of it wafted into our taxi as we bumped over Faidherbe Bridge and onto roads as rough as a crocodile’s back, the island-city’s cobbled streets in the midst of a subterranean overhaul, torn apart and scattered, and reduced to sand and trickles of tainted water. The […]

A whopping 70 percent of women in Nigeria have been abused at some point in their lives. In a country where religion is the order of the day, a stalwart religious patriarchy enforces a gendered order of submission that ensures that this disturbing statistic will remain where it is. Here, patriarchal structures and harmful gender stereotypes still […]

Prominent women like Funmilayo Ransome Kuti and Margaret Ekpo are often treated less than the men in Nigeria’s political history. Also, in this unfortunate ahistorical trough is Olaniwun Adunni Oluwole, itinerant preacher, activist, nationalist and procolonial figure, an eloquent speaker who lived from 1905 to 1957. While writers of Nigeria’s colonial histories seem to sweep […]

On this Wednesday, we reached a partnership with our Brick House colleagues at Preachy for our first co-written piece. It is difficult to come across atheists in Nigeria. In a country where hope seems perpetually lost in the fog of corruption and chaos; where you’d often hear tales of humans flying at night or morphing […]

April of 2020 and 2021 in Nairobi, Kenya, feel eerily similar, like a deja vu. Each day of the month before the velvety darkness of evening fully settled in, the streets are empty of people. Shops and restaurants close even earlier. On March 27th, President Uhuru Kenyatta delivered the 15th presidential address on the coronavirus […]

For World Poetry Day 2021 today, we ask some of our leading contemporary writers to give their thoughts on what work of poetry they will recommend that everyone read at least once in their lifetime. Here are the responses: There is a long and rich history of poetry coming from all the different countries and […]