AFrica

It was all about the biggest solar eclipse in a decade.  Grandpa invited the family to his backyard to see how the moon shadowed the sun, in his words. He sat on his favourite armchair, his walking stick with its gold-plaited handle on his side. He was wearing his medicated dark eyeglasses that he claimed […]

I know this city. I own this city. I know enough to teach you how to survive here. First: you should know this city will rip your legs apart and do you until you scream; I want to be anywhere else but here. The thing is, you’ll never leave, and you’ll never feel fine anywhere […]

In late 2020, when I pulled a hamstring while playing soccer, one of my friends suggested that I take a hot shower, apply black seed oil and wrap my thigh with a piece of cloth when I get home. “It will do wonders,” he said assuredly. I suppressed laugher amid the pain I was feeling. […]

today, i am the little crow that gloom has nothing against. lightning bugs find a home under my nails. i choose life, untethered from the clasp of time & existence. the art of living is not so hard to learn. there is beauty in the ephemeral. re-see these familiar elements. embrace the inalienable order of […]

Disruption, the 2021 anthology of Short Story Day Africa, with its themes and carefully chosen title, couldn’t have arrived at a better time. 2021, like the preceding year, will go down in history as one of the weirdest years in humanity — a rather ordinary year disrupted by pandemic and human follies.  With stories from […]

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 […]

How often we find rest in the place for longing,  fame in the space of hiding,  the truth in the face of the neonates.  I’m taken by the fate of your scalp,  this brocade of tide, gulping at healing  a dead sight with sighs & jittery culls. How often light lords over our woe  & […]

  Words, words, words You failed me when I needed you the most You vagabond!   I (For them at the Murambi genocide memorial site in Rwanda)   Ploughed from the mass graves of History Exhibits on the pyre of empty testaments Equestrians of Trauma Signifiers of perpetual suffering Icons of silence, of the never-speech: […]