AFrica

Just before his country’s encounter with France at the 2026 World Cup, Senegal’s National Assembly President Ousmane Sonko stated that “regardless of the winner, it’s Africa that will have beaten Africa,” a sentiment that reiterated the French National Team’s constitution by African sporting talent. Sonko’s remarks also speak to the domination of the French side […]

CW: Depictions of violence The first time I hear Cinderella, Mother is crying slow, deliberate tears that gather at the corners of her eyes before releasing themselves down the steep ridge of her cheekbone. Each one catches the fractured afternoon light like something briefly precious before vanishing into the collar of her kanga, which has […]

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 […]

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, […]

Born in Tede, Nigeria, Ifeoluwa Ayandele is a poet with work in Callaloo, Poetry London, Magma, Michigan Quarterly Review, among other publications. Besides being shortlisted for the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize and the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, he has received the 2026 Pink Poetry Prize from Great […]

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 […]

In 1962, the Heinemann African Writers Series began publishing inexpensive paperback editions of African literature that would define a generation of readers across the continent. Readers in Lagos, Ibadan, Nairobi, and Accra could read writers like Chinua Achebe in editions designed specifically for Africans. These books circulated widely in schools, teacher training colleges, and public […]

Reviewer: Mosunmola O. AdeojoDocumentary: When I Say AfricaDirector: Cassandra HerrmanProducers: Cassandra Herrman, Linda Peckham, Kathryn Mathers Africa as backdrop. Africa as a stage. Africa as the set upon which someone else’s life story unfolds, their moral awakening performed, their benevolence practiced. In Cassandra Herrman’s documentary When I Say Africa, we are invited to confront this […]

When we last went to Mother’s rural home in Gutu in the early months of 1997, the river still flowed, the buses still ran on time, our money still had value and I still cared about my family. I still cared about her. No, not Mother. Her. No two people were closer than me and […]

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 […]