Black Orpheus

On re-counting history 68-sh, 50-sh years later I It is easy to miss the moment when an intellectual tradition starts to wither: there is no bang, no funeral, no obituary. Nothing grand. It just disappears, and one day, you look around and realise that everything is gone, via a slow, suffocating erosion. Black Orpheus was […]

It gives us some pleasure to present the digitized copies of Black Orpheus journal to the public for the first time. Over the last six months, we’ve worked with Archivi.ng, a Nigerian nonprofit digitizing newspapers and other culture materials, to scan all the copies of Black Orpheus journals we obtained as part of the Black […]

By Tádé Ìpàdéọlá Poets who are also scholars of poetry occupy a peculiar niche in the ineffable enterprise of memorable music and words. They are not rare birds in the West (or the Orient), but here in Africa, the sighting of one such personage is something to cherish. If granted the further pleasure of not […]

We were thrilled by the response to our Black Orpheus Fellowship announcement late last year.  We got 59 applications, all of them fascinating and some quite ambitious. It took a while to read and assess all of them, but thanks to our five judges (editors, curators, academics) who read through the entries, rated them, and […]

OlongoAfrica is offering long-term and short-term opportunities to support quality research and writing on the history, politics, and influence of the Black Orpheus journal and the Mbari Club generation. We are offering both in-person fellowships on the ground in Lagos Nigeria, as well as remote fellowships in Nigeria and elsewhere around the world involving independent […]