Igbo
On Speech and Gender Relations in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” says the narrator of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA). Here is the place of speech (and its absence) in Umuofia, the fictional Igbo community where TFA is set, since conversation is the art of […]
On Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s The Naming
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 […]
On Lineage and Voice
On a humid afternoon, after a few years back from Germany, in our house in Nigeria, where my childhood had its formative years, I found a book lying on our dining table. Its cover showed a pair of drumming hands, brown against the dim yellow and blue of the jacket, and just beneath them, my […]
Mbari: Interrogating the Place of Space in African Art
Long after the last fire was put out in this old restaurant, the pot goes on smouldering. The band is in the area designated as the stage, tuning instruments. In a corner, a handful of young artists and intellectuals are arguing over some tedious philosophical point. Eau de Bohème, Édition Afrique. Liquor chases down smoke […]