Literature

It has become fashionable, in the last decade, to lament what some critics see as the estrangement of contemporary African literature from the continent it supposedly serves. This claim, which recurs with tedious regularity in festival panels, online debates, and academic essays alike, insists that African writers today have turned their gaze too decisively outward: […]

Going to the university for the first time in the harmattan semester of 1991-92, I first realised how influential Ngugi wa Thiong’o was in the Nigerian literary and dramatic spheres. Pen Point, the only independent student bulletin with which I would occasionally publish, had been named after a similar publication edited by Ngugi in the […]

There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other people’s stories. Mohamed Mbougar […]

I’d always loved writing, and curating them, and interrogating those who produce them. It’s a life-affirming thing. We are made by stories, so listening to others tell theirs or showing us how they get to set them down, or doing so myself, is a delightful experience. Has always been. From 2009, I had a travel […]