Nigeria

Somewhere in BornoIit lingers, the sorrow, like a mist as men sit on benches with tumblers of ginin hands, smoke from bummed cigars drifting aboutthe atmosphere—the only mechanismmy countrymen have invented to disembody ache.IIa foreigner once asked why the children herewear old faces: i told him to wear his caution perfectly well. the bullets don’t […]

Mummy Tobe sat in the spacious living room of her one-bedroom apartment, her jaw set firmly on her hand and her hand set firmly on her leg. Her expression was one of deep thought. Her eyes fixed on the linoleum floor and peered into the unknown. Her friend Agnes was sitting on the same sofa […]

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 […]

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, […]

O heavens, hear me now…Hear me on the edge of this wilderness, Ripping off my heart to you, calling out,A traveller at crossroads, in this thicket.Haven’t you heard me cry out to you?Haven’t you heard my voice of lament?Sometimes the day feels dry, Like rotten oranges decaying in my mouth.Sometimes the night comes too often,With […]

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 […]

A few years ago, I was in conversation with Odoh Diego Okenyodo, a former literary journalist and poet who has since left the sphere of literary journalism and established himself as a development communication and media expert, about the dying culture of literary anthologies in Nigerian literature. Our conversation was triggered by my recollection of […]

The digital media space in Nigeria is an unrelenting arena of attention-grabbing spectacle, as hardly does an issue surface before others pull you to them. Digital netizens understand this economy of attention well and try to maximize visibility through a range of tactics. The recent online exchange between Nigerian music stars Ayo Balogun (Wizkid) and […]

In Adedayo Agarau’s new collection The Years of Blood, boundaries blur and collapse. Life bleeds into death. Self merges with the other. Ritual and violence collide. This collision produces what Julia Kristeva calls the abject, that which exists at the border of our identity, neither fully self nor other, neither clean nor unclean. Adedayo Agarau […]