Nigeria

Siwo siwo siwo Siwooooooooooooooo He was Nigeria’s closest instance of the Renaissance Man: musician, sculptor, inventor, sportsman, architect, scholar, mythmaker, lay philosopher, folklorist, and culture ambassador/impresario. A true Jack of many trades who strove so hard to be master of all, he was a man of  many capabilities , with a voice that was admirably […]

When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they were thought to be business records, but what if they were poems or psalms? My love is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. — Jack Gilbert. […]

The searing reality of grief began to creep into my life the year I lost my friend to death. It was on a cold-ridden morning in Benue, when a phone call from a friend from home broke the news to me. Stunned by the gloominess that pervaded the voice that delivered the news to me […]

The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness – Gueorgui Pinkhassov I am on Instagram fiddling through images. I am looking at pictures by Fati Abubakar. The account @bitsofborno is titled Yerwa. Maiduguri, also called Yerwa by the locals, is the capital and largest city of Borno State in North-Eastern Nigeria. These images are […]

I’m doing something crazy. There is in fact no exact English word to describe it. It is called fait divers which is a French phrase for very brief newspaper reportage of unusual happenings and dark occurrences, like accidents or crimes, that befall ordinary, insignificant people. There are a thousand and one loose English translations of […]

i will leave the dead in your body some room to dance. i will sit beneath the baobab tree with drums of tulips by self-acclaimed craftsmen. i will call forth boneless children & make  seats from udala trees for them. we’ll sit, we’ll eat, & drink too. we’ll be the motivators the eyes of the […]

You don’t send out invites to these things. So obviously no RSVP’s in return. It’s all guess work. There’s a metaphor somewhere in there. I’ll work it out in a minute.  – Aduke Gomez There is, among the Bambuti of the Ituri forest in the Congo, the impossible music of the bamboo flute. This flute […]

A whopping 70 percent of women in Nigeria have been abused at some point in their lives. In a country where religion is the order of the day, a stalwart religious patriarchy enforces a gendered order of submission that ensures that this disturbing statistic will remain where it is. Here, patriarchal structures and harmful gender stereotypes still […]

Prominent women like Funmilayo Ransome Kuti and Margaret Ekpo are often treated less than the men in Nigeria’s political history. Also, in this unfortunate ahistorical trough is Olaniwun Adunni Oluwole, itinerant preacher, activist, nationalist and procolonial figure, an eloquent speaker who lived from 1905 to 1957. While writers of Nigeria’s colonial histories seem to sweep […]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is deeply and unapologetically Nigerian. You get reminded of it when she laughs and her whole shoulders shake. When she speaks Igbo in that fast, accentuated clip you never look far for the Nigerian in her; it’s there, as apparent as the fabric on her neck. When she tells Ebuka Uchendu in […]