Nigeria

On this Wednesday, we reached a partnership with our Brick House colleagues at Preachy for our first co-written piece. It is difficult to come across atheists in Nigeria. In a country where hope seems perpetually lost in the fog of corruption and chaos; where you’d often hear tales of humans flying at night or morphing […]

Shortly after the lockdown began in March 2020, I began buying more books. This started innocently perhaps facilitated by boredom; there were some new titles that had just been released that I wanted to read. Some were books of writer friends I was interested in supporting or reviewing. Others were titles I had come across […]

They slipped him in during the night. We all woke up in the morning to find him there, in a sitting position, occupying the bed beside the man who screamed God’s names each day they changed wound dressings. My first thought on seeing him sitting there, shirtless, his torso rising and falling heavily in an […]

history oft becomes second nature. a history of subservience is inferiority. history is sediment of time, sturdy like diamond to undo history, we ask time to become cannibal, which is to say we ask time to chew on its own fangs, chew itself back to the beginning, down to its innocent gums a history of […]

The handkerchief Aunty presses into my hand is white and crisp. It has the strong musty smell of old clothes. She says she got it in camp during the Holy Ghost service in August, that the Reverend personally anointed it. She repeats the word “personally”, staring at the heart-shaped birthmark on my nose. ‘Make sure […]

The tragic exploits of killer-herders in Zamfara and Igangan, Edo and Ondo; a breadwinner razed in fire for the twin crimes of blasphemy and heresy by self-appointed custodians of faith and morals; orphans dying of the throes of hunger; a woman beaten to death for the womanly crime of being a wife and mother, the […]

While any legitimate criticisms of a decrepit system cannot be equated with an outright dismissal of it, there is something to be said to the Nigerian abroad whose narratives about colleagues at home are couched mainly in typecasting rhetoric. Neither a gesture at academic populism nor a hint of empty nationalism, this, here, is my […]

…I devoted myself to sumptuousmoos and hallelujahs. Look around you:only the absence of certain people suggestsyou did not sleep throughout the whole journey. -Terence Hayes Unlike Hayes, I no longer devote myself to sumptuous moos, and I have struck beef off my menus. Not because I am an Adventist as most people believe we are […]

Forgive me this Grace “in Italy a lot of migrants beg for moneyfor food, on the street” — Lucky I remember your face, veteranof the Mediterranean, of sea crossings,veteran of boats. I listen in stillness. I do not say to you, my guilt is America.I listen to you talk of shurroty, the act of beggingfor […]