Review

Foluso Agbaje’s remarkable debut, The Parlour Wife, is likely the first novel many will read that focuses on the impact of the Second World War on an African population, with African characters squarely at its centre, and by an African author. The main setting is Lagos, the coastal city that was at the heart of […]

One of the critical comments on humour I often return is Humour, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria of the foremost Nigerian critic, Ebenezer Obadare. Obadare showcases critically how the work of humor is central to the understanding of Nigerian society. He explores how humour by cartoonists, dramatists, and stand up figures power resistance through […]

In my last review of a Nollywood film—C.J. Fiery Obasi’s Mami Wata (2022)—I submitted that to criticise Nollywood, demanding range from our directors, is to build a reputation as a serial complainer. As a principle, I believe in edification than putdown criticism as the former helps us understand the underlying issues of craft better, more […]

Lydia’s statement close to the end of the book carries the weight of the novel: I’m here to tell you that happiness is possible, again, Lydia says, And I hope that you find happiness again. If anything is to be said about the strength of Olukorede Yishau’s third book, it may be the sure presence […]

On a sunless afternoon in early 2000s suburban Magodo, a routinely squalid existence in one of the city’s slums is interrupted by gunfire and rapid explosions. A woman and her two daughters are almost robbed and violated in the ensuing chaos but for the timely intervention of a neighbour, whose heroics come at the cost […]

Stirring pain, it would seem, marks one of the textual resonances in Nigerian poetry. This pain, which takes on grief grafted onto memory, for most Nigerian poets, is as personal as it is public. In his debut collection, How Morning Remembers the Night (HMRTN), Ifesinachi Nwadike captures pain-grief and poetics of verdant reminder. The treatment […]

We have published a lot of incredible stories this year spanning different tastes and genres in African literature. As we approach the year’s end, we have compiled a list of our top stories for 2022 strictly for your leisure reading this holiday. At the top of our list is this piece by Mọlárá Wood which […]

Or How to Render Metaphysics in Film There is now the quartet, in film, of Ernst Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter), Cary Joji Fukunaga (James Bond, No Time to Die) and Biyi Bándélé, (Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba), who in my opinion, have brought something special to the understanding of the human condition, […]

To a generation of Nigerians, the character Àjàlá might as well be an urban legend. Fictionalised in film, memorialised in music and romanticised in folklore, Ajala has become a common noun, a term in popular Nigerian usage for something part Don Quixote and part Don Juan. Over the last few decades, Olabisi Ajala’s legend has […]

If it wasn’t obvious enough that the leading poetic voices on the continent now belong to a new generation of writers bred in the jungles of the internet and raised in the angst of 21st-century dilemmas and preoccupations, the new NLNG prize shortlist has made it clearer. The three writers currently on the shortlist — […]