Review

 How “Shanty Town” Bungled the Chance to Be a Spectacular Crime Series

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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 […]

Amnesic Curse and the Poetics of a Verdant Reminder

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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 […]

2022 Year in Review: Top Ten Stories at OlongoAfrica

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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 […]

Looking Through Ẹlẹ́ṣin’s Hourglass

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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, […]

Reading Àjàlá in Modern Times

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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 […]

The Nigeria Prize 2022: Garlands for New Blood

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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 — […]

Of Memory and Call of Waters

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The earth’s hunger is eternal Its stomach swells with our loved ones In farewell, we make concrete beds And mound pillows… Transition (page 25) In Su’eddie Vershima Agema’s Memory and the Call of the Waters, memories are tenderness and sorrow. It is a stream of calm waters waltzing through terrains of hurt and loss. It […]

Saddiq Dzukogi’s Poetics of Grief

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Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art describes language as “home of being.” He also describes poetry as a form with powers to disclose “being.” Saddiq Dzukogi’s collection of poems, Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which is occasioned by the death of his daughter, Baha, wades through a […]

In “Nomad”, Romeo Oriogun Earnestly Converses With Time And History

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Romeo Oriogun has always regarded his life as some form of “protest”, and in many ways, he’s not far from the truth. As an artist, he has had to go against the grain, hone his craft and churn out the kind of poetry that was (derisively) described by (older) literary purists as “trauma porn”, all […]

Are God’s Children Little Broken Things?

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In writing the nine stories in God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, Arinze Ifeakandu spent time with each character, keenly observing, asking the right questions, and learning their pleasure, history, joy, and rage. He delicately brought them to life in shops, clubs, bedrooms, and in the streets as they moved through spaces in their unapologetic […]