I once attended a conference in Ibadan on the authenticity of Nigerian pidgin as a distinct Nigerian language worthy of both codification and general use. On the one hand, it was a necessary intervention in a country where the use of anything other than the colonial language has gained an unexpected derisive quality in particular circles in the new elite [...]

The moment news broke about the death of Africa’s foremost novelist, Chinua Achebe, one of the first feelings that came rushing in after the sadness for the loss of a man so beloved is a personal questioning of what the passing really means. By the time he died at 82, he had published five novels (one of which is the [...]

If what has been reported in various places online, and comments from close family members and colleagues are anything to go by, Africa’s foremost novelist and author of the famous Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, has passed on, at 82. The author whose magnum opus, a novel detailing a class of the Igbo traditional culture with an invading European one, has been translated into about 50 languages, [...]

Growing up in the Nigeria of the eighties, without internet, the only other sources of connection with the larger world were the black-and-white (and later colour) television in the living room, and the books that lay scattered in many shelves around the house. In-between those, a young precocious child gains insight into what had gone before, took imaginative trips to [...]

The writer (and current winner of the Nigerian Prize for Literature) Chika Unigwe was at a Secondary School in Lagos about a week ago, on invitation, to talk to literature students about the process and vocation of writing. On the way out of the venue, one student who had not got a chance to ask questions during the programme ran up [...]

The coordination of three unrelated thoughts at the right junction on my desk (at the perfect time) led to the selection of the subject of this editorial. Each has to do with the process of writing, and thus relevant in an environment with a constant evolution of new ways of expression. But before I go on, this bumper issue of [...]

On November 25th, irrepressible Nigerian writer/critic Ikhide Ikheloa blasted a couple of familiar musings on his social media platforms. One of them went thusly: African literature! In the 21st century, the stories of Africa are still being being vetted by the West. There is no excuse for this shame. Then this: The elephant in the room. If the “African writer” does not [...]

One of the major points Chinua Achebe harped on at the beginning of his now famous memoir There Was A Country, common as well to most of his major literary interventions, is the importance of oral literature and the primacy of traditional forms of cultural transmission that predated the European conquests. In response to arguments supporting cultural homogeneity at the expense [...]

In this issue, I present work by four writers from Nigeria. Richard Ali is the editor of the Nigerian Sentinel Magazine, and the author of a new work of fiction “City of Memories”. In his work, “Three Poems“ presented here on the LitMag for the first time, love meets memory, and misty-eyed idealism. Following him is Dami Ajayi’s flash fiction about [...]

This week’s issue features poetry by Caine-prize shortlisted writer Rotimi Babatunde, a long short fiction on 419 by writer Efe Okogu, and a quasi-faction piece by Sylva Nze Ifedigbo titled Dodan Barracks. In the early eighties, the constant instability of the national government in Nigeria due to the shadow of military coups made childhood very peculiar for a lot of people. [...]