This week’s issue features excerpts of fiction, some poems, and a non-fiction piece from a writer’s residency. Chris Ihidero, a columnist from Lagos, makes a debut with two poems exploring pain and nostalgia. In Bolaji Olatunde’s Straw Dogs, a young man explores his own sexuality and confrontation with the forces of Christianity. I strongly recommend it. Alkasim Abdulkadir also makes [...]

I often run into a fascinating interesting dilemma of sorts whenever I read and edit submissions to this magazine. Do I turn “favour” into “favor” as my spell-checker suggests; neighbour to “neighbor” and labour to “labor”? After all, such decisions are usually based upon the sole discretion of the imperial editor, he himself taking a cue from the rules set [...]

A while ago, I stumbled on an old email from my friend Uche Peter Umez, the prizewinning author of Sam and the Wallet and a bunch of other publications. In it were a couple of paragraphs he called Fragments from Sanskriti Kendra. Uche knows something about the beauty of words. He has won the BSU creative writing competition, been a commended winner [...]

Living on the campus of the University of Ibadan as a student in the early 2000s, there were three venues of socialization: There were classrooms, there was the Staff Club (and other places of relaxation, including an open shed in the Students’ Union Building where professors, artists, poets, and other creative students sat to drink, smoke, and share ideas about [...]

We begin here: sandwich. This is only because Ikhide Ikheloa’s Oporoko Chronicles walks the margins of our sense of taste, humour, family, mischief, and imagination. Far from his equally brilliant and refreshing response to the mostly insensitive response of African intellectuals to the Kony 2012 viral video, the writer takes us on a trip through the quotidian rote of a generic [...]

This week’s offerings, short, traverse a realm of experimentations. In Teju Cole’s Kadara Kekeke, the writer’s pithy twitter-based news-based literature take on new outlooks in the clothes of its local tongue. A recent twitter quasi-protest to bring Yoruba into the global arena of the social media platform has tweeters from Nigeria writing in Yoruba for one day. More on that [...]

Last week, Temie Giwa’s Road to Kigali re-imagined African life as a series of journeys, with a welcome tribute to my poem Be Like The Road. Rwanda’s return to normalcy from the post-genocide period of the early 90s comes back to us through the writer’s eyes and poetic tribute. It was preceded by Olumide Abimbola’s morose telling of the mind of [...]

“In the beginning was the word,” and it has defined everything else. We will return to this sentence time and time again, but for now, it serves as a good start. Words have defined, described, enthralled, moved, and enchanted us for generations. Words wake us in the morning, and lull us at night. Now – for the purpose of this [...]