AFRICA

I was battling a mental illness while I was weaning myself off doctrinaire Christianity. I was undiagnosed because I couldn’t afford access to a good, and LGBTQ2+-friendly psychologist, and the illness was debilitating.

First you must imagine everything in sepia.

I have always found it a little too dramatic when I see movies where people run off to another city to begin a new life after a break up. A whole life in a place, ending because of one relationship. Ridiculous!

Boxing champion Conjestina Achieng deserves material support as well as honour

In over two decades of my life in Nigeria, I have only seen a skateboard once and that skateboard was owned by a man who has been labeled as eccentric by his neighbors.

Having criminalized queerness, the Nigerian state ruthlessly promotes homophobia. In response, LGBTQIA+ Nigerians continue to mobilize, committing to the struggle for queer rights.

The mobility challenge faced by African cuisines in an increasingly technological age is unacceptable. So, when recently I stumbled on a writing about a certain food app called DishAfrik, with its ambitious catalogue of curated African cuisines, with a real-life cooking feature, I was overjoyed.

Iwo smells of dust and rusty air, clouding up my mind and drowning my memory. The first thing my mother welcomes me with is water. She is an ardent devotee of the culture that believes water is the most glorious form of courtesy that can be paid to a visitor. But I always find it hard to drink.

On the afternoon of my friend’s demise, I logged in to Facebook to discover a myriad of his pictures congregating people’s timelines. In those pictures, his face was distinct, sharp; his mien betraying the darkness saturating the day, binding us in that state of sadness with the thread of mourning.

Fati Abubakar was born and grew up in Maiduguri, Borno State. With her camera, she braved the odds of bomb blasts and a terrorist group that termed education as forbidden as well as a patriarchal society, where the ideal visual of a young woman is not that of her walking around town chasing pictures. Chronicling everyday life in Borno, in the heat of an insurgency, Fati sets out with her camera as a canvas and her eyes as brushstrokes, to create an alternative ‘real’ image of Borno not just as a war zone of a theatre of trauma but a place of humanity and hope in a time of crisis.

From Salawu Olajide, our colleague at Olongo Africa, who is also the author of Death to the Baobobs!

The glories of art and music in Nigeria before independence, in a new documentary

Readers of Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House may find Onyeka Nwelue’s The Strangers of Braamfontein familiar, especially in its discussion of sex trafficking of African women.