Posts from Olongo Africa

Or How to Render Metaphysics in Film

To a generation of Nigerians, the character Àjàlá might as well be an urban legend.

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.

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.”

Romeo Oriogun has always regarded his life as some form of “protest”, and in many ways, he’s not far from the truth.

I am more familiar with the poetry of Fred D’Aguiar than his prose, so I was thrilled when I discovered his debut novel at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) in Accra where I was a writer-in-residence in April earlier this year.

In 1997, a young Ike Nnaebue, along with free of his friends, left Lagos, Nigeria for a journey across West Africa, hoping to get into Europe by road (and ultimately) by sea, but a fortuitous encounter at Mali’s capital city caused him to make a detour, one that would change the trajectory of his life forever.

I love my country. But America Courts me — the man with everything.

The writer-director, author of Burma Boy, Biyi Bandélé, has passed.

Ifeakandu, in his debut, reveals the mundane and daring lives of gay men in Nigeria, conveying their everyday experiences with compassion.

They will ask me when I know, I’ll sigh and say not so long ago. It happened in fragments—piece by piece you came and filled up the empty space—and in a matter of time, you became my world.

A piece of intrusion fantasy, its prose carefully measured, tied to a Black woman’s hair.

I come from the country / Of the Happiest People on earth, / Where death sells at ten for one kobo / And the Living envy the peace