Posts from Olongo Africa

Thousands of Africans from countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Somalia and other countries languish under the disproportionate cold of eastern Europe as they wait at transit points and the border.

Bàrà was the burial site of the Aláàfin (King) of Ọ̀yọ́, ruler over the empire and its millions of subjects. “It is a spiritual site. When a new Aláàfin was to be installed, the Aláàfin-elect must come here to worship the past Aláàfins."

Barter Because it’s 1945 And the Allies put a war horse over a west African infantryman, A boy is traded for a horse.

The Western gaze comes from the idea that Eurocentrism influences the way we (Africans) are perceived, the way we think, and how we in turn see ourselves.

He belongs to a generation of Nigerian men raised to be strong, silent, and hopelessly incapable of accepting complicity even in the face of clear damage. The patriarchy is alive in him indeed.

For Ayọ̀ Bámgbóṣé at 90

Our dealings are dominated by a disregard for scientific reasoning, and a preference for ostentatious, and often venal religiosity.

All our lives, a series of crossings. The parts of our existence we are often not proud to claim still make up the sum total of our lives.

So straight, so Ubuntu, steered a troubled nation

The past year recedes

Although science fiction is still a white-dominated genre, Black sci-fi has come far from the days of zombies, aliens and white-washed robots. We have seen how much culture and history can be woven into technology to birth Afrofuturism.

There were bigger boys. Boys with the height of a pole and the bulk of a boxer. And they knew it, that they were bigger and dangerous and powerful. So, they taunted the smaller kids and took their lunches and asked them to hang upside down.

Ernest O. Ògunyemi is a staff writer at Open Country Mag. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Tinderbox, Sierra Nevada Review, Journal Nine, The Indianapolis Review, Down River Road, Capsule Stories, No Tokens, The West Review, The Dark Magazine, Mud Season Review, Agbowó, Isele, and in the anthology 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry III. He is the curator of The Fire That Is Dreamed of: The Young African Poets.