Posts from Olongo Africa

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!

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.

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.

One of the numerous reasons the German word, Kampf, has remained popular is its usage by the failed Austrian artist and dictator, Adolf Hitler. The word itself, ‘kampf’, from old High German, is borrowed from Latin, Campus; more familiar to us in its modern English form, ‘camp’.

She works for a Chinese family in a modest-serious restaurant specializing in buffets of Sushi. It’s temporary, for sure. Her apron waits expectantly, like a boxer’s towel, to be thrown into the hospitality ring. Minimum wage. Student gratuity. He wants better for her than this. Their battling at present, he’s fully aware, is his fault. […]

The housemaid remains a fixture in many Nigerian middle-class families, attesting to the social stratification in the dominant culture. Ironically enough, not many Nigerian novelists have significantly dramatized the plight of domestic servants, the world of servitude that entraps many of their kind.

This morning the air was serene and Tebogo took it all in. She was sitting on a rock at the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens, amongst the prettiest of flowers and the grandest of trees, reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf and occasionally pausing to breathe in the fresh air to take everything in. Tebogo knew that this is what she had come into life for.

Unstable leadership in African countries hasn’t just ruined family lives, it has fried the mental house of men and women whose talents and skills could have built a thriving society.

Siwo siwo siwo Siwoooooooooooooo

A prominent feature of post-colonial Nigeria was a remarkable fondness for everything white. This included western education and white-collar jobs, leading to the demonization of certain informal professions. For some reason, artists were among the most reviled.

When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they were thought to be business records, but what if they were poems or psalms?

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.