nigeria

In Nigerian popular culture, ‘double wahala’ is a Pidgin English phrase that was made popular by ace Afrobeat musician and activist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

I hardly leave my house, but I had to go there; I was going abroad and needed to be double vaxxed before traveling.

The university store where Bimpe Alabi sells snacks and drinks at the park is usually crawling with customers. Since University of Ilorin's lecturers have gone on strike, this has changed. Alabi stands outside, inviting passersby. Her profits have shrunk, pushing her family into hardship.

In the traditions that established earlier voices in modern Africa poetry, sociopolitical maladies have remained an arch theme. In the words of Omafune Onoge, what rocks African poetry most is the crisis of consciousness.

“We have a lot of insecurity in Nigeria. By road we are not safe. By train we are not safe”. (From a survivor of the Abuja-Kaduna Train bomb; Mon., March 28, 2022)

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.

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

The past year recedes

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.

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’.

Siwo siwo siwo Siwoooooooooooooo

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.