nigeria

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.

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.

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

I’m doing something crazy. There is in fact no exact English word to describe it. It is called fait divers which is a French phrase for very brief newspaper reportage of unusual happenings and dark occurrences, like accidents or crimes, that befall ordinary, insignificant people.

Flourish Joshua is a (performance) poet from Nigeria, a NaiWA poetry scholar, 2nd place winner of the 7th Ngozi Agbo Prize for Essay, Managing Editor at NRB, Interviews Editor at Eremite Poetry & Poetry Reader at Bluebird Review and Frontier Poetry. He is published (or forthcoming) on London Grip Poetry, Ghost City Review, Brittle Paper, Indianapolis Review, Bluebird Review, and elsewhere. Say hello on Instagram/Twitter @fjspeaks.

It is not difficult to understand why a volume of poems on the subject of suicide by an African poet can be a difficult thing. The subject is the last taboo, obdurate and stiff as death.

The idea of feminism in Nigeria itself has been identified as a threat to men. Patriarchal structures dictate that being submissive and loyal no matter the circumstances is what a good religious woman should be. This doesn’t speak for any one religion, but rather for all: Women who identify as feminist in Nigeria are criticized and mocked using all means to dissuade us from the very idea.

Adunni Oluwole’s prediction that the elite were going to replace the colonial system in Nigeria with a worse system was proven true by the events that succeeded independence. In spite of her support for the continuation of the colonial system, she was not a supporter of oppression.