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Tope Folarin on the Misguided Urge to Carve the World Into Binaries
When I was about six years old my father told me a fantastic, utterly incredible story. He said that when he was about six, maybe a bit older, he ventured into a small stand of woods near his home in...
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On a Progressive Platform for New African Literature
How does a hot party keep getting hotter? It takes an attentive host, interesting guests, a rich mix of familiar and new faces, great conversation, and some je ne sais quoi that makes it feel like...
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When You Find Out Someone Won a Prize Plagiarizing Your Work
A few weeks ago I received an email from an unfamiliar sender. In the subject line was the title of a story I wrote five years ago. Sometimes, when you get published, this happens. Either a reader...
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Wole Soyinka on Yoruba Weddings, Nigerian Movies, and Making Traditions New
I once hallucinated at a Heathrow Airport hotel—the Sofitel—the consequence of a flight cancellation that imposed an unscheduled 24-hour layover. Nothing for it but to chafe at the delay and submit...
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29 Nigerian-English words added to the 2020 Oxford English Dictionary.
English is the official language of Nigeria, a diverse and polyglot nation of 190 million; as such, it’s about time that linguistic richness was recognized. Thus has the august Oxford English...
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Abi Daré On Nigeria and Daughterhood
In this episode of Reading Women, Kendra talks with Abi Daré about her new book, The Girl With the Louding Voice. From the episode: Kendra Winchester: Hello, I’m Kendra Winchester. And this is Reading...
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On the Harrowing Life of a Boko Haram Captive
Shehu, my fixer in Nigeria, had managed to help me find 18 women who were recruited as suicide bombers by the Islamic Terrorist group Boko Haram. All of them had resisted and had surrendered to...
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Portrait of Kaduna City, a Half Completed Story
The places we love contain elements of ourselves. Sometimes, these places, be they cities or rural areas, are expression of our dream. Dream, in this sense, is the hopeful us. What we hope to become....
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How Women Are Changing the Face of African Publishing
In the mid-20th century, a feverish movement for independence from colonial governments paired with a growing university-educated class, who pushed for education on the continent to be decolonized,...
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On the Igbo Art of Storytelling
In December, 2013, my younger brother and I traveled to our village in Igboland, southeastern Nigeria, to spend the Christmas holiday with our grandmother. Every day there, we’d read the novels we’d...
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Travels Through the Homeland: On Being Isolated From One’s Mother Tongue
Time to Eat the Dogs is a podcast about science, history, and exploration. Each week, Michael Robinson interviews scientists, journalists, and adventurers about life at the extreme. In today’s episode,...
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Chigozie Obioma: ‘I Really Do Believe That Fiction Should Say More Than One...
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and...
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Homecoming: How To Be a Returnee in Lagos
I was one of three black girls in my sixth form politics class and I was the “loud one,” a label I’d been christened with since primary school. I was comfortable with the identity I’d been given and...
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Uzodinma Iweala, Bindu Shajan Perappadan, and Suhasini Raj on How African...
In this week’s episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan are joined by author, medical doctor, and Africa Center CEO Uzodinma Iweala and Delhi-based journalists...
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Imbolo Mbue on the Post-Colonial Greed of the Oil Industry
Imbolo Mbue is a gifted storyteller with a keen sense of the human repercussions of social dislocation. Born and raised in Cameroon, she came to the US to study at Rutgers and Columbia. Inspired by the...
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How a Twitter Hashtag Changed the Rules of War
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper...
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Up in Smoke: On Death, Identity, and a Flammable Childhood in Nigeria
Kerosene burns nearly everything. Growing up, our house was sometimes invaded by soldier ants, rivers of red, clacking bodies that ran over our windowsills and bit us with thoroughness. We soaked...
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The In-Between World: On the Mythology of The Famished Road and the Literary...
“I felt on the edge of reality.” These are the words uttered by the narrator of The Famished Road as he recalls his venturing to a location that looked like “a strange fairyland in the real world.” The...
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On the Politics of Language in Nigerian Literature
In the back of Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s new book, Ìgbà Èwe, a Yorùbá translation of Childhood, written in English by an American poet, academic and philosopher, Emily Grosholz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes,...
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All Shades of Iberibe
Kandudi opened her eyes to a flood of light, a welcomed contrast from her recurring dream of traipsing through the dark woods, tailing the cry of a baby. Her head throbbed. It was worse at her right...
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