“We Need New Names is only my first novel so this is such a huge deal, downright humbling stuff that I wasn’t expecting hence my shock when I first heard – I didn’t even know my book had been entered. I’m still a little dizzy from it, but I’ve been processing the news and it has sunk in. I’m also especially pleased by the support of the Zimbabwean community and I’m glad it feels like a national event, which is what books should be. Looking ahead, I’m crossing my fingers of course, but just being longlisted is already such an honour.” Via Books Live

 

NoViolet is the only African on the Booker Prize longlist. We are all sending good vibes her way and hoping her novel moves on to the next stage. 

Chimamanda Adichie and yours truly!

Dare Johnson, the photographer, got back to me about three weeks after Adichie’s visit on February 27. This was right around the time of Achebe’s passing.

As we set about organizing a memorial tribute to Achebe, everything else took second place on my list of priorities, including writing a blogpost on Adichie’s visit. But by the time the day of the memorial tribute came and went, I had forgotten that the photos from Adichie’s event had still not been posted. [Click HERE to see photos from Achebe's tribute.]

Recently while I was raiding my image folder for something I can’t now remember, I discovered them and thought I’d share them with you!

[Read my thoughts on the event and on meeting Adichie HERE.]

All photos: (c) Dare K. Johnson

THE END!

Adichie’s visit was jointly sponsored by Duke Africa Initiative, Center for African and African American Research, and the English Department. In her talk, she reflected on two classic forms of narrative—fiction and memoir—and helped us think about how one is implicated in the other.

Apparently, she’s been working on and off on several memoir pieces, one of which she shared with us. It was a piece about mourning the loss of a beloved uncle. Here is a tiny bit to show you how powerfully evocative her writing was of that strange and dark feeling called melancholy:

Uncle Mai’s death brought to me the exquisite terror of confronting other losses and so, during the weeks that led to the funeral, I fearfully watched my father. My almost-80-year-old father. He played his role well, the stoic one in charge of things. When asked how he was doing, he would say cryptically, “Nobody is made of wood.” His entire focus was on arranging the ikwa ozu. The word “ozu” means corpse while “ikwa” is, depending on the context, to mourn or to sew, and as a child the expression “ikwa ozu” terrified me, brought amorphous ghoulish images to mind: the sewing of a corpse. It took a while before I understood that it meant a collective mourning, a funeral.

After she spoke, I and Prof. Ian Baucom interviewed her up on stage prior to the general Q&A.

Adichie has often talked about how in writing Half of a Yellow Sun, especially in making sense of her archive, she had to navigate the difference between what is “factually correct” and  ”emotionally true.” Professor Baucom’s first question referenced this distinction. He recalled a moment in the novel when Olana returns from having witnessed the massacre of Igbos in the north. “[Odenigbo],” quotes Baucom, “used massacre when he spoke to his friends, but never with her. It was as if what had happened in Kano was a massacre but what she had seen was an experience.”

Baucom then asked: “Is the difference between what history knows as “massacre” and what the novel finds a way to share with us as a “seen experience” connected to the difference between the factually correct and the emotionally true? Is that the same thing as the relationship between the work of the historian and the work of the novelist? Or is that distinction too easy?”

In her response, it was clear that Half of A Yellow Sun is a novel built around the task of moving beyond the facts of an event. Adichie sees bare facts as radically incomplete things. Even where they are abundant and overflowing, there is always something missing. The private, subjective dimension of experience—especially with regard to extreme violence—is something that is not always present in the documents that make up the official archive. As exhaustive as her archival research on the war was, it was her ability to inject the heap of official reports, newspaper clippings, books, songs, etc with a human element that made the story. There are two ways to give an account of violence. One is the official, often staged and grand narrative of war, revolutions, and so on. The other is a subjective, personal account that captures all that is contingent and ambiguous about acts of violence. Interrupting or undermining the first with the second is partly what comprises the work of the novelist.

Right around when Adichie came to Duke, Nigerian bloggers were still nursing wounds from the fight over Achebe’s memoir, There Was A Country. I wanted to get her take on the book, so I asked her what she thought accounted for the difference in reception between Half of a Yellow Sun and Achebe’s memoir? Why was her novel so overwhelmingly embraced while Achebe’s account was received with slightly more hesitation?

I was struck by two things she said. First that Achebe’s short story collection, Girls at War, is a somewhat more beautiful account of the war than the memoir. The difference between the stories and the memoir is for her a testament to the way in which fiction can do a certain kind of narrative work that memoirs cannot. She also recalled how when she read the memoir, she longed to get more of Achebe’s own private and subjective experience of the war and the ordeal surrounding it. In a sense, if there was anything missing from the memoir it was Achebe himself.

At the end of the evening, she and two friends who accompanied her on the visit met up with me and a few of my professors for dinner. I had attended many of these post-lecture private dinners but had never been to one that was this fun.

We ate, laughed, and talked about all sorts of things—random, silly, fun, quirky and intelligent nothings— till almost midnight. We only called it a night when we realized that we were the only ones left at the restaurant and that the serving staff were clearly ready to move on with their lives.

Within the context of social media soundbites and controversies, people often appear in ways that do not reflect their true selves or, at least, show their many-sidedness. In the recent Adichie-Elnathan brouhaha, Adichie was criticized for being stuck-up and insensitive. And I’m not going to say that her comments did not encourage such a criticism. But my encounter with her revealed a quite different person. She’s chill, funny,  and has a delightful disposition. It is one thing to have strong views about things. It is quite another thing to be able to express them with swag and intelligence. She does both. I was also struck by how much of a Naija-girl-next-door she is, down-to-earth, the kind of person with whom you can talk just about anything—books, boys, hair, lipstick. And yes, we did talk about books, boys, hair, and lipstick.

[Check out photos from the event HERE.]

 Obinna Udenwe is a returning Brittle Paper Champion. “Twisted Luck” is a dark and funny piece told about the wife of a policeman who is also a thief. Because Udenwe writes in second-person, reading his stories feels like being a character in an absurd urban tale. If you liked “Fool” from a couple of weeks ago, you’re bound to love “Twisted Luck.”

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Your husband is a police officer. He is a thief too. At least that is what people may call him, but you don’t care. Who is not a thief in Nigeria? Even in America? Everywhere in the world, people are stealing now. When he comes home with rumpled naira notes, you help him stretch the notes and count them, arrange them in five naira, ten naira, twenty naira notes like that. He gives you some of it, for the Ankara wrappers you demanded the other night, for the egusi soup that you need to cook, for that lap of smoked bush meat you saw hanging in front of Mama Kosi’s shop. Always, you smile and prepare water for his bath. And life goes on.

Today is Friday, like every Friday, he returns early in the evening, because he has another business to conduct. You count the money quick, quick and prepare his bathing water. He sits on the torn cushion in the sitting room, stretches his legs on the centre table and uses the TV remote to surf the channels while you boil the water for his bath. He will eat when he is done with business. His customers are on their way. He informs you. As soon as he is done saying that, there is a knock on the door. He makes sure you conceal yourself in the room; he moves quickly to the door. You turn down the stove so that the burning water will not make any noise.

He unlatches the door and they walk in. There are three of them today, you are sure, because you have heard three voices, aside that of your husband. He asks them to sit.

‘How far?’ he asks.

‘Fine, Oga O.C. How work?’ one of the visitors asks. He tells them that work is fine. They go straight to business. You strain to eavesdrop because your husband has tuned up the volume of the television and his customers have lowered their voices.

‘Oga O. C. We need the two guns, this time.’

‘Okay nah, no wahala. But na your money oh,’ your husband responds. They say no problems. He doesn’t need to talk about the price because they are already customers. He enters the room, and you look at him. He places his index finger to his mouth to tell you to be calm. He lies on his belly and draws out the two AK 47s from under the bed. A police officer is entitled to one rifle, but he has two. Once when he had finished making love to you, he had told you that he stole one from a police officer that was shot during a bank robbery, the police had been overpowered and they scattered in different directions. The gun had been reported missing in his office and the armed robbers were believed to have made away with it. Now he has two rifles, which is good for you both. Two rifles mean double payment from his clients.

You smile when he stands like a giant that he is. You admire the way he hold the rifles, with strength and agility, you watch him enter the sitting room. He drops the guns on the centre table. One of the visitors picks the guns and inspects them one after the other.

‘Good rifle. Oga O. C knows how to care for these Corns,’ you hear the visitor say.

“Corns” are the nicknames for the rifles. You peep through the keyhole. They put the guns into a guitar bag and bring out a black nylon and give it to your husband. He puts it on the cushion and locks the door after them. Outside, you are sure that they will not be noticed, as their car is packed just by the door of your sitting room. As soon as you hear the sound of their car engine you come out of the room. Your husband smiles at seeing you. He pats the black nylon. He does not know how to count money so you do the counting. It is ten thousand naira. Five thousand for each gun. You smile.

‘Business is good, Honey,’ you say.

‘Very good,’ he responds. ‘Take six thousand for all the things you need. Don’t disturb me for anything again till next weekend.’

‘Yes, Honey.’ You smile and your heart is filled with joy. You go back to the room where the stove is seated by the window, there is no kitchen so you cook close to the window in the room, the smoke evacuates through the open window. You turn up the stove and the water begins to boil. Your heart is filled with joy for there are many things the money in your hands can buy. You collect one of the flat pillows on the bed and put the money inside. You put the remaining one inside the bedside drawer where your husband banks his money. You dream of good life – tomorrow you will be able to buy that Hollandis wrapper that you have been eyeing for weeks. And yes, you remember that your mascara is finished and you need a new one. You make a mental note to get that too. You know that it is weekend and your husband could get lucky and his customers may come back on Saturday or Sunday to hire the guns. You raise your hands to the heavens in appreciation.

It is midnight or past midnight, you cannot remember because your wall clock is not functioning. The knock on the door is hard. Your husband wakes you and asks you to be calm. The knock turns to banging this time and he goes close to the door and asks;

‘Who is there?’

‘Segun!’ the voice calls. He hesitates, and then unlatches the door. Two men step into the sitting room. You had locked the door to the room when he went to the sitting room to open the door. But you can hear what they are saying because the night is quiet.

‘Oga O. C. Kasala don gas! Please keep this bag for us. Here are the guns. We will come tomorrow. Don’t go to work, till we come.’ Your husband does not talk and you strain your ear to hear but notice that he has locked the door. He taps on the bedroom door and you open for him.

‘Honey, what is it?’

He shoves the bag containing the guns under the bed and sits. He unzips the bag from his clients and some dollars fallout from the bag. You cover your mouth with your hands.

‘We are rich!’ You shout.

‘Shhee!’ he cautions. He dips his hand inside the bag and everything inside is money. Sleep leaves your eyes instantly. Your eyes swoon and the bag of money appears in seven places. You grab your husband’s laps tightly, and he touches your arm to calm you. You are dreaming of wealth – a lot of wrappers to buy, shoes and Brazilian hair for your head. You think of the new dress that you will buy for the next August meeting. Even your panties and brassieres, you need to change all of them. Perhaps, it is time you talked to your husband on the need for you to relocate to a flat in the centre of Ibadan. There is this new car you saw yesterday, or the day before, you cannot remember clearly. But you know that the name is Murano jeep, you will have to buy one.

‘My wife!’ your husband calls, jostling you from your thoughts. You sit on the ground, pouring all the money before you.

‘Jesus! Jesus!’ you exclaim at how much money that is before you. ‘How did they get this?’

‘I don’t know. It must be a huge operation. Perhaps they robbed a foreign firm or a white man. Count it,’ your husband instructs. He joins you on the floor. The money is in bundles of one hundred dollar notes. Each bundle is ten thousand dollars. There are twenty four bundles in all. You stand and pick your Nokia phone, scroll to the application and open the calculator. You do the calculation. What is before you is two hundred and forty thousand dollars. You multiply that by the naira equivalent and that gives you close to thirty eight million naira. You feel like fainting because your forehead aches and your hearts beats rapidly like you have just finished a cross-country race. The room suddenly becomes stuffy and you perspire, your husband wipes his brow. He stands and he walks to the sitting room and comes back. He is confused. He removes his shirt and sits on the bed.

You look around the squalor that you live in – small room with a steel bed occupied by a torn flat mattress. The wall is painted with blood from the mosquitoes that you’d killed on the wall. The fan is not working. By the side of the room, close to the window, are your cooking utensils, stove, pots, frying pans and cutleries. There is a cockroach feasting on the left over jollof rice on the plate close to the stove. You smile. Everything is fine now, you imagine yourself living in a big mansion. You imagine servants from Akwa Ibom serving as cooks and maids and security guards and calling you, Oga Madam, genuflecting to greet you.

Very early in the morning, your husband picks the money which he has packed into your travelling bag and both of you change into your Sunday clothes, you flag down a taxi in front of the house and zoom off to the centre of the town.   You rent a nice suite in a hotel, order champagne and cake, and bathe in hot water, in a glittering white tub. Like in the movies, you make love in the bathroom. When you climax, which had not happened for over a year, you laugh aloud, so loudly that your husband pulls out and says; ‘You don kolo? Are you mad?’

In the evening you walk down the streets close to the hotel and buy suya and oranges and apples and water melons. You take everything to the hotel and order a nice meal of ora soup. You eat like you are in heaven and wonder why someone would want to die when heaven is here on earth. When your husband enters the bathroom to shower again, you call your friend who sells fabrics and ask her to keep different kinds of Hollandis wrappers for you. Your husband calls his friend who runs a real estate business and asks that he look for a duplex or a bungalow for you to buy. You hug him and kiss his neck and say; ‘I love you, Honey.’ That night, he sends the names and addresses of the two criminals to his friends at the Criminal Response Squad.

It is two weeks now and today you pack into your new apartment. Your husband paid the man who sold the house to you in dollars. You have not gone back to your former apartment, and your husband has resigned from his police job. He is planning on starting a block industry and you want to travel to Lagos to buy second hand electronics, you have asked the real estate man to look for a shop for you. You call Madam Ghana and tell her that you need a maid and a gateman; they must come from Akwa Ibom because they are the only ones that know how to respect their madams. She says no problems, Ma. Madam Ghana calls you Ma now because you have money and each time you go to her shop you buy all the clothes that catch your fancy.

The night you pack into your new apartment, you cook vegetable soup and prepare pounded yam for your husband. He is watching the news when someone knocks on the door. Both of you are startled because the gate is locked and you wonder how the person knocking on the door managed to gain access to the compound.

‘I thought you locked the gate?’ you ask your husband. He nods. But could it be that he did not really lock the gate, after all he had been drinking Red Label and eating fried chicken since afternoon like a big man that he is?

‘Check who is at the door. It could be the neighbours. Besides it is still 8pm.’

You stand to do as he says. Your huge buttocks sway from side to side as you walk to the door. You are sure that your husband’s eyes are following the side to side movement of your buttocks. You wiggle them as you move to the door. You ask who is there but the person knocks calmly and you open the door.

Two men step into the sitting room, pushing the door along with them. They are carrying pistols. Black pistols, pointed at you, and at your husband who is already on his feet.

‘If you move I will shoot!’ one of them orders.

‘Oga O. C!’ the other calls and approaches your husband who has knelt down and is begging for forgiveness. ‘Did you ever think you can run away?

‘Abeg, Sir. Abeg, Sir,’ your husband is saying repeatedly. You are lying down, facing the floor and begging God that they do no harm to your husband.

‘Greedy man! We robbed a construction company, lost three of our men. And made away with the money. A lot of money. We understood how poor and wretched you are and thought we should help you. What you ran away with was your own share. We did not want to tell you because we wanted to test your loyalty—’ your husband’s eyes flickers with hope, a smile crosses his lips. He approaches the men.

‘Segun, I am sorry, Sir. I was confused. I didn’t run away—’

‘Shut up! You think we are fools?’ He slaps your husband so hard and he falls to the ground. ‘We were monitoring your moves. You sent our details to your friends at the police headquarters. Look at you, a pauper; now you are a millionaire, you now live in a new apartment. You live big. And you tried to swindle us. You thought it was the only money eh?’ Your husband shakes his head and they slap him again, blood flies out of his mouth, a tooth drops on the floor and your husband’s hands covers his mouth unconsciously, there is blood all over his hand.

‘Please…’ Your husband is crying now. You are crying too. The tall dark man whom your husband calls Segun drops his gun on the cushion, he brings out a dagger from his trouser and begins to cut the covering of the cushion into threads, he cuts enough quantity and you watch with appalling dismay as the new cushion is desecrated, he ties your husband’s hands to the dining table and ties his feet too. He cuts the foam stuffing of the cushion and pushes them into your husband’s mouth. You begin to plead the more because you think they want to slash his throat. What happens next is what you never would have imagined in your life. He pushes his dagger into your husband’s stomach, just below his chest and he moans in anguish but his cries are muffled by the foam in his mouth.  Then Segun turns towards you, you lie down immediately, his heavy boot rests on your protruded buttocks. They smile fiendishly.

‘Both of you think we are fools eh?’ he bends down and yanks off your Hollandis wrapper, you are wearing nothing beneath it. He uses the dagger to tear your short blouse, and your breasts jump out like balloons and stare at him menacingly. You shift unconsciously, pleading with your eyes and your hands. He slaps your face, blinding you and grabs your breasts with his two hard hands and squeezes tightly. You moan in pain and your husband makes awful but helpless sounds, watching with weak but dying eyes.

Feature/Post Image: Lemi Ghariokwu

Obinna Udenwe is a prize winning Nigerian writer. His works have appeared in the Kalahari Review, Tribe-write, Flair Magazine, Kadunaboy and in Literary & Travel Magazine. When he is not travelling all over the world, he shares his time between Abakaliki and Enugu.

By the time we were in tenth standard, Nuratu was one of the few girls brazen enough to relax her hair, and risk the wrath of Mrs Allardyce. That won her some admiration from us. Still, her English wasn’t very good – she pronounced ‘ch’ as ‘sh’ – and her laughter sometimes sounded like the squealing of a goat. And then, there was the problem of her breasts. While we mastered lines from Dryden, and sharpened our minds in various ways, her entire being seemed to be physical. She was, to use the word we were most fond of, local. We watched her with some wonder, this curious creature who tore into boiled yams with all the elegance of a market woman; this hayseed who only used her fork and knife when a prefect was patrolling the hall; who, when she laughed, heaved her chest up and down. Around her hovered a constant skein of our knowing glances…Continue reading

Image via

(a story that will surprise you at every turn, a darkish story, a bit of blood to satisfy your hankering for the macabre, but, mostly, a story about love when it shimmers in beautiful and unexpected colors. enjoy reading.)

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 The trouble begins on a hot Thursday afternoon when the sun is boring a manhole in the middle of the earth and my tongue is sticking to the roof of my mouth.

I sit at home, my back to the tin wall, my arms crossed at my chest as the rustling sounds made by the corrugated iron sheets structure tickles my eardrums.

I glare around. Sparse furnishing is distasteful. The biggest article in the shack is the dented mattress on which Dada and I sleep. Its cover is tattered, revealing wrinkled yellow foam here and there. There is a wooden table, a rusty steel chair, and then our clothes, which hang on the wall. Our cooking utensils lay in a pile in the corner. I watch a cockroach climb out of a grimy pot and scurry away, underneath the door and into the sunshine. I need to throw away remnants of food that have gone mouldy. The stench in the shack is bad, as is everything else.

At my tether’s end, I buckle to the temptation to walk down twenty poles to Birnin Afabi where Mai Ajingi sells chilled water and ice blocks from a deep-freezer. When the sun burns as hot as it is right now, Mai Ajingi, the only one who owns a deep-freezer in the shantytown proceeds to wear his bulabula - a big trouser that is wide at the pipes – and day in day out, till charred dust motes rise up and silt the blazing eyes of the raging sun-god, Ajingi fills his cavernous pockets with our hard earned coins.

I step out of the shack and narrow my eyes, my right hand rising instinctively to form a visor. The sun is always too bright and too harsh at this time of the year when harmattan is drawing close.  I walk briskly, taking scant notice of anything around me, except a figure hurtling towards me in the distance. He cannot be more than seven years old. He is naked to the waist and he spots a bloated stomach. His attention is riveted on the bicycle tire which wobbles ahead of him while he guides and prods it with a stick.  He looks up when it is almost too late and screams a curse, telling me to get out of the way. I flatten against a rusty shack as he blazes past, mimicking a vehicle horn.

I right my cap and snap my fingers. I will find him later.

As I cross the plank-bridge of the Gulengulen drainage, I happen on the crowd.

Standing in the center of the crowd is the imposing figure of Bareda. He is naked to the waist, and has on a dirty pair of jeans and no shoes. I can see his butt-crack peeping above his waist band. He has a red amulet on his left bicep. There is second man standing in the circle. His is wiry, with bushy hair. His jalabia is dirty, and a long chewing stick wiggles in his mouth as he watches Bareda.

Bareda is stabbing his bare belly with a long sharp blade. The crowd yells and moans and howls in utter bewilderment. Old women grab their prostrate breasts with two hands, whimpering. Younger ones place both hands on their heads.

I forcefully expunge gelatinous saliva onto the dry sands and restrain the urgency of my thirst with both hands. I wipe the sticky remnants of spittle off my dry lips with the back of my hand as I plough a path through the crowd.

“Bring ya hand, you dey fear?” Bareda says, grabbing the right hand of the jalabia-wearing fellow.

The man squirms fearfully, his chewing stick twitching. The crowd bursts into laughter.

“You don rub am? Rub am again…” instructs Bareda releasing his hand.

Jalabia hurriedly dips his hand into one of the white plastic jars arrayed on the ground beside the men and rubs the brownish paste on his hands and neck as directed by Bareda. The crowd murmurs, its voices dissenting. Men urge Jalabia to be a man. Women point out it is not by force. Children cross their hands at their chests and watch with deep interest.

When Jalabia is done applying the ointment, Bareda grabs his right hand and runs the wicked looking blade on the inside part of the elbow, as if to severe arm from bicep. The crowd howls as one, holding their own arms protectively. Jalabia panics too, and attempts to shake free, but he finds himself in a vice-like grip. Then, he realises that there is no cause for alarm. There is no cut, or blood. He relaxes somewhat then, watching the magic, wide eyed.

“Buy odeshi! Na the only odeshi you fit trust be this…” yells Bareda, viciously stabbing the stunned Jalabia in the throat. The blade bounces back with a clinking sound, as if it has struck chinaware. Bareda is prancing up and down, his steps in tandem with a wild tune coming from a radio somewhere.

I scan the crowd for my brother, Dada but I do not see him. This is surprising because it is his kind of gathering.

Out of the corners of my eyes, I see Bareda let go of Jalabia who rejoins the crowd elatedly rubbing his hitherto assailed neck and arms. The crowd welcomes him back like a brother who had been given up for dead – with loud cheers and back rubs and handshakes.

“You, come here,” Bareda suddenly announces, pointing in my direction with the knife.

I look behind me.

“No, you, Ali,” he says.

Ali is my nickname in the shanty town.

Someone in the crowd nudges me forward. I suddenly find myself in the centre, the cynosure of a sea of eyes.

“Rub odeshi on your neck,” instructs Bareda.

I hesitate. The men cheer me on, including Jalabia. The women begin to whimper and wring their hands. One of them calls out my brother’s name when I decide and proceed to rub the nutty smelling ointment on my hand.

“No, on your neck.” Bareda repeats, his eyes hooded.

I hesitate again.

“No, not my neck. My hand,” I say. Some voices go up in murmurs of solidarity, others in catcalls of derision.

I stand my ground. Bareda shakes his head from side to side, his teeth bared in a mirthless grin.

“If I kill you, our people go gree me go?” he asks slashing the air with his knife and drawing an arc across the crowd. The crowd sighs and a portion shrinks backwards in terror.

I smirk, the illogic of his reasoning slaying me. What good is justice to the dead?

“Will vengeance bring me back?” I ask with a smile. There is no laughter in my eyes. His shoulders droop and his face points at the skies. The crowd shifts restlessly. The show has become dull. No crowd likes a dull show.

“Comot, comot,” Bareda waves me away impatiently with the knife, scowling.  I leave. I do not fack.

“Anyone with liver? Free odeshi,” he advertises, prancing, slashing and stabbing his own bare body as I return to my position.

The men give me a wide berth. I see relief in the eyes of the women. One old woman prods my head from behind, muttering a rebuke for my acceptance of the challenge in the first instance.

Jalabia is about to make his own submission when suddenly, there is an uproar. I look around. It is Arogu towering to the centre.

Arogu is the head of the Chilo brotherhood. He was born in the shanty and has been in more skirmishes than everyone in our here put together. The scars on his body prove that it is a miracle he is still alive.

He and I had once engaged in a brutal fistfight that had degenerated into a knife fight. I’d broken his jaw and slashed him in the upper arm before he finally responded with a wide handed slash to my face that left an ugly scar running from underneath my left eye and across the bridge of my nose. Folks had then stepped in and separated us.

That was long before the shanty gang rivalries took a deathly turn.

Arogu stands there, in his seven-foot glory, wearing a dirty pair of jeans which had been reduced to knee length with a pair of scissors, and rugged canvas shoes. A toe the size of a baby’s head peeps from his right canvas. He pumps his bare, sweaty barrel chest, and the crowd roars. Bareda stands rooted to the spot, eyeing Arogu cautiously, like a cat. A sixth sense warns me that this sales pitch has taken a quietly dangerous turn. The men’s faces are like those of wild animals, their eyes like serpentine slits in their foreheads.

Both men have retreated into a different world. It is a world infested with a dangerous type of rivalry that festers rapidly like Mai Bagana’s ankle ulcer, a contention that is curable only by slashing blades, mitigating black magic and mindless blood letting.

Arogu pointedly refuses to touch Bareda’s magic paste. He watches as Bareda lifts the knife, and runs it across his own neck, a deathly snarl spreading all over his face. As usual, nothing happens to Bareda. The crowd is silent. The music from the radio takes a cue and stops too. Everywhere is so silent a discerning ear can hear an unruly feather drop.

The crowd shrieks as Bareda charges at Arogu and stations the blade of his karo knife threateningly against the latter’s neck which is wide and thick with dark circular rings, like a drum. Arogu does not flinch. The men glare at each other for a second before Arogu finally faces the skies, presenting his jugular invitingly. My fingers curl, tightening reflexively. How I wish I were the one wielding the Karo.

The crowd holds its breath as Bareda slashes.

It happens, first with the loud bleat of escaping gas. A tentative jet of blood spills forth, some of it landing on my face and lips.

The crowd gasps as Arogu clutches his throat, blood spilling through his black fingers. Arogu crumbles face down like a heap of rubbish, his eyes rolling upwards. Blood gushes out of the open slit in his throat like water from a broken pipe. The slit hisses, expelling air. Bareda crouches defensively and spins around.

We, Shayana are what is left of the crowd.

It has been two weeks of silence.

Something of an uneasy calm has descended on our shantytown and it clings to us, heavy, like a damp blanket. The afternoon sun blazes still and the smell of our roasting flesh hangs in the atmosphere. The ugly odour of meningitis infiltrates the shantytown and neighbours break out in pus tipped rashes.

The drainage across our back yard suddenly develops the stomach-churning stench of putrefying matter.  Dada brings two spades home one evening and hands one over to me. We roll up the pipes of our trousers and stand, our legs spread across the gutter. We begin to scoop out the drainage dregs, dumping them on the ground beside us. Passersby wrinkle their noses and spit as we work. Dada works faster than me, his sinewy arms moving rapidly, a frown on his rugged face.

We work for about twenty minutes before my stomach suddenly heaves and bile rises in my throat. I hold myself as we uncover and hoist the source of the vile stench – a cat. Its belly is swollen and as Dada strikes it with his spade, it rips apart. We can see unborn kitten in a transparent sack, black and white, eaten half and half by termites. I begin to retch.

“Hold yourself,” Dada reels, himself grimacing and turning his head aside to spit for the umpteenth time. A huge Tsetse fly buzzes around my head and I swipe at it, spitting in irritation.

“Brother, this is bad,” I retort, frowning. I am not sure I will ever be able to eat another cat.

“Bad? You don’t know the trouble ahead then. This is child’s play to what will happen,” prophesies my brother, pointing at the greyish horror we have unearthed.

“How did it get here?” I ask, still in shock.

“It is a message,” comes the simple reply from my all-knowing elder brother. We drop our spades and I go in search of a sack.

I return with a brown paper sack with insides still whitish with cement. I hold it open on one end, touching the other end to the ground. Dada, using his spade, carefully rolls the bloated carcass and its spilling entrails into the sack while I hold my nose pinched between my free thumb and forefinger. A mother hen and her chicks squawk excitedly.

Once the carcass is in the bag, I straighten and hoist the package off the ground. I wait to feel the weight hit the bottom before I squeeze the sack, creating a neck.  I need no further invitation to begin the long walk to the incinerating well.

“Don’t stay long,” Dada says as he bends his long frame and enters our shack.  I do not respond. My belly is running riot. Somehow, I know I will be late.

***

I walk past the rows of shacks that litter the shanty town. I weave in and out of the squatter settlement expertly, taking the short cut to the incinerating well, instead of the longer government main road. I kick a thick white polymer bag ahead of me on the boiling sands, raising dust as I walk. The nylon is stuffed with a piece of red clothing and tied at the end with a string of grass – shanty children’s football.

The shanty town is noisy and replete with gaudy cloth lines this afternoon. The women are clad in Ankara wrappers tied around generous bosoms. They gossip, guffaw, quarrel and call out to their shrieking children. There is the smack smack sound of pounding by wooden mortars and grating noise of mechanized pepper grinding machines.

I stand for a while and watch a woman berate her drunken husband, pounds of meat fretting in her arm as she wags a finger in his face.

“Stupid useless man with small dick!”

She ends the tirade with a vow to find another husband. The grey haired man sits on the bare ground, a puddle of vomit between the inverted V of his spread out legs. His head is bent as if in shame.

He remains in that posture as the woman turns from him and begins to scold a little girl. The child had taken the liberty to relieve herself right at the entrance to her rusty shack.

The shanty gets madder, dirtier and stranger as I walk. It is probably one of the only places in the world where cats and mice roam around in their hundreds and in mutual respect of each other’s space. We humans are reduced feet-stamping on the ground, to scare the indifferent mice away.

After a few minutes’ walk, I see the rail track that leads to the incinerating well. There is the usual litter of boys, sitting on the tracks, surrounded by overflowing garbage. I see little ghetto boys standing knee deep in garbage, poking with sticks, trying to find something worthwhile. The plastic companies reward them well for returning biodegradable materials. Tiregu, Dauda and Asani, Chilo chieftains are seated, as usual in a group. Smaller boys sit around too, here and there. The smell of marijuana hangs thickly in the air as smoke swirls around the boys. I fling my luggage deep into the incinerating well, clap my hands to rid my palms of particles of cement and go to settle on the track, a little away from everyone.

I bring out a tiny wrapper of cement paper from my pocket and undo the knot. Dried grass greets my eyes. I spread the wrinkled white sheet of rizler on my palm and empty the weed into it. I discard the empty cement wrapper and seesaw the rizler to achieve an even spread of grass. Then I begin to strap. I strap with expertise.

“Wetin una comot?”

It is Tiregu. I look at him. He’d passed by as Dada and I laboured at the stinking drainage. I’d noticed he had glared at us but no one had said anything.

“Dead cat,” I respond, the symbolism suddenly stinging me. I’d not understood at first.

“Na im be dat?” he asks, pointing at the incinerating well.

“Yes…”

I can see Bareda and Alula and some other Shayana in the distance. Oddly, I do not feel the need for their protection. I’d not become the teenage bare-knuckle champion in the shanty out of luck. It had come out of pure talent, and daily gruelling practice sessions. It is why they call me Ali.

“You heard what happened?” Tiregu asks, not looking at me.

“I was there.” I reply, striking a matchstick.

Warm breeze blows out the light. I strike another, and take care to shield the flame with a cupped palm. It catches on the rizler and I quickly drag and puff until the rizler rustles, coming alight. I blow a thick gust of white smoke upwards, then drop the matchstick carelessly beside me. The flame goes out slowly, in a gentle stream of spiralling smoke till it disperses into thin air.

“It was bad.”

“They were testing medicine,” I defend.

Tiregu falls silent.

There was no gain saying it. Nothing had happened that does not happen all the time.  Our shantytown is home to several gangs. The two major gangs are the Shayana and the Chilo. Shayana means “wild cat” while Chilo means “antelope”. Arogu, up till his death two weeks ago had headed the Chilo. Dada and Bareda head us Shayana.

The slaughter incident had lifted a drowsy veil off our eyes. In a shanty, gangs become weak when there is prolonged peace. Gangsters begin to yearn for war, like gun dogs. Rival gangs start to test new medicine in organized contests which invariably breed new violence.

Arogu’s death hadn’t been Bareda’s fault. Someone in the crowd who wanted Arogu dead had probably wielded a medicine more powerful than Arogu’s own. Another possibility is that Arogu’s powers had expired during the months of peace, and he did not know.

Now, the blame of his death lies at the doorsteps of the Shayana. And we are not complaining. Our back is strong.

“If anything happens during medicine testing, so be it. It is an unwritten code, a well understood tradition in this shanty,” Dada had said to Bareda after the incident.The interred cat message had come shortly after that discussion, an official statement by the Chilo of the impending reprisal and the form it will take.

Presently, I finger the switchblade tied to my waist underneath my jalabia. The cold metal gives me a feeling of security. I adjust my turban, pulling it closer to my eyebrows so I could covertly observe goings-on in my surroundings. Bareda and Alula get up, and walk towards the road. They ignore the hard glares of the Chilo who are speaking to each other in low tones.

“Ali, let’s go,” Bareda calls out to me from the distance. I wave him away curtly, blowing fumes defiantly upwards in concentric circles.

Maybe I cannot handle three grown up men all by myself, but should these Chilo swine start anything, I am determined to give a good account of myself, for future purposes. Bareda and Alula leave without another word. I see Tiregu place a restraining hand on Asani as the latter starts to rise. I watch all these without appearing to do so. I suddenly feel cold, and alone, and my instinct for survival comes to the fore with full force.

I lurk mentally, like a ferocious cat waiting for the right moment to pounce. I will not wait to be attacked. I ease the blade under my jalabia loose without betraying any movement, readying for a quick draw. I wish now I’d brought Dada’s automatic, for added comfort. I sniff the air, savouring the prospects of a quick kill in this lonesome arena.

Dusk begins to set in and a warm wind fans my face. To relax my nerves, I stretch and arch my back languorously, my hands raised up above my head and clasped at the palms. I hear my spine make a snapping sound, expelling compressed air. The other boys begin to trickle away too, with their loot of biodegradable items. I watch the Chilo from the corners of my eyes. They are still talking in low tones, and I pick an angry bark every now and again.

I smoke the claro off my joint which I hold between the loops of a bent broom stick. I listen to the last seed pop, feel the heat sear my black lips before I drop the joint, and get up dusting the seat of my pants.

“Smally!”

I was expecting it. It is Asani’s voice.

I turn to look at him. He is gangling towards me. His walk is steady on the rail tracks as he holds his arms aloft, like an aircraft’s wings. The distance between us disappears quickly. The others get up too, but they do not move.

“Yes?” I make it a bark.

Asani comes to a halt in front of me, his yellow teeth bared in a vile grin. He jabs me three times on the chest with a finger as thick as a banana. His fingernails are nearer to black than any other colour.

“Tell…tell, tell… Da…Dada that there is no sleep anymore,” he stammers, his head twitching in an uncoordinated manner. I try to avert his foul breath but he is far taller than me. The stench sinks through my headgear and lodges in my nose and throat.

“What did I say?” he asks, pushing me in the chest.

I did not need further invitation.

I swing my fist upwards and catch him in the chin. He reels backwards in surprise, a grunt escaping him. When he opens his mouth, his dentition is a sea of red. He puts a palm to his mouth, stares at it and yelps in horror. I step into him in a flash and another blow explodes on his pointing jaw. I hear bone splinter as Asani shrieks and drops to his knees.

I spin on my heels and make for the main road. Running is difficult on the uneven railroad tracks and I can hear heavy footfalls and rapid breathing behind me.

I sense the duo of Tiregu and Dauda on me before I feel the blow savagely delivered to back of my head. I topple over, my face missing by inches, semi-dry lumps of human waste that clutter the rail track. As I fall, I reach under my jalabia but a crunching kick numbs me. I feel the bone of my forearm give way, a dull ache crawling up my shoulders.

The duo crowd me now, and I look up at their now blurring faces. The retreating sun shines dully behind their heads. They are both yelling at once. I cannot make sense of what it is they say. I only feel heavy blows and kicks fall down on me like rain as the dull dusk lighting slowly diminishes into welcoming folds of utter darkness.

***

I awake to a world that is warm with the aroma of garlic and other spices.

I try to sit up, but I groan and fall back in pain. I lie still on the soft mattress that dips somewhat in the middle, and try to keep my mind blank. Raw pain courses through my head, arms and entire body.

“You are awake.”

The voice is gentle, soft. I let the silky smoothness of it flow through my system, soothing me. I want to turn to look but my head feels like a mortar has been lodged in there. In the topaz glow cast by naked flames, I see a figure bent over cackling fire. Its shadow is divided into two unequal halves on the wall, the top half strangely elongated. The figure moves in a blur, then rises from a low stool, holding a bowl in its hands as it approaches me.

He cannot be more than fifteen years old. He has large roaming eyes and ruddy brown cheeks stained with dirt. His hair is dark and wavy and his jalabia is dirty. He is a Koral, a migrant peasant from Niger. He slowly comes to a stop beside me and sits on the mattress. He reaches somewhere behind me and retrieves a pillow made of tons of intertwined clothing. He leans over me, raising my head up and sliding the pillow underneath. I can smell his body closely. It reeks of dirt, garlic and ginger.

“Is that okay?” he asks me.

The last person who had asked me such a question was mother, ages ago.

“Yes,” I manage.

I swallow thick saliva and my throat explodes. I writhe in pain as I wonder where I am and how I got here, but I cannot muster the strength to ask.  The memories of the events of the evening come back to me like a flood. Dada must be worried sick by now. I look out of the open window of the tin shack and see that it is dark outside. I try to think, but my mind is invaded by the krah-krah-krah sounds of the swamp toads, and the chirping sounds of insects.

“Who are you?” I mumble, scarcely hearing my own voice. My throat burns and I fall quiet, exhausted.

“My name is Rasheed,” he says, placing a wet towel on my throbbing forehead.

“Take this,” he says, scooping up a spoonful of hot brown soup.

“It will soothe you.”

I open my mouth and he feeds me, patiently. It is bean soup, salty and spicy. Soon, I start to feel warmth creep into me, and sweat covers me. I find that he has put my right arm in a cast of rags, and rubbed a stinking ointment all over my bruises.

The fever breaks out in the middle of the night.  I am covered from head to toe with rashes and goose pimples. I sneeze and retch with an alarming violence that rattles the entire room. The heat radiating from my body spreads all over the bed sheets, burning it up. I shiver and my teeth clatter. The tin walls spin round and round in my eyes. Rasheed swathes me in a bed sheet and rocks me to and fro as I murmur deliriously.

I watch the candle flare as if from another realm. It puts up a good fight to stay alive as a dusty gale begins to blow, rustling the leaves outside and rattling the tin shack. The flame dies eventually as I drift into an uneasy calm.

I awake to harsh sunshine and singeing heat in the afternoon.  I feel too weak to open my eyes. I listen to Rasheed as he moves about the shack, whistling. I force an eye open and blink at the cruel lighting. A tremor runs through my head and I keep my mind blank to ease off the pain. Rasheed is standing over at the door, blowing off chaff from roasted groundnuts. He finally turns and comes back inside and his eyes and mine meet.

“Who beat you up that way?” he asks, standing over me, tossing the nuts into his mouth.

“Some boys,” I answer. “It was my fault. I hit one of them first.” I quickly add. My throat feels like a desert – parched.

“Chilo?”

I nod.

“Are you Shayana?”

I nod again. The flame red cat tattoo on my right bicep said it all.

“They have burned down Birnin Fada,” he informs me.

“Chilo and Shayana?” I breathe.

It is his turn to nod.

I close my eye and lay still.

Rasheed explains that he had been in the mammy market in the morning when it started. He learned that there was an ongoing search for a teenager who had gone out and not returned home last night.The Shayana had come to the rail tracks to look for me but it seemed I’d disappeared into thin air. Enraged and convinced I’d been murdered by the Chilo, the Shayana had struck.

“You have to stay here for a while, till things cool off,” Rasheed finishes.

“I have to get word to my brother, Dada. You know him?” I croak.

Rasheed nods.

“Tell him where I am.”

“Okay, but you must eat first.”

He feeds me again, with the left over bean soup.

It tastes even better today and he stares into my eyes as he feeds me, an almost motherly look creeping into his watery eyes.

He helps me hobble to a nearby bush and leaves as I crouch in the shrubbery.  Huge flies with greenish bottoms buzz around me as my bowels rumble. I let out fleeting gas and pass a rushing, endless stream that leaves a peppery sensation in my anus. My belly is soon empty and I am too weak to stay balanced on the balls of my feet.

Rasheed calls out to me from the distance, saying that he is going in search of Dada. I say thank you, hoarsely. I am not sure he hears me, but he leaves all the same. I wipe my buttocks with leaves, and hobble back into the lonely shack that overlooks the rail tracks, and lay on the mattress.

The room is almost empty, except for a few clothes hanging on nails. His kitchen is in full glare. Odd assortments of food items lay on the floor, some tipping out of nylon bags. Cockroaches and lizards dart in and out of hidden crevices. I drag my eyes off the squalor and slowly drift off into a disturbed slumber.

I dream of being surrounded by machete wielding Chilo, all of us trapped in a burning shanty house.

***

Dada did not come back with Rasheed in the afternoon, but he sent word that he would come as soon as it was dark.  He arrives as twilight appears in the horizon and he hugs me a little too tightly.

“You are truly a cat,” he says.

I nod, joyful for my brother’s commendation. It does not come often. Rasheed has a sad, almost remorseful look in his eyes as we leave and I did not turn back to look at him.

Dada and his friends ferry me home on a stretcher under the sombre watch of moonlight.

As our little party travels, the men regale themselves with tales of the clash, how Shayana blades had slashed and flashed, traced fine arcs in nothingness, and wrought horror on the flesh and bones of howling Chilo.

I imagine the music of it all, bone splintering under the brazen ministration of steel, lacerating flesh, turning up white fat, before red liquid sprays forth. I salivate. Shayana are buoyed by blood chilling screaming. But the district is silent now; a guttural silence that one cannot get used to or forget. The silence reeks of an eerie suddenness and hollowness, like that unexplainable spectre, in which everyone in a chatter-filled shack suddenly fall quiet, for no obvious reason.

We speed quietly through the district that now seems unbalanced, sitting precariously in a perpetual slant, like a saucer on a precipice. We cross myriads of traders’ stalls that lay in ruins. There are series of black mounds in the middle of the roads, metal threading from burnt tires in intricate tangles with each other. The stench of burned flesh sits deep in the atmosphere. It will be like that for a long time.

Someone shows me a severed human hand on the ground. It is long and wiry with crooked, gnarled fingers. It is the kind of hand created to wield axes, the kind of hand that could only have belonged to a Chilo.

“Chimpolo’s” Dada simply says. Chimpolo was a Chilo who got his nickname from his looks.

The Chilo had suffered alarming casualties. Tiregu’s head was almost hacked off his neck with a sickle. Some were shot, several were hacked to death in their shacks and others tied together and burned like refuse.

Such is the face of shanty anger and vengeance when the mask of peace is doffed.

***

It is late in the night.

I hobble on, a lonely figure under the demure moonlight. Ever since the skirmish, I only come out at night, wrapping the cloak of darkness smugly around me. I do not meet anyone as I exit our shanty town. Everyone is safely locked indoors, and I am grateful for that.

I soon reach my destination, and rap gently on the door of Rasheed’s shack. He is seated on his low stool making bean soup. He does not say a word as I limp inside and go on to sit on the mattress.  I have not seen or heard from him in the past two weeks. I gently lay my crutch stick on the floor beside me.

The room has the same dull glow from the flame in the lantern. The aroma of the bean soup makes my belly growl. I have not eaten all day.

“You are better now?” he asks when he senses I have settled in well enough. His inflection quickens the blood in my system. He still has not turned to look at me. His back looks broader than I remember it.

“Yes, thank you,” I reply, stretching out on the bed.

A hot breeze blows and I watch the leaves on the Gmelina tree outside sway. A pig grunts in the nearby garbage.

“There is a lot of rebuilding going on at the shanty.” I say. I want to hear him talk.

“The ruin is great,” he replies.

I sit up slowly.

“Can I stay here till all is done and ready? Hope you don’t mind?” I finally blurt out what has been on my mind.

Rasheed does not respond.  He just continues with his cooking. If he wonders how much of a pest I am, he does not say so. He just cooks in silence. As I watch his delicate almost womanly movements, I realize I will need his care. I know who he is. And I know he knows who I am. The eyes do not lie.

Finally, he gets up from the low stool, bean soup bowl in his hands, and walks slowly towards the mattress. He sits beside me and sets the steaming bowl on the ground. I lean back into the mattress and close my eyes. Rasheed’s soft lips crush mine with a feverish urgency. We go at each other for a long time, straining and panting heavily like wild dogs on searing heat, the spicy aroma of bean soup warming the air.

When one finds home, the heart is at rest.

Many thanks to Jeremy Weate for the permission to use his beautiful photographs of the Dambe fight—a Hausa boxing ceremony—and of the railroad.

Oluwafunminiyi Omojola is a Nigerian writer who is also a banker. Being a Yoruba man who is married to a Hausa lady and resident in Iboland, Funminiyi considers himself an epitome of the detribalised Nigerian.

His poems and short stories have appeared in many news dailies and magazines around Africa including The Sunday Sun, This Day, and The Kalahari Review.

Your supreme illusion is that you think you are an African.

A word of clarification: I am not a cultural Nazi.

The problem is not that you’ve never lived in an African country, that you don’t have a passport from an African country, that you don’t know what it means to travel (like a glorified refugee) with an African passport or go begging for visas from embassy to embassy with an African passport.

The question I’ve been burning to ask you is simply this: “what is Africa to you?”

I came across something you said once. You said: “We are Afropolitans…Africans of the world.” I can’t say there isn’t some “spontaneous overflow of strong feelings” coursing through my veins as I pen down these words of yours, that I’m not a tad miffed at your preciousness, calling yourselves “Africans of the world.”  Isn’t that phrase already taken by people who actually live in a place called Africa and are therefore the Africans of the world?

By the way, feel free to say I’m deliberately miss-representing what you meant by that statement.

Without seeming to cavil about petty points, can I draw your attention to some other thing you said: “There is the G8 city or two (or three)”—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo—”that we know like the backs of our hands,” but  ”there is at least one place in The African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen.”

You are African because you tie your sense of self to an auntie’s kitchen? “Africans of the world” via “an auntie’s kitchen”? Positively postmodern! By the way, I like the expression: “tie your sense of self.” It’s cute and pop-philosophical in a chic sort of way, politely non-committal. It also means that this tie that binds, not yourself, but merely your sense of self to Africa (read: “auntie’s kitchen”) is of a flimsy nature.

Africa is for you a  mask that you put on and take off as you please. Ah Afropolitans! I don’t know if you realize that you are the only ones who have that luxury (or is it delusion) to be African when and where you please.

Africa exists for you in the realm of dream as a ghostly memory you can evoke when the moment calls for it, as a vague but ambivalent force that fuels your artistic inspiration, as a card you carry and whip out when you feel vulnerable, as an outpost of the world, a hazy horizon on the fringes of the Afropolitan map drawn around your favorite “G-8 cities.”

My dear Afropolitan, Africa is, for you, an aesthetic element, a self-stylizing device, an accessory, an add-on, an ornament.

P.S. Let’s make a toast to Africa, Your Imaginary Africa!

Sincerely,

Ms. Screwscape Paper

When Bibi Bakare-Yusuf and her husband, Jeremy Weate, set up Cassava Republic, the Nigerian publishing industry was in pretty bad shape. They had little or no financial backing and had to put up with the difficulties of finding places to do high-quality printing. They were essentially trying to sell books in place where there was no working distribution network.

That was in 2006. After publishing everyone from Teju Cole to Mukoma wa Ngugi, Cassava Republic has earned its place as one of the top presses in Africa.

Watch the video of the ever vivacious and ridiculously smart and articulate Bibi Bakare-Yusuf talk about why Africa so badly needs to take charge of its “intellectual production” machinery.

Image via Jeremy Weate

Cassava Republic Press from jolyon hoff on Vimeo.

Who do you need to follow on twitter to make sure you have a global handle on world events? Every year, Foreign Policy Magazine publishes a list of 100 people to help you decide.

To be on that list is no mean feat. You are essentially the top hundred in a mass of 500 million users. It also means having your name listed alongside people like Bill Clinton and Pope Francis as the top influencers and producers of ideas in the world.

That’s why it’s so cool that not one but two African novelists made it to the list. Nigeria’s Teju Cole and Kenya’s Wainaina Binyavanga came under the Africa section, alongside four others, most of whom are journalists.

Teju Cole, who is a verified twitter user, has an eye-popping 104,660 followers. He’s become something of a twitter phenomenon ever since the days of his Small Fates and, subsequently, the drone tweets.

At 7,698, the number of Binyavanga’s followers are a bit more modest, but the author of the fictional memoir, One Day I’ll Write About This Place, is one of the foremost voices in the African literary Twitterville.

It’s not the Booker Prize or anything like that. Notwithstanding, congrats is very much in order

Complete Africa List:

Teju Cole (@tejucole): Nigerian-born novelist who hops between Lagos and Brooklyn.

Howard French (@hofrench): Journalism professor; former New York Times correspondent in Africa and China.

Calestous Juma (@calestous): Kenyan-born professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and authority on science and technology in Africa.

Andrew Mwenda (@AndrewMwenda): Managing editor of Uganda’s Independent magazine; aid critic.

Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen): New York Times bureau chief in Johannesburg; formerly in New Delhi.

Binyavanga Wainaina (@BinyavangaW): Kenyan author and director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College.

View complete list of 100 HERE. Want to follow any of these guys? Click HERE.

Nnedi Okoroafor. Author of Kabu-Kabu. Nigeria/US

On July 2nd, Nnedi Okorafor posted a rather dark message on her blog, Nnedi’s Wahala Zone. She said:

In the last three months, I’ve gone through some serious dark events that I will remember forever. Whenever I thought it was done, the universe took me over another cresting wave and I had to hang on for dear life. Then another. Then another. Those close to me know what I’m talking about. Those not so close to me will have no idea.

I hope whatever situation she was referring to has changed for the better and that she is in happy anticipation of the March 13, 2014 release of her novel titled Lagoon by Hodder and Stoughton. The cover isn’t out yet.

This may be the first novel-length science-fiction story ever set in Lagos. Isn’t it cool that Nnedi Okorafor just might be Nigeria’s response to South Africa’s Lauren Beukes?

This is all so exciting.

Here’s is the gist of the novel: 

A star falls from the sky. A woman rises from the sea.
The world will never be the same.

Three strangers, each isolated by his or her own problems: Adaora, the marine biologist. Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa. Agu, the troubled soldier. Wandering Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria’s legendary mega-city, they’re more alone than they’ve ever been before.

But when something like a meteorite plunges into the ocean and a tidal wave overcomes them, these three people will find themselves bound together in ways never imagined. Together with Ayodele, a visitor from beyond the stars, they must race through Lagos and against time itself in order to save the city, the world… and themselves.

‘There was no time to flee. No time to turn. No time to shriek. And there was no pain. It was like being thrown into the stars.’

“My Smelling Mouth Problem” by Igoni Barrett is a strange story and is written in a peculiarly Nigerian English that sounds more lyrical when it is read than when heard.

“My Smelling Mouth Problem” is a love story between man and a city. The 22-year old LASPOTECH student from Port Harcourt clearly has a fondness for Lagos. The only thing that gets in the way of this love is the nightmare on four wheels called Danfo buses.

Here is why.

“Every time I enter Danfo,” the character explains, “I must open my mouth.” In Danfo, the privately owned commercial buses that ply the city’s roads, he either has to call out his stop, yell if the driver fails to stop, quarrel with a thieving conductor, or jostle with fellow passengers for extra space in the horridly cramped bus. These are all actions requiring speech, which for a man in his condition, is something fraught with danger.

It would seem as though sitting by the window would help, but no. Passengers are too tightly packed. When he speaks, as he inevitably has to do, there is no way to avoid offending others with his bad breath. He then has to endure evil looks from fellow commuters. Invariably, a commuter or two would ask whether someone had farted. “Either the person beside me will look me with bad eye, or the person at my back will say, who has messed?” Nothing fun about having your mouth and your anus mixed up by strangers in a space as intimate as a bus.

At that moment, what he dreads the most happens. The condition of his breath becomes a matter around which the community of commuters gather. “All the whole bus will gather together and advice me to be brushing my teeth. I am sick and tired of this embarrassment.” Danfo buses had turned the ritual of going to school and returning home—a rather banal aspect of city life—into a nightmare. It had turned a city he seemed to like a lot into a place of shame and suffering. If only he could find a city bus that allowed him to fulfill his desire to be mute in the midst of many.  But isn’t that a mere dream?

Salvation came from the most unlike quarters—the visionary governor of Lagos, who instituted the BRT bus system. When BRT buses came around, our man was ecstatic. “Joy gripped me,” he says. He said his goodbyes to Danfo and embraced the new ones.  They are cheaper, newer, faster, roomier, and safer than Danfo. But that is not why he loves it. ” I only enter BRT bus,” he explains, “where I don’t have to open my mouth.”

In BRT buses, there is a certain kind of order that makes speech unnecessary, that elevates one to a silence that saves from the shame of a body’s defect. For this character, at least, BRT buses offer a new way of inhabiting and moving through the chaos of sounds and bodies that define the city.

After all, what is a city if not a lover that gives us the promise of embrace no matter how flawed our bodies might be?

Thanks to Teju Cole for the image.

Wondering where to find “My Smelling Mouth Problem” ? It’s in Barrett’s recently published collection of stories titled Love is Power Or Something Like That. 

Barely two years after it replaced the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book, the Commonwealth Book Prize, awarded to the best first novel and aimed at recognizing emerging writers, has been scrapped.

Here is the official announcement made by the Commonwealth Writer’s organization last week. As is usual with documents like these, the pressing question is not addressed. I still don’t know why they ended the book prize. Are they hard pressed for cash?

Commonwealth Writers has re-focused its prizes to concentrate on the Short Story. It will no longer offer the Commonwealth Book Prize.

Commonwealth Writers develops the craft of individual writers and builds communities of emerging voices which can influence the decision-making processes affecting their lives. The Short Story Prize aims to identify talented writers who will go on to inspire their local communities.

The 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize will be chaired by Ellah Allfrey, Deputy Chair of the Council of the Caine Prize and previously Deputy Editor of Granta and Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House.

The Short Story Prize enables writers to enter from countries where there is little or no publishing industry.  Authors writing in languages other than English are also able to enter stories translated into English. The Prize unearths and promotes the best new writing from across the Commonwealth, developing literary connections worldwide.

The Short Story Prize is awarded for the best piece of unpublished short fiction (2000-5000 words). Regional winners of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize will receive £2,500 and the Overall Winner will receive £5,000. Translators will receive additional prize money.

The 2014 Short Story Prize will open for entry on 1 October 2013 and close on 30 November 2013. Entry will be via an online application form. The judges, who reflect the five regions of the Commonwealth, will be announced on 1 October. — commonwealthwriters.org

Don’t submit your story without reading the new rules. Click HERE.

Image via

Colleen Higgs—

Modjaji is a women’s press – but some people don’t realise that it is a women’s press – they look at the titles and just think, ‘these are all good writers’, which if you reverse the gender bias, might not be seen as unusual at all. In a way, I think that means Modjaji is doing something right.

But at the same time, I do have an activist sensibility. Very often women’s voices and experiences are sidelined.  And Modjaji is able to publish things that don’t fit into well set commercial genres – Hester se Brood (Hester’s Book of Bread), for example, is about making bread and living in a small village in the Karoo. Many people loved it because she writes wonderfully, and her partner has done such beautiful drawings, but other publishers wouldn’t touch it because it was too weird.

The first novel I published, Tracey Farren’sWhiplash, is about a sex worker – and not a glamorous Belle-de-Jour type – it was rejected elsewhere, and it was not easy to get it stocked in stores here after it was published because of its subject matter. But then it was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and all those reluctant stores had to stock it. Now it is being made into a film. The director, producer and Tracey Farren herself have been working on the film for several years in different ways. Tracey has written the script. The producer and director have been working hard to raise sufficient funds for the film.

I think Modjaji is a feminist press. And that’s to do with what’s going on in the world. Having lived through and enacted it, I think publishing only women writers is a hugely political act, particularly if you think about the way publishing is owned, media is owned, who gets to make the decisions, and how women are represented. Even in South Africa, where we have a great constitution, lesbians are violently attacked and in some cases murdered simply for their sexuality; all women live with fear of violence and abuse, and our rape statistics are horrific.

Women do have a different experience of different things – not necessarily just because they are women, but because of the way power is structured and filtered. There was a point, not so long ago, maybe 30 years ago, where married women couldn’t open a cheque account in South Africa, without permission from their husbands –women were treated as minors.

A bit of context: Modjaji Books is a small press that publishes books written by South African women. It is based in Cape Town. You just read what the founder, Colleen Higgs, has to say about what it means to think of Modgaji as a women’s press.

Check out the full interview HERE. It was conducted by Katie Reids for African in Words. Visit Africa in Words for more illuminating interviews. 

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For all those who have dreamed of reading or writing African crime and spy fiction, your day has finally come with the recent launch of Cordite Books. 

You’ll enjoy this must-read interview of Helon Habila. He talks about his work as the editor of the Cordite Books crime imprint. He also makes some of the most illuminating and provocative observations about contemporary African fiction.

Habila is the author of Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time, and Oil on Water. He teaches creative writing at George Mason University in the United States.

I think, if you want to capture the African zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, you can do that best through crime stories. — Helon Habila

Ainehi Edoro: What inspired your interest in crime/spy writing and in the business of publishing crime fiction?

Helon Habila:  Like most Nigerians of my age I grew up reading, not Achebe and Soyinka, but James Hadley Chase, and Nick Carter, and Desmond Bagley, and John D McDonald. We used to buy them for a few naira from the bend-down book vendors. We also had a sort of informal book club, reading by turns, one book would go round the whole school, and by the time it came back to the owner it was torn and the spine broken, and the pages had to be glued back together. Come to think of it, my interest in crime fiction goes back to my first day in Secondary School, we were sent to the library where I discovered the Nancy Drew series, I finished the whole series in weeks.

The second part of the question, about publishing as a business, well, I am not interested in it as a business per se, but in order to disseminate something, to distribute it, one needs organization, meaning it has to be set up as a business. So, to get a book from writer to reader you have to set up a company that does just that, and here we are, in the business of publishing. I don’t know much about that aspect of things, my partners, Richard Ali and Azafi, handle that part. Basically Cordite intends to popularize African crime and spy fiction. But first we want to launch the crime aspect first, which I will edit, as a sort of pilot project. The spy aspect will follow. It will be handled by Richard, who is a spy fiction enthusiast.

 AE: Cordite Books is clearly ready and open for business. Your website is clean and classy and the call for submission has been well publicized. Can you tell us a little bit about the publishing company, where it’s based, and so on? Perhaps also say a few things about the brand? What does Cordite mean?

HH:  I am glad you like the website – that is more a credit to the website designers than to Cordite. I like it too. It is a testament to the talent and industry of young Nigerians doing things by themselves and for themselves everyday.

What does Cordite mean? Actually Richard came up with that name. Cordite, I believe, is a sort of smokeless gunpowder, with a rather distinct smell. We toyed with many names before settling on that. Cordite is a metaphor for crime. We love it, it is exactly the kind of imagery we were looking for. Ours is an interesting partnership: Richard is the creative partner; Azafi is the business woman; and I will be the talent scout if you like.  Our aim is to discover and promote African crime stories. We believe there is the talent, and the readership, to make that work.

AE:  D. O. Fagunwa says in a 1960 essay published in Teacher’s Monthly that “the aim of a novelist is to present to the public something interesting to read, and the success or failure of a novel lies in how far it can get a hold of its readers and compel them to read on.” The popularity of his own writings testifies to this statement. Do you see your interest in crime fiction as staying true to this mandate of literary entertainment, something that has generally been downplayed in African fiction?

 HH: I agree with Fagunwa, completely. According to Aristotle, the aim of literature is to entertain and to educate. Unfortunately our “serious” literature in Africa focuses more on educating and has neglected the entertaining part. I don’t want to give the impression that crime fiction is not serious, or cannot be serious. Crime literature has a long genealogy. It goes back all the way to Greek tragedy. Oedipus Rex is about murder, it is detective story per excellence – a man kills his father and marries his mother. The whole story is about uncovering the criminal. This is thriller stuff. The whole community is cursed because of this crime, and the criminal has to be discovered for society to return to normal. This, in a nutshell, is the poetics, the idea, behind crime fiction. There cannot be healing and restoration to normalcy without justice. It is the same idea in every Agatha Christies story, in every Conan Doyle story, and of course in every Ian Fleming story. The detective is the spy, is the hero, fighting a battle on behalf of the whole community, fighting for restoration of natural order.

Can we apply that to the Nigerian, African situation? Yes we can. It has been done before, by Pacesetters. And when you read books like The Last Duty, by Isidore Okpewho, it is a crime fiction. JM Coetzee’s Disgrace is a crime story. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is a crime story. Basically, a crime story is about crime and detection and punishment.

By starting an African crime imprint we are trying to open up the discussion, to bring it down from the Ivory Tower to the streets, where real people live, where most new trends and ideas begin. We want to ask questions like: what is the state of crime, and justice, and punishment, in Africa today? What is happening in our prisons since the end of colonialism, are they still places of punishment or correction? Why do the rich get away with stealing billions while the poor are hanged for minor crimes? Why do our leaders feel no shame in stealing? Why do our police defend only the rich and not the poor? What is the moral dimension of all this? Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent in the world, with transition from traditional to modern settings there is a shift in the way we perceive crime, from the collective to the individualistic, if you like, but in doing so, are we throwing away our African values? I think, if you want to capture the African zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, you can do that best through crime stories.

I have noticed that there is a huge gap in our reading culture: people are either reading Shakespeare, or Soyinka, or JP Clark, or Ngugi – the so-called highbrow literature – or they are reading non-fiction, mainly of the inspirational, religious kind. There is nothing in-between, at least not by African authors. If they want something light and entertaining they have to go to Nollywood, or foreign crime and spy and romance writers, like Robert Ludlum, and Hadley Chase, and the Scandinavians. But the fact is, we live in crime ridden societies. Why are we not talking about it, why must we always sublimate it into some high art, and not talk about it in direct and simple idiom. Crime and punishment, that is what I am interested in.

 AE: You own Cordite Books with Paressia Publishing. How did the collaboration come about?

 HH: Well, I did come up with the idea for the crime imprint. I’ve had the idea for a while, but because of my situation: I don’t live in Nigeria, I don’t know the publishing industry that well, etc, etc, I knew I couldn’t do it by myself, so I proposed the idea to my publisher, Parrésia Publishers, and they immediately saw the viability of the idea and agreed to be partners. Cordite Books is a partnership between Decibel Books, my company, and Parrésia. Decibel provides the crazy, wildcard ideas, and Parrésia provides the grounding, the infrastructure – it is a perfect marriage. Parrésia is my Nigerian publisher, a company started by Azafi and Richard and their partners, and the funny thing is that I didn’t even know them that well before we went into business. Azafi I had met perhaps twice while doing the Fidelity Bank Anthology last year, and Richard I knew only by reputation though it turned out that while I attended the University of Jos, he lives in Jos and we have friends in common. Oh, we also found out, much later, that Azafi and I did our NYSC in the same city, Jalingo, Taraba. I in 1996, Azafi some years later.

 AE: As one who has until now been a novelist and teacher of creative writing, how has it been like venturing into the business side of publishing?

HH: Well, like you said, I am just venturing into it. We shall see how it turns out. But I believe that good art is like any good product, there can be a market for it. In Nigeria alone we are over 160 million people, that is a big market. Surely it shouldn’t be too hard to sell half a million copies of a book to 160 million people? The whole of Africa is even a bigger market. You can comfortably sell, in Nigeria alone, over 100,000 copies of a book if it is good, if you market it right. Multiply that by ten, twenty, when talking about the whole of Africa. The problem is that western publishers and companies always undermine and underestimate the potential of the African market. As such, they never bother to develop the market. It is too much work. So they always dismiss it, and they tell you Africans don’t read. They don’t buy books. We want to change that. I believe Africans must begin to show more faith, more confidence in the African market. We are starting with the assumption that our primary reader, our primary market is African. We have a burgeoning middle class, we are more educated than we have ever been in history, the whole world is cottoning on to that, the Chinese seem to be aware of that more than we are, we Africans should lead the way. Our writers and intellectuals and business people must begin to think Africa, to behave as if their only market is Africa, to believe in Africa.

AE: Since the Pacesetter days, Nigeria has not really had a thriving genre fiction scene. Do you see the founding of Cordite Books as marking a resurgence of the form? 

HH: Honestly, I am puzzled as to why we haven’t had a repeat of the phenomenally successful Pacesetters series. This was when the whole country was reading, following each publication, then suddenly it stopped. I still believe there is a huge vacuum for that kind of fiction, the popular, the immediate, the visceral. It has been done before, our aim in Cordite is to do it again, a sort of modern version of it. Only our aim is wider, more ambitious.

We still have crime in our midst. We still have victims. We still have perpetrators. What we need to create is the idea of heroes. People who are willing to buck the trend, to stand up for what is right, to purge out evil from the body politick. Our police can’t do it, because they are unwilling, and they don’t seem to even understand the idea of heroism, of standing up for what is right. What crime fiction does, and most of literature, is to create that idea of the hero, to convince us that we can all be heroes, a kind of DIY hero, if you like. Today we speak of Spiderman, and Superman, etc, as if they are real people – but they are fictional heroes, from comic books, fighting crime, purging the society of evil and restoring it to health. Children grow up reading them, and they fall in love with the idea of standing up for others, for the weak, of sacrifice, and they learn to hate evil.

 AE: Why do you think Africa has not really made its mark on the global genre fiction scene? We’ve done amazing things in the highbrow side of things, but it looks like we are lagging behind in more popular sort of writing. Any thoughts?

HH: I guess it is a result of our education, our colonial education system. Most of our university trained writers aspire to write like Shakespeare and Dickens – they write only for the elite. Perhaps I am also guilty of being in that category. Other writers, like Ekwensi and Tutuola, and even Saro-Wiwa, we push aside as being too simple. But if you look at these so-called “simple” writers you will see they are in touch with our day to day concerns even more than writers like Achebe and Soyinka and Ngugi are. To go back to the example of Oedipus Rex, read it and you will see that it came from mythologies and folklores of the Greek, their day to day concerns about life, and religion, and family, and communal survival – this is what all good crime fiction talks about. So, my point is, we have as much raw material to create a market for crime fiction as any other nation, say Sweden, which is seen as the number one producer of crime stories. The joke is that these peaceful Nordic societies don’t even have the same volume of crime as we do. Perhaps the reason is in Africa we are scared to talk about it, to question it, to challenge it, like other nations do. Our leaders want us to believe that Africans are a peaceful, forgiving people, that God will give us justice someday if we don’t get justice here on earth. Crime fiction questions that kind of morality. Crime fiction tells you that you need to have justice here on earth if you want a truly just society.  Crime fiction doesn’t believe that there can be peace without justice. These are things we need to talk about.

 AE: There’s an Ian Fleming reference somewhere on the Cordite Books website. Does the James Bond series epitomize, for you, what good crime writing is? In other words, what would good crime writing do or look like vs. one that isn’t so good?

 HH: I think of crime fiction as popular fiction, just like a folk tale is: it talks to the people about the things that matter to them most, their safety, their corporate and individual survival, the question of their rights as citizens. But it must do so in a direct, entertaining way. So, we want good plotting, suspense, direct diction, and of course, a satisfying, unexpected but logical ending. Having said that, it looks to me as if I am talking about any good fiction. But let me just add that, crime fiction has to be about a crime: murder, kidnapping, blackmail, hit and run, etc, etc, and how that is eventually uncovered. We don’t want to be prescriptive, but we’d love it if these stories are set in an urban place. Urbanity, modernity, these are things we want to talk about, to promote as an aesthetic, if possible.

 AE: What’s the publication time line? From the moment you get your winning manuscript, how long before the official release of the title?

HH: Submissions are open from August 7th, 2013 and will close on November 30th, 2013. The winning manuscript will be published mid 2014, around July.

 AE: Tiny bit of clarification: there are three prizes, but only the winner of the first prize gets published, right?

HH: There will be three prize winners. The first two will get published by Cordite, but only the first place winner gets 1000 dollars cash prize; the second will also be published and receive 250 dollars while the third place manuscript will receive 200 dollars. There will be honorable mention for the fourth and fifth best manuscripts received. 

AE: How optimistic are you about the whole enterprise? Are you set to find us an African Ian Fleming or Agatha Christie?

 HH: Very. Very optimistic. But ours is not a simple, blind optimism. We have watched carefully how fast Africa is changing, and how other things need to change as well. Like the way publishing and distribution works. There is an emerging middle class whose tastes are the same as any middle class in the world, and they need a literature to address their day to day issues. To show you how viable this idea is, it has only been a week since we sent out our advert, and already we have publishers from different countries wanting to partner with us. There is a demand, what there hasn’t been is supply. We hope to take care of that.

Interested in becoming a Cordite crime/spy writer, get more information HERE. Follow Cordite Books on twitter: @CorditeBooks

Image: Helon Habila (c) Jide Alakija

There’s really no end to last-name adjectives in Western literary culture. Shakespearean, Dickensian, Kafkaesque, Sebaldian are just a few. As you can imagine, it’s an honor for an author to have his or her last name become an adjective.

The last-name adjective is the sign that an author has become bigger than him or herself, has been promoted to a higher level of abstraction. Kafka ceases to be Kafka (the man) and becomes a technique, an aesthetic form, a style, a political idea, an artistic movement, a literary problem, a historical force, etc. His name is used to define a vast and diverse body of work that comes after he is long gone and even many that precede him.

The last-name adjective is the proof of an authors influence on a literary tradition. I like to think of it as an apotheosis from author to ancestor.

In African fiction, we’ve had some. Not many. It is common among African literary scholars to speak of an Achebean style, a Soyinkan aesthetics, or a Senghorian imagery.

Blame it on my Tutuola obsession, but I think he deserves to become adjectivized. Tutuolaesque—sounds so beautiful!

Fastforward 50 years from now, which of our contemporary African writers will receive this literary honor? Not all of them. You have to have reinvented the literary tradition for you to gain access into this very exclusive ancestral cult.

Who, among our contemporary writers, will change the course of African fiction? Who will leave a legacy that we would celebrate by transforming their last names into adjectives. Will we ever get to describe literary ideas and forms as Adichian, Beukesian, Colean, Binyavangan, Selasian, Bulawayan, Okrian?

We’ll have to wait and see.

Image by Wassel Mathews via

Wole Soyinka, Siddhartha Mitter, and Teju Cole in Lagos (courtesy of cassava republic)

As you might have guessed from his tweets, Teju Cole was in Nigeria sometime in the summer. At some point during his stay, he paid a visit to Wole Soyinka. In a New Yorker piece, he mentions the meeting, but more as an aside. Much of the essay is about something else: Soyinka and the first lady of Nigeria had a fight. Soyinka called her a hippopotamus. She said he was an embarrassment to the nation. Soyinka fired back, called her a Shepopotamus.

It was not until the end of the essay that my antenna picked up something genuinely exciting. I have in mind Soyinka’s house. Teju describes it: Aso-oke cloth for curtains, an intriguing clutter of sculptures (or gods?). “Shadowed and quiet,” the house was perched on “the edge of the woods” where Soyinka would often go hunting like the true (literary) daemon he is.

I hope I’m not the only one intrigued by this tidbit on Soyinka’s dwelling. His house holds nearly as much fascination for me as his ideas and work. There are some who would squirm at such a confession. My post on Taiye Selasi’s sexiness got a lot of criticism. Some people felt that I was disturbing the boundary that needed to be maintained between the body of the artist and the genius of the work. My post they said was belittling and detracted from the beauty of her mind and her work.

#NoteToSelf: must value African novelists for their mind and not their bodies or things. Or maybe not. After all, when we deal with an author’s work, aren’t we also dealing with a kind of body, as in the body of the author’s work? Aren’t the body of work, the body of the woman, the image of the artist, the genius of her creativity all one broad tapestry of interlocking texts?

Teju is himself struck by Soyinka’s body. And I mean this literally. “[Soyinka], he writes, “looked vigorous, effortlessly handsome. His famous afro and beard, both a vivid white, looked less like signs of age than evidence of some unending efflorescence.” Through Teju’s gaze trained on Soyinka, we see an aging body still in bloom, “effortlessly handsome,” and strong, inhabiting a house populated with sculptures and things, poised on the edge of shadowy woods.

Are we surprised that an essay, which begins with a reading of Soyinka’s play ends with a reflection on Soyinka’s body?  An artist’s body—and all the things clustered around it— is always implicated in lot more things than we imagine it to be. The road from an artist’s body to the body of his work is a very short one. Both bodies are legitimate machineries of meaning and do some of the most beautiful kinds of literary work when we place them in relation.

It is a shame that the literary world, especial in Africa, has chosen to define itself against a celebrity culture it sees as commodifying and base, as something that should be left to lesser art-worlds of pop-musicians and movie stars or to Kim Kadarshian. We are not supposed to be intrigued by the lives our favorite authors live behind the books they write for us. That is why we are forever doomed to waiting for memoirs—such pretentious things—to learn the filtered and stilted versions of the lives of these famous men and women.

Alternatively, maybe we are long overdue for a literary paparrazi industrial complex.

Image via Cassava Republic

(c) Ian Williams for National Post

Chimamanda says she is drawn to art that reminds her of home.

Listen to the podcast below to see why Flavour’s hit track “Ashawo” and Ben Enwonwu’s “Tutu” conjure up, for her, thoughts and images of home.

There’s no reason why you wouldn’t have heard Flavour’s hit track, but I’ve gone ahead and included the video (and Enwonwu’s Tutu) just in case.

Can you guys seriously picture Chimamanda singing along to Flavour’s music: “Sawa sawa sawa le, sawa sawa sawa le, ashawo?” I actually can “Flavour,” she says, “makes me want to dance.”

Have a lovely weekend! Thanks to everyone for such a great week here on Brittle Paper—your visits, your facebook and twitter shares, your comments.

Muah!

Flavour – Nwa Baby (Ashawo Remix) [Official Video]

Tutu by Ben Enwonwu

(c) Johan Klovsjö

The scarcity of novels in African languages is not the only reason why we should be concerned about the future of African languages. What worries me more than anything is the absence of translations in these languages. Why isn’t there a Dinka translation of Plato’s Republic, a Yoruba translation of Madame Bovary, a Hausa translation of The Kama Sutra, or an Igbo translation of Half of a Yellow Sun?

Perhaps, the better question to ask is why should there be?

For languages to thrive and survive, they need to transform themselves. If folktales have taught us nothing, at least, they’ve shown us that the surest way to inspire transformation is by letting a stranger into the household. When you translate a text that is written in a language that is very different from your own, you force your language to take on the demands of the other. In the process, your language enriches itself with new words, new imageries, new styles, and syntactic forms.

This transformation is mutual. A Yoruba translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra will modify the Yoruba language as much as it will modify Nietzsche and the German language. Subjecting German to the rules of Yoruba results in Yoruba being forced to accommodate the quirks and strangeness of German. Translation is a space where languages grapple with each other, test their limits, and come out altered but stronger.

But then translation is an unequal exchange—one where the translating language takes way more than it gives to the original. When we translate The Ozidi Saga or Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale (The Forest of a Thousand Daemons) into English, we are actually doing the English language a big favor. Yes, translation into English allows these texts to circulate globally, but it does very little for Ijo or Yoruba.

Imagine, on the other hand, compelling the Kikuyu language to think through Einstein’s relativity theory, Dickens’ curiosity shops, Woolf’s “luminous halo,” Holderlin’s Greece, Heidegger’s concept of time, Darwin’s apes, or even Conrad’s weird Africa.

Translation is essentially a way of poaching someone else’s languages for things that you might not have in yours so that your language can imagine things it wasn’t built to express.

It is the translator, as Walter Benjamin writes, who is saddled with the task of “ break[ing] through [the] decayed barriers of his own language.”

Image via Johan Klovsjö

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is almost here. Biyi Bandele’s film adaptation of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun will be screened publicly for the first time on the 8th of this month at the Toronto Film festival.

There are three showtimes:

What will critics say? How would their judgment affect our sky-high expectations for the movie?

Here is a recently released clip to get you excited about saturday.

It’s a powerfully romantic moment in the story. Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is proposing to Olanna (Thandi Newton). Like all things Odenigbo, the proposal is unusual.

The slight tremor in Odenigbo’s voice as he broaches such a weighty topic while evoking all that is delicate and anxiety-ridden about the moment just makes my heart melt. Talk about subtle acting. Ejiofor is so far a convincing Odenigbo.

I know I should keep my expectations modest—a good trailer does not mean a great movie—but I’ve chosen not to!

Enjoy.

Trailer