I feel her breath fanning my skin
In the rustlings of the cassava leaves
She sings a lonely melody
With the lost creatures of the night
And once and again
She comes with the rain...

iam tanganyika
i smell and fester with the smoke of african genesis
iam the beginning
kilimanjaro the anthill of rituals
iam the smile of africa...

I am spending a little time in my home country. That is what we like to do, us Africans, spend the holiday with family. It looks a little as though we want to be sure we know where and how the families are doing. The ones that stay away do indeed stay away. But we are all here, most of us from last year. I do not want this to become a ritual. Christmas with efo riro is a better option than this yellow fried rice with strange peas. It is hot in here and I have missed the thermostat...

Jos
She tickled us
Music rolled from sonorous winds
Eating from the gracious ambience
of our agreed tomorrows
We jiggled to the beats...

I have absolutely no problem with the term, “African writer,” I am an African writer. Everything depends on context. And it is true that we are the sum of our experience and folks are right to protest any definition that in their view limits the range of their identity and their life’s work. But I do think Gappah protests too much...

Like Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Maik Nwosu's Alpha Song re-enacts the motif of the knowledge-seeker. It is a story of insatiable quest, of man’s endless search for meaning, for the true essence of life. But it is a futile search. No one ever finds it. Everything ends in disillusionment...

While my grandmother’s creases fiddle with my hair, my eyes stay fixed on the roughness of her bedroom wall. Grandmother’s walls are different from the ones I grew up within. Stories live inside her walls. Your grandpapa, me, we lived here many long long agos. She adds extra longs as if they help chronicle time...

Custodian of our sovereignty
Canaries from Arabia
Where medicine men
Mutilate organs of our nationhood...

Of course I knew who Murtala Mohammed was. He was that ominous head on the twenty naira note. The airport in Lagos was named after him. The long bridge in Lokoja also bore his name. I knew his middle name was Ramat. As a child, my school once went on an excursion to the museum in Lagos and we had been shown the Peugeot car he was being driven in on the day the bullet of a lone shooter took life out of him. I knew that the name of this shooter was Dimka. I knew that after his death, Obasanjo took over power. I knew he took the first step towards moving the Federal Capital to Abuja. I knew he died in 1976. All the options before me bore 1976. But I did not know the exact day he died...

Bobo wonders how they kidnapped him. He usually had a convoy of six or seven cars. Bulletproof jeeps screamed blue-and-red as their sirens cleared traffic for The Future to pass unopposed. He made sure he had armed aides to escort him because Nigeria was too unpredictable and people were all too ready to waste you without much provocation...

This book is several conversations burning at once. The writer Yvonne A. Owuor starts the conversations rolling in a piece she admits is a rant. It is a rant pregnant with profound gems. She questions why the West glorifies its own wars with stories of valor and views Africa’s wars as savage and barbaric, pointing out that there have been equally gory examples to draw from in the West...

Ours is a land where labels make you better
A place where calibre is proved with brand
It helps to sport the odd logo or letter
It’s always favoured if it comes from jand
We never thought where all of this would lead
So busy were we paying obeisance to greed...