Fiction

Yagazie Chinekotam | The Old High Gate Hotel

The set of apartments sat like the last twelve cubes in a St. Louis sugar box. I could smell the aroma of...
Poetry

Newpanther | Chapter 9

Chapter 9 yesterdays agoI saw long haired hippies in black and whitereligious groupies squatting everywheretelling fortunes under Shaman trancedrop a bit of...
Fiction

Michael Barrington | A Toast to Africa

The message from the Regional Director was sparse and uncompromising—no explanations, only urgency. He should leave at once. His destination lay...
Essays & Reviews

‘Shèun Ominira-Bluejack | “Uneasy Lies The Head”

“I am an African! I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers,...
Poetry

Mark de Klerk | Playing Golf with Nelson Mandela

Playing Golf with Nelson Mandela Once again, I am in the roughfeeling inferior to the guy behind mewho keeps hitting holes-in-one.After a...
Poetry

Abigail George | Black Vulnerability, Black Stigma

Black vulnerability, black stigma There's a swamp in his breath, swampy breathvolcanic ash in his pink nostrils, dragonThe red light from the...
Fiction

Khosa J.K. Chambalo | Memory Lane

The red earth of Malawi does not forget the footprints of its children. Even when the rain washes the surface clean,...
Poetry

Cliff Burns | First Meeting

First Meeting You are the Otherbut from your pointof view so am I Inside Schrodinger’s Boxstaring at each otheruncertain what happens next Tribal peoplemeeting...

LAST MONTH...

The Permanence of Loss | A Conversation with Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé

Kayode Odumboni -

Abigail George | Old Brown Sherry lullaby

Abigail George -

Rais Tuluka | The Lineage Behind African Eyes

Rais Tuluka -

Brian Obiri-Asare | in pure moonlight

in pure moonlight +++over at the chop bar, where they’re still palavering & holding onto the promise of this world, her sighs return +++from the abyss...

Nadia Ahidjo | Na Wetin Dat?

Kadi was slicing avocados for dinner when the first thing hit the roof. It was too loud to be a fruit or a branch....

B. Guserwa | A silent affection

My old man loves his wife, but you would never know it. You wouldn’t know it from the way he never says her name, from...

Oluwatobi Adeboyeku | The Mathematics of Passing

It is the season of first rain. Campus air—damp lecture theatres. Muddy walkways swallow up sandals. My coursemate Tola’s patience is wearing thin, like...

Scott Frost | The First Thing They Take

The First Thing They Take I. before you learn your kradinis the first thing they take.not gently--nothing sort of exciting--but like a tax, they takeeven though...

Samuel Kozah | Facing West

West is the first fact of me. I have faced it for eighty years. My world is curved. The earth presses against my round edge...

RANDOM CONVERSATIONS

Toni Kan Onwordi: Writing is profitable if you know how

Toni Kan Onwordi, better known simply as Toni Kan,...

Harry Garuba: In Praise of “the Thursday People”

Harry Garuba who passed in February 2020 was a...

Gender in African Literature Today: A Conversation with Asante Lucy Mtenje

Asante Lucy Mtenje is a Malawian academic, creative writer,...

Wesley Macheso: Fiction is greater than the reality it mirrors

Wesley Macheso teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Mzuzu...

Nengi Ilagha: Words are the instruments of our warfare in the spirit, as in the flesh

NENGI JOSEF OWEI-ILAGHA, fondly called Pope Pen the First,...

Titilope Sonuga: I believe in truth-telling as a pathway to healing

Títílopẹ́ Sónúgà (she writes it as “Titilope Sonuga”) is...

The Mystique of Maxim

(for Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, Boroja I, Obi of Ikate,...

“The artist is a person at a crossroads” – Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Cameroonian Scholar Francis B. Nyamnjoh on Art, Academia, indebtedness,...

Nnedi Okorafor: I just have stories to tell…

Nnedi Okorafor is an important writer, period. She is...