Onitsha Republic
[hr] Uzor Maxim Uzoatu visits the sprawling city of his childhood in the former secessionist Biafra, home to the largest market in West Africa for everything from fake guns and drugs to the literature of self-help and love, cash-awash banks, not to mention the most famous address in Nollywood. [hr] Fact and fiction are Siamese […]
Neo Africanus: In Teju Cole’s World
Teju Cole, author of the award winning book Open City, recently announced that his new book is a non-fictional narrative of contemporary Lagos. But what is Cole’s relationship to his native Nigeria and its cultural and commercial capital, Lagos? Akin Adesokan looks of the answers in his books. I Of the many encounters in which […]
I Have Always Meant to Fail
Isoje Chou knows the road is long, winding and full of mythical, evangelical and philosophical twists and turns. Set foot on the path in I Have Always Meant to Fail: from Abiku to Abikuisms (Speaking of Nigeria and Road Desire). (Scroll down-down for references and footnotes) Apropos on the problem Movement in Nigeria is as […]
How to be a Nigerian
Peter Enahoro a.k.a. Peter Pan’s How To Be A Nigerian was first published in the 1960s as a series of columns in the Daily Times. It became a bestselling book that was re-published in 1996. Almost two decades later, Enahoro’s brilliant satirical enquiry into identity, nationalism and inventiveness is still the definitive guide. To be […]
A Corpse and its Jurisdiction – a letter from Lagos
Akin Adesokan tropes on the detective genre after he stumbles on an unidentified corpse in Oko-Oba. Who does the body belong to? And more importantly who is going to take responsibility for it in a society where bureaucracy and apathy have usurped common human decency? I had some housekeeping assignments around Oko-Oba, near the Abattoir […]