Method After Fela
by Akin Adesokan “You reckon a guy just goes and cuts down a guy of timber. You gorra do it proper man or you won’t live to cut another log. Dead men tell no tales kid. Until that guy is sawn up and turned to a bench or table, the spirit guy is still struggling inside it, […]
“I’m Not An African Writer, Damn You!”
by Akin Adesokan One is an African writer, or rather one becomes an African writer, it seems, not so much by writing as by winning a prize. Better if the prize is awarded to a work of fiction. Better still if the prize is awarded from Western Europe or North America. Much better still if […]
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 […]
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 […]
Authority Stealing: The business of crime writing in Kenya, India and Nigeria
Kenya In pursuit of some scriptwriter talent, Billy Kahora discovers that academic mantras, conservative world views and hand-me down observations stunt a rendering of the true grit that must be lived to be imagined in a Nairobi noir. ‘The cinema like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the […]