Life After Oil
Jeremy Weate explores the cultural politics of the petro-based economy in Nigeria, where crude as commodity has perpetuated ethnic divides and the illusion of development and modernity through a national pastime of forgetting. He asks: what culture and what memory will be left of oil, after it has gone? The culture of oil that has […]
Situation is Critical
Jeremy Weate moves from text to context in search of the current state of African writing. I’ve just received my review copy of Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them. I’m not sure I can stomach it all the way through, still less write about it. The tome lies on my table, a lead weight too heavy to […]
Lagos Underground
In the 1930s, Harry Beck published a map of the London Underground Tube network. Since then, stations have arrived and departed and colours have changed, however, the outline has stayed close to the original design. Three-quarters of a century on from the original design, Jeremy Weate reinterpreted the iconic map for a megacity with a similar […]
Achebe The Native Intellectual
There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, raised a dust storm of reaction in Nigeria. Jeremy Weate suggests the books controversy and power lies outside the simple tectonics of ethnicity. There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, has raised a […]