Your Essential Guide to Africa Through Nigeria

Visual artist and graphic designer, Osaze Amadasun, reimagines Ladi Kwali, reclaiming the full legacy of a cultural icon beyond her portrait on the 20 naira note.

The religious extremism that fuels insecurity in Nigeria today did not begin only in terrorist camps; it also developed, quietly, within Nigerian universities.

What began as a Tuesday evening service at Christ Apostolic Church in Eruku, Kwara State, turned into a live-streamed kidnapping that dragged 38 worshippers into the forest and left three people dead. Nearly 40 days after the bandit attack, Pelumi Salako visits Eruku to speak with survivors.

For decades, the potter on Nigeria’s twenty-naira note was considered the product of British colonial art instruction, but this viewpoint denied a crucial truth: that Ladi Kwali’s art came from a Gbagyi worldview in which clay, labour and the female body were sacred, inseparable and hers alone.

For decades, Apo Mechanic Village has kept Abuja’s cars running. Now, as demolition looms again, the mechanics and traders who built the Abuja’s informal engine confront another uncertain future.

In 2011, a Boko Haram bombing at the United Nations House in Abuja claimed the lives of 26 people. The incident changed Nigeria’s capital city and the lives of its residents forever.

Last year, when Nigeria announced a posthumous pardon for Ken Saro-Wiwa and twelve other Ogonis, it was framed as a gesture of closure. Noo Saro-Wiwa does not see it that way. In this conversation, she explains why a pardon, without exoneration, cannot undo the violence of the past or resolve the political struggle her father left behind.