Safia Elhillo

‘Poetry Is Political’ Safia Elhillo’s First Draft

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Sudanese poet, Safia Elhillo, feels very differently now about the idea of belonging than she did at the time of writing her award-winning collection, The January Children. Looking back, she was ‘so concerned with a sort of diasporic longing that centered nationhood and nationality as the primary sites of belonging, and I just really don’t believe that anymore.’ Read More...
April/May 2024First DraftInterviewsSudan
ECOWAS

A Sahel-less ECOWAS

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The announcement by Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger of their exit from ECOWAS, 24 years after Mauritania’s exit in 2000, threatens to de-Sahelize the regional bloc. It marks more fundamental problems associated with spatial inequality and its influence in West African national and regional politics that are yet to be addressed head on. Read More...
AfricaApril/May 2024
Nairobi

Nairobi in a Song A Boy, His Father, and Old Tunes

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‘To Kenyans, 2023 feels like the year the country dies. But within this Rhumba and Jazz establishment in Nairobi’s Tao, it could as well be 1970,’ Ogwa writes. ‘Perched behind a corner table with two cold bottles of beer sweating before me, I pass a quintessential moment, watching folks of all ages waltz elegantly to Cabo Verde Barefoot Diva, Cesária Évora’s “Partida”... For me, old music is not just entertainment, it’s a compass with which I always find my way back to me.’ Read More...
Father's DayFebruary/March 2024Kenya
Christianity

A Peculiar People Christianity and Nigerian Public Life

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Nothing was untouched by the practice of religion in Nigeria. You could not pour sand in your ears to drown out its demands. We carried on with the assumption that the spirit world was a place of dynamism where things happened before they reached our plane. I loved this about us... Yet I came to see how our approach to religion and spirituality wounded us. Read More...
Best of 2024: EssaysFebruary/March 2024Nigeriavol8-no2