Osaze Amadasun’s ‘Ladi Kwali’

In the 1970s, a Nigerian radio cleric built a pipeline between northern Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, sending young men in search of a purified Islam. The returnees would go on to transform how millions practised their faith and unsettle the society around them.

The father held the form four ZIMSEC results several months later, reading and re-reading the neat set of A’s and B’s with great deliberateness…‘If only you were a boy,’ said the father. ‘Good job. Whoever marries you had better be rich. This is no small investment.’

Emeka has no business dying now. He and Afuajuba still have unfinished business. She wants to know why. What was so broken in their relationship that he needed to have an affair?

A trip to Brazil did not teach me that Yoruba indigenous religions are beautiful; it showed me that their beauty had been systematically obscured.

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.