By Johnbosco Omokulele The Soyinka Festival takes off today, the beginning of the Soyinka Week, with the Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange (WSICE) kicking off with the theme: I AM because YOU ARE There will be online conversations, online live drama, online film shows, online exhibitions, running every day until Tuesday (July 12 to July 14). […]
Very early in this brief journal-based memoir, Colleen Higgs writes: “My whole life has felt like a long deeply unsatisfying love affair with my mother. She is the beloved who doesn’t love back.” How hard it must be, to assume the care of a person who is not really interested in you, but demands a […]
“The Disappeared: People who have been secretly abducted and imprisoned or killed by a government or military, often for political reasons, and who have neither been found, nor their bodies recovered. Where is Dadiyata, the Nigerian lecturer and social media voice also known as Abubakar Idris? Is he still alive following his 2nd August 2019 abduction from his home in Kaduna? Can he breathe? Were his […]
I If you want to know the sex of lagoons, jump jump into their wombs You will suffer The swollen silence of rebirth Never ask me why Never ask why the mad poet of beer parlours goes on the rampage He drags his deities into […]
An Abundance of Grey Wears the prisoner’s world to rags In his hour of sunlight At eleven or four each day, The sky is the smoke trail Of his burnt fields and breaking heart His old can of water For bath and thirst and wash too small To save a […]
Nigerian-Canadian Kika Otiono has done it again, as she bags Carleton University Senate Medal for “excellent overall standing while a student at the University.” Young Otiono graduated with a CGPA of 11.80 out of 12, also described in other academic parlance as a First Class honours. 21-year-old Kika Otiono, currently studying medicine at McMaster University, […]
This spill of earth in sand dunes stupefies Yielding to the feet as they approach In dimples that disappear as the winds rise In servitude to heat. Travellers broach The delicate topic of omens, knowing fully How unhelpful they can be in straits How rarely they become of […]
Four authors represented by JK Rowling’s literary agency have resigned after accusing the company of declining to issue a public statement of support for transgender rights. Fox Fisher, Drew Davies and Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir said they could no longer work with the Blair Partnership, the London-based agency that represents all aspects of the Harry […]
You can go a long way in 97 years, and Elsa Joubert did. Born in Paarl in 1922, Joubert grew up in an orthodox Afrikaner family, and at first embraced their beliefs. In fact in her early years she felt her father was not sufficiently committed to the Afrikaner cause. In 1938, when Afrikaners celebrated […]
We, as Africans, were quite amused yet sympathetic to the fervour and serious antics of the Black Power movement on the campuses of American universities; as Black student leaders openly proclaimed at rallies on campus that their flat noses, thick lips, nappy kinky hair and black skin, were all collectively beautiful! These gestures were well-calculated […]
