Open Country Mag : Africa : Books, Film and TV, Culture

Books

How Wole Soyinka Inherited the Drama of the Gods — and Shadowed the Nigerian Tragedy

Since the 1950s, the Nobel laureate has worked in rebellion, carving out a complex, fecund torque of an oeuvre. But as his plays of mythic vigor and Yoruba impulse revitalized Anglophone theatre, raising an art form to ritualistic heights, his force of personality kept him in the political arena, a close witness of an African affliction. Few artists have lived like him. Yet at 91, carrying the mantle of “greatest living writer,” he has one more great battle on his hands — with generations who once deified him.

Otosirieze

“Little Did We Know”: How uHlanga Press Disrupted South African Poetry

Nick Mulgrew started a publishing outfit to bring “dismissed or ignored” voices to print. Ten years later, it has landed notable prizes, invested in indigenous languages, and grown a dedicated readership.

Iheoma Uzomba

Ikenna Okeh’s Quest for Authenticity

To tell their stories, the author of Yahoo! Yahoo! imitates his characters. If he writes about scammers, he wants readers to suspect him of scamming. Why should Nigerian literature not be as relatable as its music? And why, as director of the Puebla International Literature Festival, should he not want writers to take an ethical stand?

Victor Ebubechukwu Orji

In Great Grief, Mubanga Kalimamukwento Saw Her Country

As a child, no one told the writer and attorney how her family died. She has since compressed her resilience into acclaimed novels, nonfiction, poetry, and Ubwali, a magazine shaping Zambian literature.

Paula Willie-Okafor

New Writing & Excerpts

“Where Language Is Asked to Withstand Pressure”

For our fifth annual 60 Notable Books of the Year list, we invited the literary culture critic Tolu Daniel as guest curator, to make 45 picks. He surveys “a prose landscape in search of quieter, more patient forms,” poetry “less a lyric refuge than a site of confrontation,” and “a shift towards visibility culture” where “books now circulate as events, images, and metrics long before they are encountered as texts.”

Tolu Daniel

Introduction to 20.35 Africa Vol. VIII: “The Desired and the Divine”

Of the eighth volume guest-edited by Sarah Lubala and Logan February, managing editor Precious Okpechi writes: “The way we express joy, the way our longings fold out of our skin, is skewed by the weight of customs.”

Precious Okpechi

“The Ahistorical Racial Polemic of Conclave”

Politicking and ideological clashes take centre stage in Edward Berger’s papal succession drama Conclave, a frontrunner for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. But it is in the arc of its African cardinal that the film sets a damaging narrative.

Otosirieze

Introduction to 20.35 Africa Vol. VII: “This Grasping for Hope Walks with Us”

20.35 Africa Vol. VII, guest-edited by Kwame Opoku-Duku, is introduced by managing editor Precious Okpechi: “A sense of belonging permeates the poems in this anthology, an acceptance of one’s place in a flawed world.”

20.35 Africa

Book Reviews

The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura

Tierno Monénembo

Rated 4 out of 5

Dream Count

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Rated 5 out of 5

This Motherless Land

Nikki May

Rated 3.5 out of 5

When We Were Fireflies

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

Rated 3.7 out of 5

I Am Still with You

Emmanuel Iduma

Rated 3 out of 5

Imagination’s Many Rooms

Amatoritsero Ede

Rated 2.5 out of 5

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The Stone Breakers

Emmanuel Dongala

In the fifth novel by Dongala, a major figure in Francophone African literature, Congolese women, working as stone crushers at a gravel pit, demand higher wages.

Ghost Season

Fatin Abbas

This sweeping tale of the breakup of Sudan explores the porous and perilous nature of borders ― national, ethnic, or religious ― and the profound consequences of crossing them.

Gaslight

Femi Kayode

The second novel in a mystery series following investigator Taiwo Philips, who tries to crack a conspiracy around a religious leader accused of murder.

Whites Can Dance Too

Kalaf Epalanga

A reflection on and celebration of Angolan music, the intertwining of cultural roots, freedom, and love.

Film & TV

Taiwo Egunjobi’s Cinema of the Trapped

In grave dramas of styled minimalism, the Ibadan-born director constructs harsh worlds of dangerous dreams, in which characters are caught up in greed and violence.

Victor Ebubechukwu Orji

His Style Is Symbolist: “Afro Contemporary Symbolism”

Grief led Uwana Anthony to make his short film Everything Must End. His style is “a movement and a cause for change in our approach to pursuing knowledge.”

Victor Ebubechukwu Orji

She Makes Humane and Horror Shorts

As founder of the Africa International Horror Film Festival (AIHFF), the first such platform in West Africa and second in the continent, Nneoha Ann Aligwe believes that the genre “allows us to confront” the “darkness within us.” And courage matters to her, hence her documentary Born Different.

Victor Ebubechukwu Orji

In His Short Films, the Drama Is in the Mundane

Guided by his “Igbo awakening,” Dika Ofoma sets his brief features — God’s Wife, A Quiet Monday, and A Japa Tale, among them — in southeastern Nigeria, with characters, often women, whose day-to-day lives, he argues, are “interesting enough.”