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

Books

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Great Kenyan Writer Who Centred African Languages, Dies at 87

The novelist, playwright, and theorist left a blistering legacy. He was, with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, regarded as part of an unofficial trinity: the continent’s greatest pioneering writers.

32 Books in 63 Years: Your Guide to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Body of Work

The late great Kenyan writer produced full-length work in all genres except poetry, capturing the tensions between colonizer and colonized, orality and literacy, and tradition and modernity.

JK Anowe, a Confessional Poet, Confronts Himself

Working from fragments, the reclusive poet led a wave of young Nigerian voices situating the self and mental states. Now his “schizo poetry” is evolving, drawing from Igbo cosmology.

The Rovingheights Bestseller List 2024: Presented with Open Country Mag

Releasing the third annual compilation of the only bestseller list in Nigerian literature: comprising the Top 100 books of the year, alongside the Top 50 in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, self-published, and children’s books.

Otosirieze

New Writing & Excerpts

“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

“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

“Thinking Through Tremor”

Morality as an uncanny city in Teju Cole’s second novel: “And if we are to think of music as a sort of shield for him, then we are invited to think of his dead friend as having once played that same role in his life.”

Reyumeh Ejue

“‘Our Literature Has Died Again’: Nigerian Writing in the Era of the Nomadists”

As conversations sethe about the “death” of Nigerian literature and the loss of authenticity in its poetry, a writer counters for the growing japa-MFA subculture: “I call them the Nomadic Generation because of their complication of nationalism.”

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola

Book Reviews

The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura

Tierno Monénembo

★★★★★ 4/5

Dream Count

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

★★★★★ 5/5

This Motherless Land

Nikki May

★★★★★ 3.5/5

When We Were Fireflies

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

★★★★★ 3.7/5

I Am Still with You

Emmanuel Iduma

★★★★★ 3/5

Imagination’s Many Rooms

Amatoritsero Ede

★★★★★ 2.5/5

Shop

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.”

Victor Ebubechukwu Orji

Film & TV Reviews

A Night in 2005

Temidayo Makanjuola

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Roses and Ivy

Biodun Stephen

★★★★★ 3.5/5

A Green Fever

Taiwo Egunjobi

★★★★★ 4/5

With Difficulty Comes Ease

Akorede Azeez

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti

Bolanle Austin-Peters

★★★★★ 3.5/5

House of Ga'a

Bolanle Austen-Peters

★★★★★ 4.3/5

Streaming

Sarah Masiyiwa & Line Talla

The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah

Alhaji Waziri Oshomah

BBC: The Reich Lecture 2022: The Freedom of Speech

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nsukka Is Burning

Deborah Shorinde

Issues & Covers

Culture & Industries

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Is on the Host Committee for the MET Gala 2025

Her selection — with LeBron James, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour as chairs — coincides with the rollout of her forthcoming fourth novel Dream Count.

Victor Ebubechukwu Orji

Our Top Stories of 2024

From a groundbreaking Profile of Cardinal Arinze to a feature on Liberia’s lack of a literary bookstore, to the story of a novelist-cum-soldier: these stories of artists and industry shapers in African literature, Nollywood, and culture defined our year.