Bakwa is accepting unpublished fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and photography for its “Woman Issue.” The Nigerian editor Awuli Ojogwu will guest-edit it.
For this issue, they are interested in submissions that interrogate the facets of what it means to be a woman. The theme seeks to “give women the ‘freedom’ to explore, interpret and contextualize the experience of living in their own skins—in their own words.” It asks, “What are the pain points? What are the struggles? What is your joy?”
Bakwa is accepting submissions until January 10, 2022. They welcome writing in English, Pidgin English, and in French. They will pay a token fee of $60 for each accepted piece.
Anwuli Ojogwu, the Managing Director of Narrative Landscape Press and the Executive Director of the Society for Book and Magazine Editors of Nigeria (SBMEN), was profiled in Open Country Mag last year.
She said in Bakwa’s call for submissions, “When Dzekashu asked me to be the guest editor of the ‘Woman Issue,’ I was delighted and perplexed. Delighted because it was an opportunity to showcase the complexity of being a woman and perplexed because of the broadness of the subject.”
“The Woman Issue” is Bakwa’s eleventh since inception. Founded in 2011, the literary magazine is a Cameroon-based pan-African publication. Its approach is “high-end creative writing and creative nonfiction, which is urgent and experimental in nature, while being at the same time a mirror of writing from Cameroon and Africa.” The magazine has been influential in rejuvenating Cameroonian literature.
See submission guidelines here.
