Features

The $6,000 initiative, sponsored by Africa No Filter, will fund and support five projects representing West, East, and Southern Africa: a musical and art exhibition, 3D fashion and storytelling, a mixed media project on Nok terracotta, a podcast on LGBTQI+ issues, and a documentary on Nollywood.

The manuscript in progress has been acquired by Scribner in the US and W&N in the UK.

In Between Starshine and Clay, the novelist interviews Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and Wole Soyinka, among other major Black figures in the arts and politics. “One of the things that was the most surprising was the actual extent to which they forged their own path,” she said.

In two acclaimed and bestselling novels, the British Ghanaian writer and photographer has enlarged his terrain from love and art to family and memory. “I wanted to take my sentences past this thing of knowledge and more toward feeling,” he said. “It feels like a progression in the questions I’m asking, specifically around identity and Blackness, but, really, around love.”

How to Write About Africa gathers vivid, powerful essays and fiction by the late Kenyan icon. Its editor Achal Prabhala talks compiling it, a second posthumous book, and an uncompleted novel. “Much is made of what he did for other writers, but it was his own writing that did it for me,” he said.

As the first published African female playwright and Ghana’s former Minister of Education, the author of No Sweetness Here and Our Sister Killjoy was admired by Chimamanda Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and popstar Burna Boy. “The decay of Africa’s social, political, and economic systems is directly related to the complete marginalization of women,” she once said.

Chidi Mokeme and Nse Ikpe-Etim were snubbed in a near shut-out of Netflix series Shanty Town, with Tobi Bakre scooping a shock Best Drama Actor victory as Brotherhood swept its categories. Perennial Best Comedy Actress champ Funke Akindele also lost for the first time in five years while Anikulapo won Best Overall Movie.

Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, the actress’ debut collection of stories, sold over 2,200 copies, assuring it the No. 1 spot on The Rovingheights Bestseller List: Presented with Open Country Mag. So why do these stories of failing romance connect so widely?

Alhaji Waziri Oshomah fused Highlife, local folk styles, and Western pop into songs of positivity in Auchi, Nigeria. When New York label Luaka Bop released The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah in its World Spirituality Classics series last year, we spoke to musician and label about his artistry.

It is the second novel and ninth book by the great writer who appeared on the cover of Open Country Mag. Random House describes it as “a startling work of realism and invention.”

Ahead of its release in Nigeria, the collection about gay men just won the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for the US and Canada: a highlight in a series of recognition from the Kirkus Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Story Prize, and the Lambda Awards.

In the 2000s, she was only another superstar in Nollywood. Now she is the most nominated actress in the histories of both the AMAAs and the AMVCAs, the industry’s two biggest awards. For Open Country Mag’s first film cover, we look into her reinvention from stage to screen, 25 years after she emerged on the scene.

As Paramount’s Country Director for Nigeria, Bada Akintunde-Johnson wants to model a new mode of business and creative leadership. “You can’t exert the highest possible positive influence on people without connecting with them on a deep personal level,” he said in this extensive interview — the first in our Leaders of Industries Series.

In this excerpt from Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s Between Starshine and Clay, the Nobel laureate and his friend Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remember another friend: the late Toni Morrison.

Before his manuscript won the 2022 Sillerman Prize, Tares Oburumu faced seemingly interminable hardship in his personal life. “The act of survival, for me, is a lot more inspirational than anything,” he said, “trying to put yourself in a place where there’s no place for you.”

The fantasy revenge thriller is Nigeria’s first indigenously produced film to go to Sundance, a first it already notched at Venice. “We tapped into something beyond us while making this one,” said producer Oge Obasi. “Hopefully, that opens more doors for Nigerian filmmakers,” said director C.J. Obasi.

Created by Didier Lacoste and Joy Fleury, with screenplay by Ukamaka Olisakwe, Adachioma Ezeano, and Jude Idada, it will focus on the two Franco-Dahomean Wars of 1890-94. The story, said Olisakwe, looks at “how this impacted lives and the Kingdom’s long rivalry with its neighbors.”

Seminal storyteller of queer love, satirist of race, literary icon.

Pearl of the Sea and KARIBA started as animation but ended as graphic novels—the former the first by Triggerfish Studios. Graphic novels are a “three-dimensional experience of literature,” said their publisher, Catalyst Press’ Jessica Powers. “Maybe we’re on the cusp of a trend across the African continent.”

The enigmatic American-Somali novelist, poet, and academic on her new memoir The White Mosque, literary hybridity, and the “dystopian hypocrisy” of social media.