Interviews

Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, author of The Famished Road, and Ghanaian rapper Delasi, with the EP The Audacity of Free Thought, in a deep, rare reflection on storytelling, art forms, and their quests for origins.

Hopping between genres, his scores are heard in almost every major recent box office and streaming success, including A Tribe Called Judah, Jagun Jagun, Gangs of Lagos, and Battle on Buka Street. “I’ve been trusted by filmmakers,” he said.

On his debut album Diary of a Loverboy, the Nigerian singer and actor channels frustration, anger, and love.

Director, producer, and screenplay writer Ebuka Njoku and producer Lorenzo Menakaya on their professional journeys and the making of their Netflix No. 1 hit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Enugu-based hub, whose exhibitions, screenings, and lecture series have drawn 7,000 visitors, is, executive director Iheanyi Igboko says, “grooming a generation of young people who are not only grounded in their history and culture but proud of their Igbo identity.”

“Love is a good point for telling stories because it brings out all the other emotions of pain, happiness, joy, euphoria, and sadness,” she said of the warmly received Ndani TV web series. “And it’s what our audience—a lot of them—want in their lives.”

Collins Okoh, co-writer of the ₦636 million box office juggernaut starring Funke Akindele, tells us about his research of ghetto culture and the need for creative freedom for screenwriters. “I never thought that a gun would be referred to as ‘English’ until I started writing the movie,” he said.

Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba on how their “conversational approach to the book and podcast allows us to reach audiences who wouldn’t typically engage with such content.”

The influential Chinese American novelist on running the famed program, new African writing, MFAs, literary genres, and her novel The Family Chao. “There is the possibility of creating the conversation that brings in as many voices as possible,” she said of the Workshop.

PEN’s 2021 International Writer of Courage shares his story with Open Country Mag.

Africa’s leading crypto artist, who started as a writer, on his two-dimensional collaboration with music producer Don Jazzy, and the potential for literature.

Poda-Poda Stories is a digital platform for writers from Sierra Leone, whose literary scene was disrupted by a decade-long civil war and is now regenerating with great promise. “I started it to look inward and celebrate our own writing,” says editor Ngozi Cole in this interview. “What was missing was building bridges and connections.”

“If we are to make our characters feel human and real, they require our care,” she says of her story “The Street Sweep.”

“Because they haven’t been constrained by the world, their imagination is much more agile,” said the Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, who was on the December 2020 cover of Open Country Mag.

“It’s amazing that any government would put writers like me on a list of enemies of the Nigerian state,” he says. “A writer who calls out corruption could not be an enemy of the state.”