Cover Story

How a young priest from Onitsha, Nigeria, became the highest-ranking African and Black official of the Roman Catholic Church, and a storied icon of modern apostolicism.

The widest-read contemporary Sudanese writer is retrieving from history the stolen spaces of her country’s women, and bringing nuance to an image of Islam. In a time of war, her fiction expands a national consciousness.

Since she erupted in The Meeting, playing against type as a hilariously antagonistic receptionist, the superstar has embodied complex women, including a soldier’s wife in ’76 and a bewitching singer in La Femme Anjola. Now, 25 years into her career, she is Nollywood’s most critically acclaimed actor, and Open Country Mag‘s first film cover star. Where does she draw from to inhabit these women?

With Happiness, Like Water and Under the Udala Trees, she helped herald LGBTQ visibility in Nigerian literature. With Harry Sylvester Bird, she still isn’t looking to satisfy society. “I think, sometimes, it takes time for people to digest what literature is really doing,” the literary icon says.

Originally planned for December 2021, to mark our first anniversary, our in-depth special issue profiles 16 African writers and curators who have impacted, disrupted, reshaped, and even created literary culture in the last five years.

How the South African naturalist, a prodigy, innovated major work on masculinity, race, memory, and time—and then, at the tip of his 40-year career, came the Booker Prize.

Her second novel, the monumental Half of a Yellow Sun, was a major step in her singular cultural exceptionality. Fifteen years on, in Open Country Mag’s first sit-down interview, the great writer and careful thinker looks back, reckoning with her private losses and public evolution.

The great writer, street photographer, and art historian’s enquiries lured him onto a solo path in contemporary literature—a completely new terrain for an African writer. Ten years after his debut novel, Open City, he still seeks artistic freedom.

In her novels, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Shadow King, she explored the Ethiopian Revolution and the Italo-Abyssinian War. Now, with Project 3541, she is building a photography archive.

Her debut novel, Nervous Conditions, is a modern classic, and after The Book of Not, she concludes Tambu’s story with the Booker Prize-shortlisted This Mournable Body. But the literary and film icon never planned for these to take almost four decades.