Fiction
Glitches
Mpho watched me through the windows of the sky-blue phone booth outside our school gate. She twirled the handle of an open bright red umbrella to the left, to the right, to the left again and leaned in. “Remember what I said,” she told me, in a low, slow voice, as if to a child. […]
Until I Come Home
I was born Cudjoe, but my father called me Champion. He was away at sea on the Monday I was born. Four weeks later, when he held me for the first time during my Akan naming rites, I did not cry when our elder put his index finger into my mouth and poured cold water […]
Beneath This Skin
Dad said the best way to know what a person is truly made of is to cut them open. Despite being the disciplinarian in our home, he was fair and kind-hearted, unlike some of the aloof men my cousins called father. I used to think my dad was made of starch because his frame reminded […]
Conflict: A Battered Life
“Mawu! Run!” “Run fast, Mawu!” “Faster!” Ladan, Mawu’s best friend, shouted impatiently while holding out his hand to pull Mawu onto the rickety old truck meant for transporting animals. This was their only chance to escape and leave this godforsaken place. The scorching savannah sun blurred Mawu’s vision as he ran. The land was as […]
Aunty Joyce
“Pack and go! Pack and go!” The man in the house next door was shouting at his wife — the third time this week — and she rattled back profanities in high pitched Bemba. The first time we heard it, I was with my sister, Nomsa, and we’d giggled nonstop. Dad, after hearing what had […]
Nonfiction
Hot Girls in Cape Town
December in Cape Town rubs me up the wrong way. The tourists. The traffic. The tourists in traffic. I hate everyone and everything, but it’s the heat that really rattles my nerves. While my sweaty thighs chafe, high fiving each other to make me look like I peed myself, my brain can’t seem to get enough […]
The Things That Survive Death
I looked into the mirror and saw my twin sister’s ghost dancing on my face four months after she died. We didn’t share a face, but I could see her in mine, she could see me in hers. I’d taught my eyes to focus on anything but the reflection staring back in mirrors. That day, I was careless.
This Is How We Grieve
1. Homecoming On the day I arrived home from the hospital with my daughter, I went straight to my grandfather’s bedroom. I waddled through the door, supporting myself with its wooden frames towards the nearest chair in the room; my body still reeled with pain from the episiotomy. He was sleeping but he stirred when I […]
Every Day is for the Thief: On Meeting Teju Cole
I met him in 2013, with many admirers – new and old, riding on the fame of Open City. Teju Cole speaks to convince. His speech filled with pauses and precise anecdotes. He knows his way around words and understands how to convince and also ease you into his POV. His eloquence and carriage became […]
Scribbling
I remember when Malova ran away from home. It was the only time I ever saw my father cry. He was filling up the bathtub with water for me. I would have a bath early in the evening, after which it was Eric’s turn. My father broke into sobs as the warm steam filled the […]
Looking for Uncle Daniel
Uncle Daniel never came to my mother’s funeral. She died in 1994, long before the mobile phone made its appearance in Nigeria, so word took longer to travel. We had to wait ten days to bury her, as I had to make my way down from Jos, where I was in boarding school. You would […]
Poetry
His Wounds
they still smell fresh. after all these centuries, the odour was still haunting like a dream, it was hatched underneath his understanding. differed. worms penetrating through the idea, ceasing the content of home & pages & chapters & windows. they unlock the spectacle within the frames & prose of its nature. haemophilia. skin and flesh […]
WONDERLANDS
I was born in a place for old men,for boys feasting their way backwards into time.The priest swiftly makes an incisionfrom where he stoops to weave a certain birthmark;in secular seaculorum…I know boys trapped to birthmarks like seagulls to brown waterI know boys turned silenced men, still sutured to the mark of the beastI know […]
Let Me Remove the Log in Your Eye Poem
You live a life of grandeur And enjoy flaunting your sleek coupé, But you forgot the precarious latrine Waiting to be swallowed by a sinkhole at your mother’s; Your mother’s shanty doesn’t smell of roses But a squalid odour, which now perturbs The breath under your nose; You say my sisters are dirty and loose, […]
Origin Myths
I should have guessed I would always take to mourning like religion. I swallowed the loss of my mother’s father inside her womb, death sampling my blood / lumped with absence. My futures bloomed in some prior-ticking heart & I forget this (when it’s my turn to swallow the world) I think it should show […]