Noname Book Club, the radical political education project launched by Chicago rapper and activist Noname, has expanded its outreach to incarcerated individuals around the world with the development of a new chapter at Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison, one of Nigeria’s most well-known and heavily scrutinized correctional facilities.
This marks the organization’s second prison chapter in Nigeria, with Noname having shared plans for the first prison chapter in Abuja. Abuja and Lagos also have book clubs in non-carceral facilities, bringing the total number of Nigerian chapters to four.
Located in Apapa, Lagos State, Kirikiri Prison is Nigeria’s most infamous prison. Built in 1955 to hold just over 1,000 inmates, the facility has long been plagued by severe overcrowding and is notorious for its harsh living conditions. The Noname Book Club is working to bring education, connection, and collective learning into its walls.
With its inception in 2020, the book club has been sending books, reading guides, and discussion prompts to incarcerated individuals as a way to build community and resist the isolating effects of incarceration. The book club’s efforts focus on those most impacted by the prison industrial complex, centering collective learning as a pathway to collective liberation.
Since April 2021, the Noname Book Club focused on expanding into prisons, sending books to 1,500 incarcerated members. Every other month, incarcerated members receive a new book along with reflective prompts, and the club maintains active correspondence by exchanging letters, highlighting participants’ writing, and sharing their insights at public events and online.
The expansion into Kirikiri is part of the organization’s growing presence on the African continent, with recently established chapters in Accra, Nairobi, Kampala, and Dakar.
“I want to be like the radical McDonald’s, where there’s a little library located in every Black hood. That’s my dream,” Noname told OkayAfrica. The goal is to offer both incarcerated and non-incarcerated people the opportunity to bring radical change to their lives and their social structures.
The monthly selections are all radical books written by Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, aimed at helping people understand and resist the conditions of their oppression. The selections have ranged from seminal works of radical theory such as Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Angela Davis’s Freedom is a Constant Struggle, to classic postcolonial novels like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, to contemporary fiction from the global black diaspora such as Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji and–the June 2025 selection–Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings.
Check out all the Noname Book Club chapters here and follow along on their Instagram as more pop up!
COMMENTS -
Reader Interactions