In the final week of women’s history month, we are celebrating a writer whose work has inspired us for years. Minna Salami’s debut Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone offers an Africa-centered, woman-centered, and black feminist approach to everything from power to beauty to womanhood to liberation. The book is fresh off the press—out […]
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What We are Reading This Week | A Novel Honoring the Emotional Truth of Women’s Lives
On week three of women’s history month, we are celebrating a novel that centers the emotional truth of a woman’s life. Ayobami Adebayo’s debut novel Stay With Me was quite the rave when it came out in 2018. It received massive shout outs from Margaret Atwood and New York Times royalty Michiko Kakutani. Stay With […]
On Max Siollun’s Nigeria’s Soldiers of Fortune: The Abacha and Obasanjo Years | Ikhide R. Ikheloa
Only three of Nigeria’s living heads of state, current and former, have bothered to write a biography. Given its leaders’ refusal or reluctance to record their stewardship, or to promote the study of history in schools, Nigeria’s history has frequently consisted of urban legends, personal beliefs and rival conspiracy theories that vary depending on the […]
What We Are Reading This Week | A Radical Gospel for Feminist Revolutionaries
It’s week two of women’s history month, and we are celebrating angry feminists! Angry feminists, militant feminists, radical feminists, fire and brimstone feminists, call them what you will. But they are rhetorical warriors. They are writers, thinkers, activists who rudely awaken us from our political slumber to remind us that dismantling the patriarchy is more […]
What We Are Reading This Week | A 17th Century Biography About An African Woman
To kickoff Women’s History Month, we are taking you on a trip through time to the 17th century in the Ethiopian highlands. In 1672, a scribe began documenting the life of Walatta Petros, an African woman who lived from 1592 to 1642 and founded communities of faith in various towns. She was revered as a […]
Book Review | Adedayo Agarau’s The Arrival of Rain | Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera
The opening lines of Adedayo Agarau’s poetry chapbook The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020) goes: “broken every time the door opens/or is banged against your face/you can count your losses/but do you remember my name?” The poem is titled “look how far i’ve come,” and the reader will most likely pause after reading […]
The Artistic Philosophy of Breaking and Becoming in Nnedi Okorafor’s Memoir | Reviews by Ainehi
“Before the incident,” Nnedi Okorafor writes, “I moved about the world with a sense of ease and entitlement.” This was spring 1993 during the early years of her studies in university. She’d hoped to one day become a scientist and an athlete, but spinal fusion surgery left her paralyzed from the waist down. “Quite suddenly […]
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