While the recent viral #EndSARS in Nigeria may have been successful, the issues it raises impel us to rethink the famous motto of the Nigerian Police, The Police is Your Friend. For those who did not notice, #EndSARS was a citizen-led social media campaign against police brutality and violence in…

Nigerian Pentecostalism is currently witnessing the surveilling and disciplinary gaze of the netizen. This has not always been the case in a country that has been rightly described as a Pentecostal Republic by the Nigerian sociologist, Ebenezer Obadare. The wide-reaching colonization of everyday life in the country by the forces…

The Federal government appears to see that being complacent in the wake of a pandemic can potentially bring tragic consequences. By eventually ordering the closure of all public schools and universities just days after closing its borders to some of the epicentres of the virus, the government did what many…

In Mike Ezuruonye’s Lagos Real Fake Life, we encounter postcolonial urban Lagos as simulacrum, presented with an oxymoronic pastiche of the real and the fake simultaneously enacted as the defining attributes of everyday life in Nigeria’s megacity. …

About noon they arrived to its scorching welcome, A Sahara of arid wind unfurling before them. There the sun radiated proudly, burning their skin with the touch of its beams, unwanted companions. One of the travellers trudged wearily through shifting sands avoiding a fall on prying Cacti calling out with colourful pokes. Another steadied a backpack drenched with dust Blowing haze and fears from miles afar.

A Box Full of Darkness: The Language of Trauma in Jumoke Verissimo’s Debut Novel Through her narrative of trauma, Nigerian poet offers a debut novel that presents readers with a paradox: how darkness can both heal and enslave the mind. Jumoke Verissimo’s first novel has it all — poetic language…

Although his The Wayfarer and Other Poems appear to have aged very quickly, Pius Adesanmi’s poetry collection remains an important cultural document signifying a literary response to the ambiguities of oppressive power during military rule in Nigeria. There is the possibility of reading The Wayfarer and Other Poems as a…

Ebenezer Obadare’s Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism’s unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation…

I realized recently that the Nigerian academic Oga culture, that punitive style of scholarly mentorship which forbids student thought and agency, has a diaspora version conditioned by the malaise of essentialism. …