How Wole Soyinka Inherited the Drama of the Gods — and Shadowed the Nigerian Tragedy Since the 1950s, the Nobel laureate has worked in rebellion, carving out a complex, fecund torque of an oeuvre. But as his plays of mythic vigor and Yoruba impulse revitalized Anglophone theatre, raising an art form to ritualistic heights, his force of personality kept him in the political arena, a close witness of an African affliction. Few artists have lived like him. Yet at 91, carrying the mantle of “greatest living writer,” he has one more great battle on his hands — with generations who once deified him. opencountrymag.com/wole-soyi…

“I had lofty goals,” Lotanna Igwe-Odunze tells me on Zoom, about the time, 12 years ago, when she decided to create an indigenous writing script, Ńdébé, for the Igbo language. It was the end of 2008 and she was 19, attending Canisius College, a private Jesuit university in Buffalo, New York, whose international student population was mostly Nigerian and Japanese. “I was living in the dorm with a ton of Japanese people and I casually observed their culture,” she recalls. “I thought it was elegant how they wrote. I thought, ‘How come we don’t have our own writing system?’ Most Africans who write African languages do not write it in a script that originated from their culture; we use the Latin script.” A script is an emblem of cultural memory, which is why the Latin script immerses us in Western power and the Arabic script reminds us of Islamic civilization, which is why Ethiopia, one of Africa’s two uncolonized countries, has used the Ge’ez script since 500 B.C., the only indigenous African script in use at a national level. (Of the four original writing systems — the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican — none came from Europe.) Across Africa, there is a tradition of indigenous inventors challenging the Latin script’s centrality. For the Igbo language in Nigeria, there was Nwagu Aneke, a presumed unlettered but influential landowner and diviner in Umuleri, present-day Anambra State, who, in 1960, on the eve of Independence from Britain, announced that the spirits had taught him a new writing system. His invention was a syllabary — a system in which all sounds in a language are represented as combined characters — and he wrote in it, as documented by Chukwuma Azuonye, sharing anti-colonial messages and re-asserting the superiority of African cosmologies in over 100 books. opencountrymag.com/folio-nig…

For five days this December, a hand-built clay city will rise in Abuja, creating an immersive setting where visitors can encounter Nigeria’s cultural heritage not as separate traditions, but as chapters of one shared story. Carnival of Stories (@Carnivalofstrs), a new cultural festival, will take place from December 1–5, 2026, under the theme “This Is Nigeria: Chapter By Chapter.” Created by JT Agency, the festival brings together architecture, history, art, and traditional practices in a physical environment designed to let visitors walk through and experience Nigeria's cultural memory. At the heart of the festival is a city of clay, built by hand. Earth has long been used as a building material across Nigeria, and research shows that, when locally sourced and properly designed, it can have low embodied energy and help regulate indoor temperatures. At a time when construction faces growing environmental pressures, these old methods offer useful lessons for how we build today. Carnival of Stories returns to this knowledge not as a recreation of the past, but as a living practice: making, building and passing it on. The city is designed around the idea that Nigeria’s story has rarely been experienced as one continuous narrative. Instead, its traditions and histories are often encountered separately, shaped by region, generation, community and circumstance. Carnival of Stories reframes that diversity as a collection of chapters, each distinct in its identity but connected to a larger Nigerian story. “With JT Agency, we have never been interested in simply telling Nigerian stories in the conventional way,” said Bayo Omoboriowo (@BayoOmoboriowo), CEO, JT Agency, Executive Producer and Lead Curator, Carnival of Stories. “We keep asking: what else can this story become? How else can it be told? Carnival of Stories is an extension of that thinking, building a clay city where our stories can leave the frame, become physical and immersive, and give people a new way to experience Nigeria.” Adeorike Aderibigbe (@aderibi) the Creative Director & project lead, Carnival of Stories, said the festival is as much a statement of identity as it is a physical experience. “Nigerian creativity has always been world-class, you see it in our craftsmanship, in our visual language, in the way our art travels and is recognised far beyond our borders. But what makes us extraordinary isn't just the talent, it is the range of it. We are not one story told one way; we are hundreds of expressions of the same spirit. Carnival of Stories exists to hold that range in one space, to show that our diversity isn't something we manage or explain away, it is the very thing that makes our identity so rich”.

Congratulations to Nigeria’s U-17 women’s national team, the Flamingos, on winning the 2026 FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup (@FIFAWWC) by defeating Japan 2-1 in the final in Rabat, Morocco. This is Nigeria’s first-ever title in the history of the competition. #TheFlamingos #WomenLeague #SuperFalcons #WWC

Teju Cole’s (@tejucole) difference is a major subplot in a distinctive career. The reporter Matthew Kassel contrasted him with contemporary immigrant writers, like the Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri and the Russian American Gary Shteyngart, who “put questions of identity front and center.” Teju, Kassel notes, “is harder to pin down; he revels in ambiguity.” Former Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch summed him up: “It’s not like he’s placeless, but he’s creating a new space for himself, a space that isn’t already inhabited by a lot of other writers — other voices.” It is a meticulously crafted space that now includes Known and Strange Things, a mellifluous cruise through literature, film, music, photography, travel, history, and politics. It is the book that cemented his reputation as a major essayist, for whom, writes The Boston Globe, “there’s almost no subject [he] can’t come at from a startling angle.” Since the three books of prose, Teju has recalibrated his space, with three more books that meld text and images: 2017’s Blind Spot; 2019’s Human Archipelago, a collaboration with the photographer Fazal Sheikh; and, last year, Fernweh. His books are voyages of curiosity rendered unconstrained. They are versatile lunges of enquiry, Method in manner and seamless in reach. His prime power as a fiction writer is his unity of ideas and character, and his appeal as an essayist is in his marriage of sophistication and accessibility; all blend in his painterly prose. It is an oeuvre in constant reinvention, releasing him, like a canary determined to flex its voice, to bask beyond the boxes that non-white writers are placed in. Read our cover story, “The Worldly Ways of Teju Cole,” on our website. opencountrymag.com/cover-sto…

In this piece, we look at the great writer’s continued relevance. By engaging his work more as a chronicle of oppression, one sees Chinua Achebe as a modern voice who still has so much to say. Click on the link below to read the full essay by Emmanuel Esomnofu (@esomnofu_e): opencountrymag.com/the-niger…

By engaging his work more as a chronicle of oppression, one sees Chinua Achebe as a modern voice who still has so much to say.

The advocating writers, including Tsitsi Dangarembga, J.M. Coetzee, Olga Tokarczuk, Ben Okri, Yann Martel, Rohinton Mistry, Anthony Doerr, Colm Tóibín, and Kamila Shamsie, signed an open letter to President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea.

As Series Editors of Global Black Writers in Translation, Vanessa K. Valdés, Anette Joseph-Gabriel, and Nathan H. Dize know that “Black literature is the least translated.”

Northern Nigeria has a radicalisation problem that needs to be addressed. From videos of children being indoctrinated with hate to the assassination of a man who preaches peaceful coexistence, this subject is too broad for a one-page newspaper column, but it cannot go unaddressed, so I addressed it. dailytrust.com/northern-nige…

Saraba Magazine (@Sarabamag) is pleased to announce that Shammah Godoz (@shaanigami) has been awarded the inaugural Saraba Editorial Fellowship for 2026/2027. This is a one-year fellowship offered to a promising contributor who has been published in our magazine and has attended one of the Saraba Manuscript Project editorial training sessions. As an editorial fellow, Shammah will be involved in the day-to-day operations of the magazine, which include reading submissions and selecting work for the magazine, copyediting and proofreading, as well as contributing to the initiatives we shall be introducing during the fellowship year. The fellow will also receive editorial training, mentorship and the support they need to build their editorial skills, one of which would include free access to all our editorial workshops run under the Saraba Manuscript Project. Shammah Godoz: “It is a dream come true. To receive editorial training from an institution as revered as the Saraba Magazine and that a literary magazine on the continent is what gives this instruction to me. It is also a giant step for everyone involved. I hope to gain on all the skills, the know-hows behind running a literary magazine, the deeper level experience behind the literature on the continent, but most importantly, I hope to learn more ways in which our literary infrastructure can be built and strengthened on the African continent.” This fellowship forms part of Saraba’s renewed publishing programme following the magazine’s revival, with new work, editorial projects and opportunities for writers and editors to be announced in the coming months. About Shammah Godoz Shammah Godoz is a creative writer and fiction editor. He currently runs The Leopard House Collective, The Book Replay, serves as the producer and host for COAL’s Between The Lines Series, as well as the Khard and Kulture podcast, which focuses on exploring literature from the African continent and beyond. Shammah is also a Lolwe Fiction Workshop alumnus. He has worked across marketing, communications, design and film and finds a lot of peace in cooking and putting brush to canvas.

Remy Ngamije (@remythequill) Faces the New Age of Namibian Literature The editor of Doek! (@doeklitmag), author of “The Eternal Audience of One,” and Commonwealth Prize winner is leading a charge to place his country on the literary map. s a child, Remy Ngamije got low scores in writing tests at school—5/10s, 1/5s. On the margins of his notebooks, his teachers scribbled in red: Remy does not have an imagination. “It’s not that I had no imagination,” he said on our Zoom call in late November, “it’s just that I was poor.” He was six then and still learning English. His lower middleclass family had just moved to Namibia from Kenya, where they had moved to from Rwanda, where he was born. “There was a very big pressure on my siblings and I to learn this language,” he recalled, “to write as well as we could in it, to gain a foothold in our education, which was always being disrupted with movement. I figured out that this thing could be used not only to express yourself, it could also be used to defend yourself. Being bullied was a linguistic thing for us, but as soon as you could speak this language and you could defend yourself, then you could diss somebody, you could talk back on the playfield.” His parents took him and his siblings to the public library on Saturday mornings and picked them in the afternoons. With learning came leisure and with leisure curiosity. In second grade, his teachers asked for more assignments, mostly essays on how the pupils spent their weekends. Ngamije had nothing new to add to previous essays: his weekends were the same because his family, like most poor families, did nothing exciting—he cleaned the house, went grocery shopping with his dad or mom, went to the library. His essays were repetitive, so his teacher wrote: Remy needs to cultivate an imagination. Being competitive, he felt discouraged. He was improving his writing but his teachers were searching for storytelling. One weekend, he decided to lie in his essay, and began writing things he did not do, things his family lacked money to do. He was shocked when his teacher scored him 9/10. Later, he convinced himself that he wasn’t lying: the essays were creative expression and he had just discovered how to exercise it. As the years passed, he took that moment as when his attitude changed, and he applied it in his understanding of literature. Continue reading: opencountrymag.com/remy-ngam…

Introduction to 20.35 Africa Volume IX: “Sit with Their Grief . . . Reconcile with the Devastation” The poems in 20.35 Africa Volume IX, guest-edited by Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie and Antony Fangary, “remind us that the suffering in the world is inflicted by us, on us,” but also “that the thick layered air of exhaustion has not rid us of our . . . dreams.” Off the page, different concerns plague our livelihood. Sometimes, they present as ordinary and inconsequential, and other times, as global and moral. All of these are nonetheless existential. They shape our being, the way we navigate and make meaning of the world. Writers go to the page to tell the troubled stories that animate their ways into their lives, countries, and continents. These poets in 20.35 Africa Volume IX show the range of the existential crises faced in the world they live in, and they paint all the filth, beauty, and joy of it. Star Zahra’s “Soot” opens the anthology with these lines: “When I close my eyes to the pleasuring / sound of rain drops dancing on the tin roof, / A child closes theirs / to soot.” — a poem that reconciles beauty and privilege with the suffering around us. It is arranged like a wall galleried with paintings, and while three of the five frames capture the simple pleasures of life, they are interrupted with differences from places and people who can’t have those pleasures. It begs the questions: Who gets to experience the beauty of living and who doesn’t? What’s the cost of this disparity? Soot? This dark aftermath of burning and its threat to life recurs throughout this volume. Joemario Umana writes in “What the Road Refuses to Name” of a burnt vehicle by the roadside “crow-coloured and smoking, opens a door of fear / inside my body, how its windows reflect the half-moons / of men running from a country that keeps swallowing its own breath.” He confronts how a country’s failure has led to the constant death, kidnapping, and terrorizing of its citizens. Each line grapples with the danger of being in a place that refuses you the refuge of home, and the anxiety that comes with looking for death in everything. His other poem, “Sunflowers at the Mouth of a Closed Door,” contends with a similar struggle, the freedom and dreams of people stifled and hope gradually lost: “I do not know / how to stay loyal to a wound that keeps opening / its mouth… / Even heaven seems to be rationing light.” This juxtaposition of the bodily and place, and the doubt of “I do not know,” hold the poem’s core reality and the writer’s relationship with his country Nigeria. This anthology is concerned with the body, the land, the harm and damage done to their soft expressions of life. In a time when the machine and industrial complex numb our relationship to the body and the earth, how do we as writers respond to the spiritual disconnection that ensues? Read more: opencountrymag.com/introduct…

Cardinal Francis Arinze, the most senior African and Black cardinal, was papabile, a candidate for the Papacy: he was, for some bookmakers, the favourite. Read the story of 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 here: opencountrymag.com/cover-sto…

Name Redacted (@NameRedactedPod) is among the five recipients of the inaugural Open Country Mag Curatorial Fellowship, sponsored by Africa No Filter. Their proposal was to record Season 2 of One Foot in the Closet, a podcast on LGBTQI+ experiences. The initiative supported One Foot in the Closet with $1,000 and mentorship by Open Country Mag editor Otosirieze (@Otosirieze), Lumen Prize winning artist Minne Atairu, and A Nasty Boy founder Innanoshe Akuson (@InnanosheA). Name Redacted is a queer, polygender East African podcaster. They are the creator and host of One Foot in the Closet. Season 1 of the podcast was funded by a Queering Encounters in African Feminisms Grant from The House of African Feminisms, a project by the Goethe-Institut Kigali, Goethe-Institut Lagos, and Goethe-Institut Johannesburg. The first two episodes of Season 2, “Angry Baby” and “Mugarura: Part 1,” appear at the end of this interview. Read here: opencountrymag.com/a-podcast…

The organization (@Tech4HerAfrica) is taking a multi-sectoral approach with timeline-based goals. Its Girls Slay Code Academy, started in 2017, aims to launch 10,000 female developers by 2025. Read more: opencountrymag.com/folio-nig…

Adedayo Agarau (@adedayoagarau) pushed back against the idea that writing produced outside Nigeria was less Nigerian. “You know, I always say that when someone is writing about living in the U.S. or in Los Angeles, they are writing that experience as a Black man, as someone with different roots. So the poetry is very Nigerian, because that is where it’s coming from.” His first chapbook, "For Boys Who Went," published in 2016, echoes the inherited burdens of masculinity, the violences boys learn to carry early on. In the then small but growing Nigerian online poetry scene, it became one of the most-read chapbooks, with over a thousand downloads on Arthorpedia, a platform owned by Kukogho Iruesiri Samson, who was also responsible for launching several other notable poetry careers. “I became that guy,” he chuckled, “the one who would write a poem, and suddenly everyone was writing their own version with the same title.” His uncles, uninterested in literature, began calling him For Boys Who Went. Read more: opencountrymag.com/what-aded…

OPPORTUNITY FOR WRITERS!📣 The Sabi Arts Playwrights Prize (@sabiartsprize) is an annual award for Nigerian playwrights aged 18 and above, residing in Nigeria or the diaspora. The prize is open to original, previously unpublished, and unproduced plays. The inaugural edition features a total cash prize pool of ₦1,400,000 alongside residency, production, and publication opportunities structured into three winning categories. -TIMELINE & SELECTION PROCESS- Submissions Window: 1st October 2026-20th December 2026 Longlist Announcement: 31st January 2027 Shortlist Announcement: 28th February 2027 Winners Announcement: 31st March 2027 Eligible entries will undergo a three-stage blind review process: 1. An initial reading stage by an anonymous readers’ group to determine the longlist. 2. A second reading stage to select the shortlist. 3. Final jury deliberations to determine the winners. The inaugural jury consists of renowned theatre and literary practitioners across dramatic writing, directing, production, and artistic leadership, including Farah Lawal Harris, Kelvin Mary Ndukwe, Rufus Nwoko, and Kesiena C. Obue.

Working behind the scenes has not made Hakeem "Effects" Onilogbo (@Hakeem_effect) a self-effacing artist. He speaks declaratively, without irony. His speech is halting, punctuated with little pauses, fillers, and drags, the phrases and clauses often ending in a rising tone, loud and assured. “I can readily say I’m the one that changed special effects in the whole of West Africa,” he said in our first interview on Google Meet. I weighed the claim in my head, tempted to ask for elaboration, but also conscious to not disrupt his train of thought. I reached out on Instagram days later and he sent a confirmatory voice note. “Not just in Nigeria, but West Africa,” he repeated. “Because the way special effects were being done [in the past] is so different from [the way it now is since] when I stepped in. Kudos to the legends that took the baton to that stage before handing it over to me. [But] ever since I started doing special effects, everything [has] changed. People, they had not been doing prosthetics; I am the one that started it. The pyrotechnics — using elements of fire, explosions, and all that — Hakeem Effects started it. [And] a whole lot of things, realistic make-up. So I’m the one that transformed the face [of SFX] before people now started watching what I’ve done, building on the foundation.” Read more: opencountrymag.com/hakeem-ef…

Between Aisha Ahmad and horses, it was love at first sight. At the Kaduna Polo Club, where she had gone with friends to watch a tournament for the first time, she was fascinated by the animals. She knew immediately, as she watched the horse-riders gallop in their helmets and boots, chasing the ball around, that she wanted to work with the horses, to be a polo player. Read more: opencountrymag.com/folio-nig…