Reflections of a Maverick Citizen...
Watching Courage Grow Quiet
I was listening to the World Service last Tuesday when news of The Gambia’s case at the International Court of
4 Minute
Book Reviews
Ghosts of the Delta: On Chimeka Garricks’ Tomorrow Died Yesterday
There are novels that demand your attention with fireworks; plot twists, pyrotechnic prose, unrelenting spectacle. Tomorrow Died Yesterday is not
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Faith in a Minor Key: Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom
There is a quiet tension at the heart of Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, that never quite resolves, a
6 Minute
Book Reviews
Dancing Between Worlds: On Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds
There’s a moment early in Small Worlds when Stephen, the book’s young narrator, steps into a dance circle at a
5 Minute
Book Reviews
A Room Full of Mirrors: Re-reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
There is a certain kind of silence that follows a book like Giovanni’s Room. It’s the silence that comes after
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Lineages of Silence and Speech: On Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones
In Ancestor Stones, Aminatta Forna constructs a memory palace from the scattered fragments of West African womanhood, opening its doors
6 Minute
Book Reviews
The Mirror and the Machete: Reading Our Sister Killjoy in a Fractured World
To read Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint today, nearly five decades after its
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Waking While Black: On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count
In Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest offering, the Nigerian writer returns with the precise, humane intelligence that has defined
5 Minute
Book Reviews
In Between Lives: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Tender Study of Identity and Belonging
The Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri has made a quiet career of charting the interior landscapes of displacement. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning
5 Minute
Entertainment
On the Roads We Carry: Kojo Cue, and the Quiet Art of Becoming
There are albums that set out to impress, to announce themselves loudly in the marketplace of sound. And then there
8 Minute
Entertainment
Kweku Smoke: The Quiet Walk Forward
Walk With Me is different. Smoke is alone here not lonely, but in that quiet state where you become the
6 Minute
Book Reviews
Murder, Motives, and Modern Ghana: Kwei Quartey’s Death at the Voyager Hotel
In the swelling tide of African crime fiction, few writers have staked their claim as confidently as Kwei Quartey. With
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Even When Your Voice Shakes and the Quiet Rebellion of a Ghanaian Girlhood
In Ruby Yayra Goka’s Even When Your Voice Shakes, a young Ghanaian girl finds her voice in a world designed
5 Minute
Book Reviews
Fine Boys by Eghosa Imasuen:The Unflinching Portrait of Nigerian Youth and the Pursuit of Identity
At the heart of Eghosa Imasuen’s Fine Boys lies a burning question: what does it mean to be young in
11 Minute
Book Reviews
The Mirror and the Myth: On Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black
There are certain books you stumble on at just the right time when you’ve grown weary of polite optimism, when
9 Minute