Love, Loneliness, and the Chaos of Modern Womanhood: On Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad

In Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad, love is a battlefield fought in wigs, WhatsApp messages, and whispered prayers. The stories hum with the energy of Lagos; chaotic, seductive, unforgiving, a city where dreams and heartbreaks share the same Uber ride home. Kuku’s debut collection of short stories pulls no punches. It is loud, funny, brutal, and, at its heart, tender. Each story feels like an overheard conversation on a Sunday afternoon when the laughter comes easily but the pain sits just beneath it.

The women who populate these stories are smart, flawed, and deeply human. They are the kind of women many readers will recognize; women who work, love, endure, and sometimes lose themselves in the process. There’s a lawyer who falls for a man whose charm hides a quiet cruelty. There’s the side chick who refuses to apologize for what she wants. There’s a woman who learns that marriage, for all its promise, can still feel like another kind of loneliness. These are not stories about victims or saints. They are stories about survival, about the ways women build small, private sanctuaries in a world that keeps asking them to shrink.

Kuku writes with a confidence that comes from deep familiarity with her terrain. Lagos, in her hands, is not just a city; it is a character; loud, unpredictable, endlessly performative. Everyone in her stories is pretending to be fine. Pretending to be happy. Pretending not to care. Yet beneath the noise is a longing that feels universal: the desire to be seen, to be loved without conditions. Kuku captures that ache in language that is both colloquial and precise. She moves easily between English, pidgin, and Yoruba-inflected rhythms, and the result is prose that feels alive, like spoken truth dressed in storytelling.

What makes Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad so compelling is its refusal to judge. Kuku’s women are allowed to be messy. They make poor decisions, they stay too long in bad relationships, they lie, they forgive, they rage. But they also laugh loudly, sometimes bitterly, but always with a sense of self-awareness that feels liberating. The humour, often dark, is a form of resistance. It’s how they survive the emotional weight of being female in a culture that tells women to endure quietly.

At its best, Kuku’s writing feels like a mirror held up to modern African womanhood, not the glossy Instagram version, but the real one. The one where independence comes at the cost of intimacy, where success doesn’t always erase loneliness, where “strong woman” is both compliment and curse. In this sense, Kuku joins a growing chorus of young Nigerian women writers, alongside authors like Ore Agbaje-Williams and Damilola Omotoso, who are reshaping the narratives around love, desire, and gender on the continent.

Still, Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad is not without its rough edges. Some stories lean too heavily on their punchlines, their titles doing more emotional work than the plots themselves. A few characters blend into one another, their voices lost in the city’s din. But even when the collection stumbles, it never loses its spark. Each story leaves behind an echo of laughter, or rage, or resignation. And that, perhaps, is Kuku’s greatest triumph: she writes women who linger.

For Ghanaian readers, there is something both foreign and familiar about Kuku’s Lagos. The men might wear different colognes, the traffic might be worse, but the emotional geography is shared. These stories could just as easily unfold in Accra, in Osu’s bars, in Spintex apartments, in church pews filled with women praying for love that won’t destroy them. Kuku’s Lagos is a mirror in which many African women will see themselves reflected, not with shame, but with recognition.

In the end, Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad isn’t just about men. It’s about the women who keep loving in spite of them — who keep choosing hope, even when the odds are stacked against them. It’s a book about heartbreak, but it’s also about resilience, humour, and the stubborn joy of being alive. And perhaps that’s what makes it feel so real: Kuku understands that madness, whether in Lagos, Accra, or anywhere else, is not always a condition to be cured. Sometimes, it’s simply the cost of feeling deeply in a world that doesn’t always know what to do with love.