The Things That Bury Us By Munachim Amah (Georgia Review)
Brought together in holy matrimony by their shared faith, things start to fall apart when the husband, Jonas Odimegwu, stops going to daily mass, opting to join a mysterious group of people who do not believe in God. This change alters the way Nwoye Odimegwu, who had grown up Catholic and had been a member of the Mary League and Charismatic, views her husband—a shift that tears through the very fabric of their marriage.
Excerpt:
She had not seen it coming, her husband who stopped going to daily mass, who started sitting back in the pew when it was time for communion on Sundays, who said it was nothing when she asked what was going on, left her to hack her mind out of her head, try to connect the dots, was he cheating on her, was he doing something ungodly, until she saw them, the books, returned from school one day and saw those books from the pit of hell lying there so casually on his bookshelf, and even before she asked him anything felt her world caving in, this man she married but did not really know, which was the thought that came into her head as she flipped open the books, because who was this man who was reading about Eckankar, what in the holy God’s name was her husband doing reading about this secret cult, this diabolic group of people who no one knew what God they worshipped, no one knew what God they believed in, no one knew what they did when they gathered themselves wherever they convened, and not once did she think a book about them would one day make its way into her own house, yet there in her house the books were, before her very eyes, right under the roof that was her home.
Dite By Reena Usha Rungoo (Granta)
On Durga’s island back home, household altars are commonplace. Some altars house statues and images of goddesses, garlanded with flowers. Others hold photographs and personal belongings of departed ones. For Durga, however, the uneven rows of boxes and tins of teas on her shelves, collected over the years, are her altar. The smell of each tea holds an association, the ‘quotidian and the transient,’ the ‘quiet intimacies of humans.’ Those smells hold her dear ones, her goddesses. But when Durga returns to the US from her grandmother’s funeral in Mauritius, she suddenly gives them up.
Excerpt:
We know exactly when it happened. It was when Durga came back from Dadi’s funeral in Mauritius. Her grandmother’s passing had emptied her heart of home, even as her travel bags were heavy with the familiar foods of her childhood. Sifting through them, she carefully removed a sealed envelope and an unassuming blue box labelled ‘Bois Chéri Vanilla Tea’. She placed both at the back of the shelves, behind the rest of us, hidden from view. She threw out the food. And then, as if the newcomers had tainted us with their presence, she avoided us for a long while. Almost a decade elapsed as we gathered dust and waited patiently.
Number Five By Rodney Muhumuza (The Weganda Review)
Sammy, a perceptive 13-year-old boy, is perplexed by his mother’s softening towards him, dotting on him in a way he’s never seen her do before. As he contemplates this sudden change, wondering what could’ve inspired it, his mother extends this change to her relationship with her husband. She begins to wrest some agency back from her husband, whom the kids know to be the ‘nyineka,’ the boss, given to guiding the affairs of the home with heavy-handed singularity.
Excerpt:
I looked up at the wall where one gecko chased another, and yet another desperately tried to catch a mosquito, its bulging eyes giving a wicked reflection against the yellow light of the bulb. Efrem gently shoved his elbow into my ribs, which meant, when he did not turn sideways to look at me, that it was something to do with Father, who was cracking knuckles that didn’t pop. His rough beard glistened as though it had just been smeared with oil, and when he turned to inspect us once again, I saw that the whites of his eyes sparkled with wetness.
I remembered a time not so long ago when Mother would have sat still if that is what Father demanded, if she thought he wanted her total and frank silence, but that night of war it was clear those days were behind us. Mother may not exactly have ended Father’s ability to command attention just by merely saying something, or nothing, but her behavior showed a new confidence. She could stand her ground if she had to. Or was something else encouraging her? To be honest, I don’t know.
Afterwards, it was Father who sat looking dejected in the sitting room, repeatedly crossing his arms and clearing his throat until Mother came minutes later offering us supper. He never ate his food. The rest of us ate in silence.
clean read By Davina Philomena Kawuma (Lolwe)
Eight women sit for an interview with the Uganda Reproductive Licensing Authority (URLA), and this story is the transcript of their interviews. URLA interrogates their reasons for wanting children, sometimes exposing the inconsistencies in participants’ viewpoints, and determines whether their environment and economic situation are fit for purpose.
Excerpt:
URLA: you are asserting that your experience as a surrogate mother to your siblings directly correlates to your potential competency as a mother to your own, as yet unborn, child. is this an accurate summation?
51270: lol. you just keep repeating what i say. what’s up with that?
URLA: setting aside our method of clarification, we would also like to know if you regularly consult the government gazette for updates on child-rearing policies and regulations. have you familiarised yourself with the latest guidelines and financial implications of raising a child, especially the average costs involved?
51270: lol. i work a twelve-hour shift. you think i have time to read some government paper? and costs? come on, seriously?
URLA: consider this: your current income is insufficient to meet your needs. how do you then propose to shoulder the additional financial responsibilities that come with raising a child?
51270: god will make a way.
URLA: is this the same god who, until now, hasn’t altered your situation, or are you talking about a different one?
51270: look, god’s been a bit upset with me for a while because of some shit i did back in the day. but i’ve changed. i go to confession every friday. if i keep this up for the next nine months, god will come through for me.
The Evil in Me By Sabah Carrim (The Shallow Tales Review)
The narrator finds herself driven in a van by a man whose face she can’t see. When they arrive in the middle of a date field, a barren-looking place bleached by the sun, she’s taken to a hut, shoved into a dark room, where she notices women in black abayas and niqabs around her. She’s on a pilgrimage to Makkah and Madina, brought by her husband to get rid of the evil in her.
Excerpt:
This is the first time I’m seeing a date tree, or so many date trees in such a vast expanse of land. My husband has brought me on pilgrimage to Makkah and Madina to rid me of evil. But praying at the haram shareef five times a day, circumambulating the Kaaba seven times, drinking water from the well of Zamzam in three breaths isn’t enough, he says. Taufik said more must be done for it to work, and none of what’s about to happen, he cautioned, has ever been mentioned in the books.
The hut I’m led to in the date field is plain, ordinary and rustic, stripped of all forms and manners of perfection. I’m shoved into a dark room, and notice that what separates me from the outside is a padlock that covers half the door: the biggest I’ve ever seen in my life.
Then I realise that I’m not alone: women in black abayas and niqabs invade the emptiness around me. I can feel our shoulders touching, our arms, the rest of our bodies. I no longer feel myself; I’m turned into a shapeless form, merging into this black flow of sameness.
Watermelons and Broken Bottles By Foday Mannah (Isele Magazine)
Trouble breaks out when a girl named Sao, who survived an attack on her village hiding behind a wide bookcase in the church’s mission house, is introduced to the rehabilitation center, made up mostly of boy soldiers who had been given drugs and guns, forced to kill during the war. The center’s director, Rebecca Dunleavy, does her best to hasten Sao’s (and the girls’ who arrive after her) integration, but something goes terribly wrong.
Excerpt:
Rebecca then suggested that Sao join the boys for afternoon classes. She handed her over to Mr Jalloh, the teacher, the boys giggling in excitement at the presence of a single girl in their midst. Offering Mr Jalloh a handshake in the same mode as the one she had given to Rebecca, Sao settled herself in the front of the class, her lips moving as she mouthed the lines written on the board whilst Rebecca and Mr Jalloh discussed strategies to expedite the girl’s integration.
Confusion erupted from amidst the children a couple of days later. Hurrying down from her office, Rebecca found Mr Jalloh restraining a boy who had blood seeping from a slight gash. The boy was screaming whilst straining to get at Sao who had retreated to lean against the high wall at the far end of the social area, a satisfied smirk on her face.
The Lance Corporal’s Door By Shedrack Opeyemi Akanbi (Shenandoah Literary)
In military barracks, gossip is a constant feature, and it is the wives and mothers who tend to keep the rumour mill chugging along, staying on top of every curiosity in their line of sight. In this story, the curiosity is David Akanle, a lance corporal in block 072. He is unlike any of his peers from the 68th Regular Recruit Intake, all of whom the women know for their wild behaviours. This difference puts David Akanle in the crosshairs of the women, who vow to find out what his deal is.
Excerpt:
We have had our noses on the Lance Corporal long before our husbands and the other bachelor-soldiers caught a whiff of his case. Why? Because we can tell that an egg is rotten among many good ones.
You see, the only similarity the Lance Corporal shared with his regulars was that stint of predictability. We knew the 68th Regular Recruit Intake for their wild behavior. If the Soldiers’ Club was silent by 8 p.m., then most of them weren’t off duty. If there was a case of loud music keeping a block awake through the night, the culprit would be a 68th Regular. In most brawl scenes you would find at least two 68th Regulars in the ring. They overwhelmed the barrack. Some of us said they were the most united regulars in the Nigerian Army. They were always in clusters, bantering away and reveling in passionate camaraderie. But you see the Lance Corporal, he was the irregular 68th Regular.
Visa Gods By Ber Anena (The Plentitudes)
For many Africans, a visa interview is almost always a nerve-racking—sometimes humiliating—affair, and for Owino, a retired headteacher and widower, it’s more of the same. After travelling three hundred kilometres overnight, spending five agonizing hours on a stuffy, rickety bus, Owino leaves the embassy with the demand for the submission of more documents, after which the long wait for a verdict begins.
Excerpt:
At the embassy, Owino felt like a goat, tethered to the foul behavior of overzealous Ugandans he was sure were up to impress their muzungu bosses and he had to endure the resultant avalanche of humiliation. And he would. Anyadwee would be crushed if he didn’t make it to walk her down the aisle. Her dream was to have both parents by her side on her big day, but with Adunu long gone, his presence was even more important. Besides, the girl has not been home in four years. “People keep saying FaceTime FaceTime. Phone call phone call but it’s not the same,” Owino mumbled. Seeing her father would be the best wedding gift Anyadwee would wish for.
As he counted down to ten o’clock, the time for his interview, Owino wished his wife were alive to listen to his rants. That would take away some of the bile rising in his throat. Maybe he could try Anyadwee. She always indulged his ramblings, but Owino suspected his daughter could still be asleep. Even though it had been years since his daughter relocated to Boston, Owino still hadn’t memorized the time difference between Uganda and the U.S., and he hated having to count his fingers every single time.
We Can Start This Story By Tega Oghenechovwen (Kenyon Review)
We Can Start This Story follows four kids— Ugly, Joking, Rescue, and Sunshine—and their life at Democracy, a seven-story government secretariat that houses more than three hundred people, and the displacement of its inhabitants by an Oyibo man and his subordinates in government. As possible starting points, the writer expertly presents snapshots of various moments that, altogether, give us a touching view into their journey both as individuals and as a collective.
Excerpt:
The oyibo man flicks sweat off his neck and jejely tilts his face toward the balcony we are shouting from, his eyes as cool as ever. Our anger cannot change anything. Our voices are lost within the last-second warnings made over megaphones, informing everyone that detonation charges are already being placed in various parts of the building; lost to the horrendous shouts of husbands calling for their wives and grabbing what they can save of their property before the building crumbles like a sandcastle built on the beach; lost to the voices of mothers shouting for their children — some of whom are crying out loud. Nobody is calling for us, because we are not anyone’s children. Here we are on our own. So, we tell ourselves, no fear. Eyes forward, chest out. Don’t be scared. As we leave Democracy, we tell ourselves the world is our hometown. We will survive anywhere we go. We don’t look back, so we will not miss anything. We just keep going like people who have seen zero to ninety-nine and are not scared to see one hundred or even one hundred and one. But before we leave, we write our names on the wall of our space, as if to tell the future occupants of the Radisson — whenever they finish building it — that we were here before them.
Water Woes By Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim (Transition Magazine)
Saddled with the boy from birth, Aunt Philomena raises Nosa and Osa, her little son, in the house where she works as a housemaid. Her employer allows both boys the freedom to mingle with his kids, watch TV in the big parlour, and wear new clothes. But things change when Aunt Philo’s oga brings home a new wife, who banishes the housemaid’s children to the mosquito-infested verandah behind the kitchen. As things get heated around the house, Aunt Philo sends Nosa to Makoko in Lagos at his father’s request, who had walked away after Nosa’s birth.
Excerpt:
He whistled tune after tune but spared me no words as he paddled me into this gloom. Water stretched forth in every direction, threatening to swallow us, but it was the broken woods and greenish rot on the sides of the canoe that filled my eyes with mists and fizzled my excitement like a pumped balloon losing air.
For the first couple of days, I was dazed by the abundance of water, the unending waves floating on its surface constantly reminding me that it was a living predator. Except for Pa, everyone here was nice and happy to meet me, but this was no comfort. I longed for the verandah behind the kitchen in Ondo. Back there, I was always eager for Oga and Madam to travel, because that was the only time their kids swam in the backyard pool and we always swam with them. But here, who jumps into the same water to swim where he passes pee and poo? And when everyone learned I had refused to swim, their niceness was gone. I began to dread them all just as much as I did the water, and eventually the health workers, and the police people, and everything else around here.
Uncle By Lutivini Majanja (A Long House)
Upon Uncle Limisi’s return to Nairobi from Detroit, music ignites a bond between him and Daddy, whose house becomes the popular stop for their friends on Fridays and the weekends. Uncle regales them with stories of his time in America. But through the years, he keeps one part of his life in America a secret until one day when that secret traces him back to Kenya.
Excerpt:
Years later when Daddy and Mama had me and Gilbert, Uncle still visited. He and Daddy played the old records and talked about Diana Ross and how she was doing as a solo act. The Supremes, they mused, never recovered from Diana’s departure. Of the original group, it was only Mary who was left. It wasn’t the real Supremes. But Diana, she flourished! There’s no song that Diana Ross had sung that Uncle didn’t know. When he saw other musicians, he’d say they were just bad copies, incapable of matching her standard.
Uncle gifted Mama a new Diana Ross album. It was the one called Upside Down. Maybe he wanted to bring her into their circle. She hadn’t travelled abroad like him, or even across the border like Daddy, but Mama said that was no reason to act haughty as if years had not passed with him living in Nairobi like everybody else. Your uncle’s thinking is upside down, she’d say. She knew he’d bought that album for himself, so that he could have more of his kind of music to listen to when he visited with his bottles of beer and Embassy cigarettes, still commanding Mama’s record player as if he’d bought it.
A Grain of Rice in the Heart of Genocide By Chioniso Tsikisayi (Lolwe)
Before the call came to inform a family of their father’s fourth death, Moyomuhle felt the pain of the axe falling in the early hours of the morning, cutting their father and others like him at the stumps. To collect her father, Maonei drives with her mother to the farm where the Rebellion resides, arriving to see a line of other grief-stricken women waiting to identify their loved ones. Written with an inventiveness typical of poets, it’s a story about many things: loss and grief for the expandability of fathers, of the male population in general; the heroes of the liberation struggle for Zimbabwe; the fight for Zimbabwe’s democracy; the oppression and death of children in the Gaza strip, in Congo, Sudan, and Somalia.
Excerpt:
‘This was my father?’ I asked, teary-eyed. I rubbed the palms of my hands across the brittle bark, kissed the crimson dirt that caked his torso. The blood oxidised. Sticky, as though he had wept a river in his final hours. “Ngiyaxolisa Baba,” I apologise to the dead branches.
They bore fruit for our mothers. Delicious, medicinal, nourishing fruit. Gave them flowers to braid their hair. Our brothers would climb them to the very heights and perch at the top of their branches like birds. They cradled infants on their wooden knees. They sweetened our air. In the summer, their leaves provided shade. Protected our brown scalps from the scorching rays of the sun. My grandmother would say, in their days, they knew no such thing as an absent father.
But now there are no dads left to watch over the little girls that grow into women. No shade to cover the silky silhouettes of breast-budding daughters beneath the sky’s bleeding horizon. And the boys? The boys have grown to resent their roots. You will not find sweet-scented flowers blossoming from the tips of their elbows. They walk with their shoulders slouched because they fear that if they stand tall, if they look to the heavens, they too will be cut down.
Nonfiction
Down the Aisle, in Search of Pulse By Kosisochukwu W. Ugwuede (A Long House)
Confident in her ability to adapt to the food abroad, Kosisochukwu arrives in America without so much as a grain of rice. But as time goes by, the unfamiliarity of the elements, the terrain, starts to overwhelm her, kindling a longing for something that anchors her to home. And so, a few days before her thirty-first birthday, she visits an African Market in Salem, the first in her search for that pulse typical of markets in Africa.
Excerpt:
Still, markets are like cities. One might feel the pulse of a place strongest or discern the psyche of a people by walking the aisles of its market, dealing with its merchants, getting swindled there and observing the people who animate it. There is no shortage of interesting characters nor of lore, no shortage of orally delivered op-eds and manifestos on every subject matter under God’s green earth. You can learn the economics of a country’s ports in its markets, learn what most families will have for dinner, or when the seasons turn. A market is where you go to hear the thumping of an African city. To hear this pulse, improbable as that seemed, I set off on a Pacific Northwest backpacking trip a few days into 2023.
Critical Navel-Gazing By Namwali Serpell (Yale Review)
In today’s world, criticism has become, in Namwali Serpell’s words, metacritical: making a case for itself, prophesying its own demise, nostalgically musing on its halcyon days, decrying yet another crisis in the conditions of its production. Throughout this essay, she questions the utility of this endless navel-gazing, omphaloskepsis, the feverish hunt for what’s wrong with criticism, the capitalist commodification of our critical wares based on preferences.
Excerpt:
The hiccup is a thought; the thought is this: Why can’t we all just do our jobs? Why talk about criticism, why talk up criticism, instead of just doing criticism? Criticism has never thrived because of its marketing. Students did not pile into seminars led by Fredric Jameson, lectures delivered by Roland Barthes, or classes taught by I. A. Richards because their metacritical accounts of their critical practices were enticing, reasonable, or even comprehensible. The work itself and its effects on us were advertisement enough. Criticism lit people up, stirred them, made them reconsider what they value and how. If that is no longer the case, it isn’t because we don’t try to sell our product anymore. I would submit that it is precisely because we do, desperately, and in the wrong way.
The Songs of Jos By Emmanuel Esomnofu (The Republic)
In July 2023, Esomnofu visits Jos, a city that for him—and, I suspect, for all those like me who witnessed Jude’s and Jesse’s emergence in the late 2000s—is coloured by the Abaga brothers, thanks to how much J-town runs through their music. Esomnofu explores the early influences of Choc Boiz, Jesse Jagz and the burden of his brother’s long shadow, the consciousness of Jos-bred artists, including the Abaga brothers, both of whom paint the city with different strokes—M.I with ‘the attentive poise of a journalist,’ Jesse Jagz with the shifty detailing of a poet.
Excerpt:
Likewise, his music evades the most essential parts of him; I found that quality during my time in Jos, a place so beautifully marked yet slyly expressive, so you always seek something in it. What it is, the beholder can’t really say, but the feeling is undoubtedly strong. And like any magician worth their salt, Jesse Jagz knows it’s the trick of hiding that is the showcase.
And yet it was M.I’s ‘Wild Wild West’ that Chiedoziem rapped as we ascended Yingi Layout which led from Books2Africa, a partly charity-based organization we had visited, whose warehouse had pallets stacked with titles across different genres. It was one of my most poignant experiences in the city, as the street’s flawlessly tarred road appeared in front of us, the low-rise buildings and passersby emerging into view. “Better get your gun, better get your vest/ Cos in J Town is the wild wild west, down here everyone cursed, no one blessed,” he admonished in the memorable hook, setting the tone for his incinerating verses. In a sweeping draw of his pen, the second verse advances the nostalgic gaze of the first, carrying the city’s pain on its shoulders, and the listener is brought closer to actual reality.
Who is hustling who? By Mukoma wa Ngugi (Africa is a Country)
On his drive to Limuru on July 19, Mukoma is met with eerily quiet streets, except for the heavy police presence. In Kangemi, police have shot and wounded two protestors, leaving six dead throughout the country and countless injured or arrested. It is a Kenya that has come to a standstill, predictable to anyone paying keen attention. Mukoma retraces Ruto’s rise to power, the place of tribalism in fostering that rise, suggesting Cuba as Kenya’s north star.
Excerpt:
I kept asking everyone I met, why was Ruto voted in spite of his history? The answers varied: He rigged the elections; he did not rig and if he did, he only managed to be better at it than Raila Odinga; he appealed to the youth with the idea of building a hustler nation (what a telling term); the Kikuyus have vowed never to have a Luo president and therefore opted for Ruto who is Kalenjin as opposed to Odinga who is Luo.
I sat with older Kikuyu men in the little Nyama Choma spot in Limuru Market and they talked about a generational divide between the Kikuyu and youth (Ruto) and the elderly Kikuyus (Odinga). But the one I heard over and over again was that Kenyans are tired of the Kenyatta and Odinga political dynasties. As one Trump supporter was to say, they voted for him with the middle finger. And so, the Kenyans who voted for Ruto were giving a middle finger to the Kenyatta, Moi and Odinga political dynasties. But no one had really expected buyer’s remorse to kick in one year into the Ruto presidency.
Louise Glück’s Late Style By Teju Cole (Yale Review)
Teju Cole, author of Open City and Tremor, examines Louise Glück’s body of work, analyzing the shift to fables and fiction in her last three books: Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021), Marigold and Rose (2022). Beyond the elucidation of the fabular approach that dominated Glück’s last works, Cole also makes forthright connections mainly from Marigold and Rose—a short book of prose that explores the first year in the life of a pair of twins—to the personae and life of the Nobel laureate, who passed away in October 2023.
Excerpt:
The specter of these sisterhoods hovers over the pages of Marigold and Rose. It is also true that Glück became grandmother to a pair of twins in 2020, and it is they to whom the book is dedicated. But I want to suggest a further reading, one in keeping with the idea that this fiction is not up to quite the same thing as the quasi-confessional poetry of her earlier work. I want to suggest that Marigold and Rose can be read as a story about the distinct personae Glück feels inside herself. “Beautiful Rose, lovable Rose” is beautiful Louise, lovable Louise. She is the social self, friend to many, teacher and colleague to countless, winner of prizes, shopper at Formaggio, writer of letters, diner out in Vermont, Cambridge, and New Haven. “Difficult” Marigold, robust and sour Marigold, is Rose’s more inward other: call her Glück. She’s the one who possesses an inwardness that expresses itself as ambition, focus, and achievement.
