The Arts-Muse Fair

The Praxis Magazine Online hangout, themed around mental health had a record attendance that provided a space and voice to issues of mental health in our communities.
The Guest Speaker, Dr. Mustapha Ibrahim Gudaji, whose vast knowledge on psychiatry and drug abuse, enabled him provide a better understanding of mental illnesses from a medical perspective, discussed depression, suicide, post-partum depression and misconceptions like the attribution of mental illnesses to lack of spirituality. He also spoke about the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Kano, and its’ vigorous fight towards demystifying mental illnesses. He urged everyone to treat people with mental health challenges as they would any human, and to help reduce the stigma placed around seeking help for mental illnesses. The hangout which held between 2pm to 5pm Nigerian time, at the American Space, Murtala Muhammad Library, Ahmadu Bello way, Nasarawa, Kano, drew the likes of Hajiya Balaraba Ramat (Writer/ Film Producer) ANA Kan…

Poets in Nigeria (PIN) has announced Ogugua Micah Okoye, Okpara Ugochukwu Damian and Ehi-Kowochio Ogwiji as winners of the fourth edition of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize (NSPP) at an awards ceremony which held on Saturday 6th July at Niger Delta University, Amassoma, Wilberforce Island, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State.
Kolade Olanrewaju Freedom, Moderator of NSPP 2019 explained in a statement that closing the submissions on 18th March, 2019, the Prize received 504 poems from students representing 96 tertiary institutions including Universities, Polytechnics, Colleges of Education, Schools of Nursing and Seminary Schools.
Ogugua, a 300-level student of Applied Biochemistry, Enugu State University of Science and Technology clinched the first prize with his poem entitled “Micah” while Okpara, a 400-level student of Anatomy, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Uli came 2nd with his poem entitled “Suicide Warning Signs”. “An Artefact of a Groin War” authored by Ogwiji, a 500-level student o…

Conversation with Mujahyd Ameen Lilo: Winner, Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange Project Essay Competition 2019.
BY NANA SULE .
Hello Mujahyd, thank you so much for agreeing to chat with me. Can you tell me a little more about yourself. I’m Mujahyd Ameen Lilo. I was born in Kano in 2003. I am currently an SS2 student of Sunshine International College, Kano. I am an Art Student and I wish to study English and literary Studies at University level. I started writing in my Junior Secondary School years.
I remember first seeing you at the BUK Writers forum here in Kano, I at once assumed you were an undergraduate. How did you find your way there? I’m someone who loves to attend literary gatherings. So, the first thing I did after joining ANA Kano, was to ask one of the writers about other literary gatherings in Kano. That was how I got to know the BUK Creative Writers Forum.
How did you get to ANA? Before I joined ANA, I read their anthologies. I saw the Chairman’s number, Mallam Zahara…

white woes
my country is a one-book library, my life and survival, a book without anauthor chapter of peace & good life already written. only writers armed with the ink of bigotry: tribalism or religion succeed as writers. i am fighting to be good in a chapter of horror.
my country is a beautiful destination. the journey depends on your connection. and, i am a dirt of past encyclopaedias, a syntax penned by marginalized bruises, yearning to be beautiful in a pit of horror, in a country ruled by the wit of saboteurs.
at the doors of who you know, get what! the hinges and keyholes are suspended, scenes are closed to be opened by corruption. religion and tribalism, the only landscape became the food that rots the tongues, and the wound that closes the mouth.
my country is easy. it depends on who you are. life is a grail, coded designs, coined by filaments upon filaments of interpretation. they are the thorns that readjusted my destiny a sore spell, a fruit of rootless trees whose images are the shadow of my…

Deadline: 21 July, 2019
PHmuseum and African Artists' Foundation seek to recognise, honour, and nurture the next generation of visionary image-makers and storytellers in Africa with the AAF x PHmuseam African Photography Prize.
​To apply, simply sign up at PHmuseum, upload your project, and add the hashtag #AAFprize. The deadline is set for 21 July.

I have always been a proud African, one who has been chiefly influenced by the unpleasant history of colonial exploration and exploitation of the continent by the West. My pride stemmed from the awareness that my existence was connected to a reality I held responsible for my subjected humanity. Yes, living with the knowing that my race was considered inferior and my skin colour equated with negative and demeaning metaphors, fostered in me the feelings of disdain towards Europe and the West in general. Thus, I found solace in my dislike of the West. Being a proud African afforded me the opportunity to picture myself within an utopia wherein, I could will myself to view my reality outside colonial conscriptions. I could live in my moments of illusion, albeit temporarily believing that my life has no interconnectedness with the West. I tried to convince myself that my humanity wasn't part of the race so inhumanly debased by foreignnarratives, I convinced myself into believing that my…

Leaving home for school, and the other way round, was always dreadful when it meant having to sit for hours on end in ridiculously tiny Hiace buses that mostly plied the saddening South-West federal roads that connected the lip-sealing deadly ones up North.
If you were travelling from Lagos to Zaria, you had to spend an entire day on those roads, sandwiched between other passengers, most times, the space meant for the movement of your feet, compromised by loads, so that your knees were practically up in the air, as though they were yearning for a catch-up with your chest.
If you didn't control them- because buses like that never had enough space between a row of seats and another- the passenger in the seat in front of you had a bone to pick with you, half as much as you had one to pick with the one behind you.
It was always a long-ass journey with a heavy dose of non-stop grumbling and fight for comfort. No one ever won, we only got "gifts", like the killing headache I ca…