The Arts-Muse Fair

Friday June 6, 2019, Masobe Books, a new Nigerian publishing company formally announced the official launch of its business activities. Operating from Lagos,  Masobe Books prides itself as ‘a labour of love for Nigerian literature’. It dreams to support writers, significantly improve readership, and tackle and surmount the typical challenges in Nigerian literature which include poor distribution and marketing; mediocre production, and writers’ disillusionment with securing commensurate publication, reward, and exposure for their work. “As a writer and an avid reader, I have experienced these challenges personally,” says, Othuke Ominiabohs, Founder of Masobe Books. “So, I and a dedicated team of like-minded people decided to do something about them. We created Masobe Books, which is a platform to protect, project and promote our literature. We like to think of Masobe Books as a family. We believe that together as a collective — writers, readers, and publisher — we can surmo

                                    A significant role of literature is that it enables us “make sense of our   experiences…(and at the same time allows us) assign meaning and value to our lives.” 1   One way this has happened is by giving man the ability to create a story-world. That story-world has been with mankind from the beginning of creation as an oral art before evolving into the textual format. The story-world of course is that universe which is a representation of the place where the human exists. It is not an Edenic place because man no longer lives in that Garden of perfection that has been long lost. In the 17 th Century, the English Poet John Milton wrote an Epic Poem called Paradise Lost. Milton based the ten-part poem   “on the biblical  story of the  Fall of Man : the temptation of  Adam and Eve  by the  fallen angel   Satan  and their expulsion from the  Garden of Eden .” 2 Of course that represents a certain worldview. This is what literature also

Deadline: June 8, 2019. Workshop dates: 15-18 July 2019 Intermediate and established writers based on the African continent with an idea for a new short story that needs time, space and feedback to develop further are invited to apply for the Saseni!/Hargeysa International Book Fair four-day writing workshop focused on the short story form and facilitated by Nadifa Mohamed and Billy Kahora. Writers will have the opportunity for the stories they work on to be part of the first Saseni! anthology of short fiction which will be published by Huza Press in 2020. The workshop will offer a series of daily sessions focused on craft, which will explore character, plot and writing’s relationship to place and language, as well as the practicalities of drafting, revising and editing. Writers will also have time each day to read short fiction and focus on their own writing. Each writer selected for the workshop will also have one-on-one tutorials with both of our two experienced wo

Every generation of Nigerian poets has defined and conceptualized the ideological premise of its writings: from the oral opulence of Gabriel Okara’s generation to the Wole Soyinka-Christopher Okigbo's cultural consciousness and the demystification of colonial narratives of subjugation, to the Osundare-Ofeimum's social-marxist panegyrics of the dignity of the masses in a dystopian society, to the anti-despotic dirges or protest poetics of the military era, succinctly represents their distinct ideological forte. The older generation of writers conceived the functionality of literature beyond the aesthetics, of course, this doesn’t imply that aestheticism was relegated to background; they were able to consciously merged the two together, beauty and meaning. They instituted a leitmotif from one generation to another, reminiscent of the traditions of western literature: from the classical age, renaissance to the romantic and modernist periods respectively. These ideolog

SEASON OF WAITING Grateful that I have graves to kneel before and spit prayers on to put flowers over them Grateful that I have graves to sit on and spend my season of waiting that my waiting is not the sort where I sit on my bomb ravaged land waiting for my daughter and wife to be freed from the hold of Boko Haram for them to show me the inerasable scars the got between their legs to recount to me how they breath the same air with the demons who find joy in Haram in the making of men rams on Big Sallah day. My waiting is of the time when my shroud will be measured to join my daughter and wife As I wait, I spit prayers on their graves. Grateful that my thoughts are not of whether my daughter chants my name as she's being raped My thoughts are of the sound of the bullets driving into my wife and daughter's bodies, of the gushing blood. Grateful that these thoughts don't slice my heart with their knives when I see I'

APPLICATION DEADLINE : Sunday, 7th July 2019 (23:59 GMT +0) The Goethe-Institut/ Bureau de liaison Ouagadougou is setting up a  writer's residency for young African writers (less than 40 years) in 2019/20 in Burkina Faso. This residency program aims to give a platform for free expression - to writers who project the vision of (another) future in their writings, - to writers who have restrictions of expression in their country of origin, - to activist writers who express themselves in relation to social and/ or political transformations and challenges in their countries. The residence is open to writers of all literary genres: novel, poetry, essay, storytelling, narration, theatre, comic, etc. The production of a text is mandatory for the authors in residence. The texts produced will be published at the end of 2020, either in physical or digital version. General conditions of the residency: - 2 or 3 residencies of 4 weeks in Ouagadougou in 2019/20 - 3 authors per

A VISIT TO THE BADAGRY SLAVE MUSEUM BY HABEEB ADAM Only a few feelings can rival the joy of having your Special One by your side as you go on a cruise into the past, teleporting from one century to the other. In our own case, it wasn’t a joyous journey entirely. It was rather a mixed feeling of exoticness, intense pity and rage to varying degrees. The trip to the coastal town of Badagry commenced on a somewhat disappointing note. What shouldn’t take more than 2 hours at most lasted more than 5, all thanks to the omnipresent traffic jams and the potholes-ridden Lagos-Badagry Expressway. And as we set out, sardine-packed with a few dozen other passengers in a rickety Molue, we couldn’t help but note the irony of visiting the slave museum 14 decades after the abolishment of slavery, yet in a pitiable condition not too different from the way the slaves were shipped to the Americas – stacked like a pack of frozen fish underneath the ships. Rejoicing with the freed slav