Glissade

You grow up in this interior village in Kakamega, and the only time you hear the word coffee is when you’re playing the rope game of tea and coffee. Two girls swing the rope on each side, singing in Swahili: between tea and coffee which one do you choose?And you say tea every time as …

It had been three months since the last time I heard Om Sagda’s screams. I marked those empty days on the calendar.

  & though I have lived so long in darkness, tonight I climb out of the cave to look up at the moonlit sky that sees me first and smiles God knows, happiness and the sky long to see me like villagers yearning for the moon to step out Tonight I smelt my aches, shapeshift …

If Nigeria ever happened to anyone, it happened to John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (1935—2020).

The average Hausa trader is voluble. Ask the price of an object in a rural market, he’ll reply, “Hundred. Do you want me to speak gaskiya?”

We will forget the death that now stinks up the city centre, dark hallways into the doors of offices

ISSUES

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