Home - Efiko Magazine

Editors’ Note

One first issue of 2025 is our fifth. New year, new edition. Hurray! Our writers shop in border towns, take account of a great poet’s long life, show us a newly single woman holidaying in Abidjan. It’s literature again. Why? Well...

In this Issue

She filled in her arrival documents at Abidjan airport, giving a hoot when asked if her luggage bore medicines, pornography, weapons, wondering if her vibrator was classified as such and, if so, in which of these categories.

Pai Nosso - Bolanle Alashe - Efiko image

Broke

By Som Adedayor | Fiction

It was evening and the matches were over when you came to me beside the goal post. The sky had emptied itself of the sun. Darkness had poured into the atmosphere like dye into water.

Tolu Ogunlesi - Nothing to Declare - Efiko image

Medicines, Pornography, Weapons

By Catherine McNamara | Fiction

Margaret, growing used to being single again, booked a holiday in the commonly overlooked West African city that she and her lover had planned to visit before things went pear-shaped.

Munachimso Ochiabutor - Cracks Tend to Widen - Efiko image

So You Want Medicine At A Nigerian Teaching Hospital?

By Haruna Solomon Binkam | Essay

The girl on the hospital couch is unconscious. Her husband and the health worker who brought her from the referral hospital…

Mubanga Kalimamukwento: Will This Time Be Different For You? - Efiko image

J.P. Clark: A Poet And His Phases

By Ernest Ogunyemi | Essay

If Nigeria ever happened to anyone, it happened to John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (1935—2020). He was the type of poet to thrive in an environment where he is…

Zulaikhah Oyíndàmọ́lá Àgòrò - No Peace in A Lagos Bus - Efiko image

A Tender Affair

By Demilade Oladapo | Fiction

Someone is cackling in the shower and there’s a racket from the filling station on the next block. While these sounds prickle, they are not so much why Tijani curls up, disturbed, in bed.

Zenas Ubere - To J.P. Clark - Efiko image

How To Buy Goats In Jigawa

By Ridwan Badamasi | Essay

In mid-April, while in Dutse, I went to Maigatari, a border town on the Niger-Nigeria border, to purchase livestock, but first, I was to meet with D., an acquaintance and a middleman. D.

The Sissy

By Theresa Sylvester | Fiction

Father knotted his anger into his red and black paisley tie and went to work. It gripped his neck a little tighter every time his new boss called him…