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 …
Heartbreak is painful, sure, I believe. But have you ever plugged your phone at night with the conviction it’d be completely charged by dawn, and when morning greets you like a curtsying teenager, you find out it’s exactly at the point you left it the previous night, unmoved and unshaken like mount Kilimanjaro?And what’s worse …
The township is a place of unity. People rescue and aid each other for they’ve subscribed to the adage that a hand washes the other. One hand cannot properly wash itself. Urgent meetings and funeral attendances are occasions where this unity is witnessed. The residents know one another and one another’s affairs, unlike in the …
"Nigerian men, fear them. They are wicked. Wicked! Especially Igbo men. They can be at home or at a friend's place drinking beer and talking nonsense, while their wives are out in the sun, farming. And when the women returned home tired, they would expect her to go to the kitchen in that state, while …
Èjìrẹ́, Aráìsokún, ẹdunjobi, Ọmọ ẹdun tí ń ṣeré orí-igi. Ọ̀kan ni mo bèrè, èjì ló wọlé tọ̀ mí wá. You were asleep when you were born, in my hand, your reflection split into two. The men who were hired to forsake your silence brought drums & took you out to it. I looked back at …
& 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 …
He brought an honesty to work deemed unskilled and menial. A self-respect that towered over the egos of overlords occupying fancy positions, in a hierarchy of thanklessness. He had to work. As a younger man, he preferred the solitary jobs that kept him away from the world for days and weeks. Sometimes it got …
My brother, held tight to his belief like a limpet holding onto algae, chewing it off a hard rock. So when he joined Boko Haram, we only saw it on the leaf he left us that read: I have left to strive in the path of my Lord. Ya Ilahi, I agree, belief eats at a …
A child’s need to be chased, to hide and be found time and again, is why my father is the ghost stalking my dreams. When I was a child, hunting for where to hide and wait for my friends to seek, I found, inside an abandoned yard with an unfinished building, a hole in the …
This year’s shortlisted stories are, in particular, products of a severe depression in the prize’s character.
