Editorial: Lodestones and Ways Forward
The question of the role of the writer in society has plagued literature, I’ll wager, from the very beginning. From the moment when the first griots of African kingdoms set the history of the world in sagas in verse to the times when the writers who came to be known as “Homer” sat to pen their myths of Grecian gods. In our time, as African writers and African readers, this old question has been framed by the thought of three men—Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo. Their perspectives, each over three decades old, are so definitive as to not bear repeating here. Suffice to say that subsequent generations have been formed by intersects of the theoretical frameworks designed by this trio. One of the big masquerades of African writing, Chinua Achebe, recently wrote a memoir, a personal history of Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War—an event that proved personally definitive directly for at least two of the three theorists above. Full Editorial.
Poetry
Toni Kan – This House Is Empty
Dolapo Ogunwale – Three Poems
Chibuzor Okoroafor – Within Attraction
Samuel Stephen Wakdok – Two Poems
Femi Morgan – Three Poems
Uche Omar – Three Poems
Essays and Reviews
Henry Stephen Onyeama – The Mirror of our Times, a review of Sylva Nze Ifedigbo’s The Funeral Did Not End.
Sylva Nze Ifedigbo – a review of The Bonfire of the Gods by Andrew Eseimokumo Oki
Tunji Ajibade – Nigerian Fiction Writers Rule
Damola Awoyokun – Achebe and the Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
Fiction
Nnandez Aniagudo – The Cow Conundrum
Angela Amalonye Nwosu – When Death is Lovely
Drama
Emmanuella Nduonofit – The Tape
