FORTUNATE TRAVELLER

Welcome to the travel theatre/ where transition is key. — Dami Ajayi, 'On Airports I'
Non-fiction

The Hitchhiker by Emma Wilkins

We’d spent the weekend in Westerway, Tasmania, a town whose population could fit on a large bus. He was waiting on the main street, one bulging pack strapped to his front, another to his back, seemingly unbothered by the load. He was tall and strong with generic good looks. I took one look at him and I knew his story. I knew the second pack belonged to his girlfriend –…

Continue reading
Essay & Review

Where the Spirits Wait: On Kay Ugwuede’s A Substance of Things Unseen by Njoku Nonso

Title: A Substance of Things Unseen Author: Kay Ugwuede Publisher: Invisible Borders Trans-African Project Number of pages: 48 Year of publication: 2019 Category: Travel/Nonfiction Kay Ugwuede’s illuminating travel chapbook, A Substance of Things Unseen, begins in the city of Enugu, at the top of a hill. This she translates into the Igbo language as Enu ugwu: a linguistic performance garbed by seemingly measured emphasis. And this presents a sort of manual to the…

Continue reading
Non-fiction

Rediscovering Happiness at Ebedi by Isaiah Adepoju

Leaving is self-abnegation; something always wants you elsewhere. Once, when I was fifteen, I spent a week away from home. My Mum clutched me tight the afternoon I returned. I’d suffered where I went – starved, wandered, and begged. She knew; I knew; everybody knew. At night, I lay my head on her lap as she popped my pimples. ‘My child has suffered,’ she told my brothers, with her small…

Continue reading
Poetry

To Dwesa and Back by Tony Voss 

For Benjamin I Walk Talk Walking We had an idea to take a walk, gowalking, not a stroll and not a hike, justa walk, going for a walk, knowing youcan stop, feeling the elements: the earth beneath your feet, the rain waiting, the airmoving, the fire waiting. The walkingworld doesn’t pass you by, it comes with you.You’re not driven and if you’re on the rightbearing, you can always rest. Any placecan…

Continue reading
News & Announcement

An African Abroad by Ọlábísí Àjàlá to be republished in October 2022

When he’s not breaking through security to shake hands with Nikita Khrushchev, he is crashing his scooter through a border between Jordan and Israel in the then partitioned Jerusalem, amidst a hail of gunfire, escaping an assassination attempt in Jordan, or dodging the bullets of eager security agents around the Duke of Edinburgh in Sydney. When he’s not trying ‘African ju-ju’ on pretty Russian girls, he’s enjoying a tense audience…

Continue reading
News & Announcement

Kunle Adeyanju: The Biker Who Did an Ajala from London to Lagos

Since the past months, Nigerians online – especially on Twitter – have been quite taken by Kunle Adeyanju, a 44-year-old biker who embarked on a brave, adventurous journey riding from London to Lagos as part of the Rotary International’s “End Polio” campaign.  A widely celebrated feat, he has garnered a large fanbase and praise, including one from the Microsoft co-founder who described him as  ‘incredible‘. He was also conferred with…

Continue reading
Photography, Photography & Art

Walking the Streets of Tunis by Doug Barnard

The camera opens on our guide as he introduces himself and the city he is set to take us through. His name is Doug Bernard and the city is Tunis. Filmed mostly on selfie mode – personalizing the narrative and experience, what you can call the first-person narrative – the video starts right in the centre of Tunis, a few walks away from the Catholic Cathedrale Saint-Vincent-de-Paul de Tunis right…

Continue reading
Non-fiction

Ilé-Ifẹ̀: A Cradle in Crumble by Isaiah Adepoju

Ilé-Ifẹ̀ begins with a boulder, then a crevice. It splinters at the lap, opens into legs, into toes, then rejoins at the hair, the nape. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ rolls and rolls in a way Ibadan doesn’t. Metallurgic: the perfect linguistic alchemy to describe Ilé-Ifẹ̀. From the adjoining road that leads to Ondo, you remember that this place now embodies the migration of the ancient people of Ilé-Ifẹ̀; that this present location of…

Continue reading
Non-fiction

Postscript: The Last Act of Transaction by Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè

Now, thinking about my travels as an art of movement and transaction, I recall the Argentinean author, Luis Jorge Borges, who had a habit of visiting libraries in his childhood to read encyclopaedias. Travel, for me, is another way of engaging in this kind of learning. I often imagine travelling is like browsing through a huge library where many books on different subjects are opened before me all at once. This infinite immensity was the constant imagery in my mind as I rode in a van across landscapes, as I travelled in a speedboat, even as I sat in a plane meditating the brilliance of clouds. 

Continue reading
Poetry

The Dark Green Conifers by Robert Ronnow

The Dark Green Conifers another day in the woods. on Strawberry ridgelooking out over undulating green hills tothe next great wall ridge of mountains. the lastmorning clouds left from last night’s stormhanging in the valley mistily. the sun eventuallyburns them away. the respect between old Paul Karlsen and I continuesto exist. even though he’s a Mormon and I’m a fallenNew Yorker. the work is comparatively easy, liftinghundred pound bags, so…

Continue reading