FORTUNATE TRAVELLER

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Badagry

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Richard Lander and the Travelling Polygamist by Femi Osofisan

Tableau 1 [Two narrators – Lander and Pasko – come onto the stage, bringing their dairies.] Lander: In 1825, Hugh Clapperton, a navy captain, was commissioned by the British government to explore the area of the ‘Dark Continent’ lying just east of the Cape Coast, and travel up to Sokoto, then capital of the Fulani Empire established by Sultan Othman dan Fodio. Pasko: Clapperton succeeded in reaching Sokoto, but he…

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Poetry

Lagos Pastiches – Two Poems by Adeeko Ibukun

          Coming to Lagos The landscape is first within. But the stream of crab buses makes calls into spaces, perches for gregarious birds. One laying on you as awareness. The bodies are hurried motion, blending through distance. The metrics on a dioptra are found vocabularies, motioned eloquence articulating the depths and meters; hoary metals troubling through a climb: the arcing ebb towards the Island. Then he is welcomed by the…

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