FORTUNATE TRAVELLER

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Nigeria

Poetry

Nostalgia by John Chinaka Onyeche

Nostalgia (when we passed through Etche) Through the frigid terrain our car sliced Each palm, once a stranger now beckons and sways A wayfarer’s weary feet, trumpet the long-awaited return My gaze, fixed on the window, captures fleeting snapshots. Home, too, yearns for the nomad’s triumphant homecoming As streets whisper tales of an embrace long overdue Here, I declare it, this is home, and I am its herald What rivals…

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Poetry

In the Middle of Third Mainland Bridge by Jide Badmus

In The Middle of Third Mainland Bridge The danfo is a hub of abnormalities.  This one is being towed by another.  In this mobile mini-market, we jostle for space, throw jabs of tonguein search of quiet. The day has taken its tollbut I must endure this torture. A bug crawls on the shawl across a woman’s shoulder – a man by the windowsquashes another. There is an uproar!We fling the bus driver  under vocal…

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Poetry

songs of the garden city by Nket Godwin

Looking Back(for Oyorokoto)  I turn to search your footsteps from acres of solitude away,to listen to the song of your tide singing home the fishers.but you are gone from me, the way ocean of becoming,its tributaries always beckoning flotsam of dreams,constantly wash young pebbles off your brine shore. I, whom survival weaned from your breast, am underfed.I sleep and wake in Obio-Akpor, in Ikwerre, still starved of language in my State,the…

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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…

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Essay & Review

‘And The Truth Shall Set You Free’: A Review of Yinka Elujoba’s Collective Truth by Adebayo Adegbite

Title: Collective Truth Author: Yinka Elujoba Publisher: Invisible Borders Trans-African Project Number of pages: 36 Year of publication: 2016 Category: Travel/Nonfiction The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there will be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. – Susan Sontag, The Benefactor. In reading Yinka Elujoba’s Collective Truth, it is important to understand where it is…

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