Are our stories accessible to their primary audience? Whose interests are served by placing our stories behind paywalls, not to mention in print anthologies?
By Afrocritik’s Literature Board
As 2025 draws to a close, we find ourselves reflecting on the year’s literary events in the short fiction genre—or, perhaps, the lack thereof. Fiction was published widely, yes, yet it feels as though not much has happened. This is due to a number of reasons.
First, Africa’s most prestigious prize for short fiction, the Caine Prize, was not awarded this year. The second—which, in fact, does some good—is that many of the stronger short fiction pieces published this year appeared in print rather than online. Particularly in East and Southern Africa, there seems to be a resurgence of print magazines and anthologies.
Good as such a development is in social terms, it raises questions about accessibility in the digital world we live in. The major questions we are now asking are: are our stories accessible to their primary audience? Whose interests are served by placing our stories behind paywalls, not to mention in print anthologies?
This, of course, raises further questions of cultural capital, economic power, and the continent’s much-remarked political failures. The arts remain massively underfunded in Africa, and it shows in writers’ reliance on foreign institutions to publish and thrive (and neither they nor Western platforms can be faulted, to be clear; the problem sits at home, not outside).
Recent political developments in the United States have not helped matters for African literature, at least in the short run. Perhaps it is time to face ourselves and develop our own institutional channels of literary legitimacy, as Ehirim argues in his essay, “Niggas in Paris”, to a level where they begin to formulate prestige both at home and abroad.
Nonetheless, a number of positives deserve acknowledgement. East Africa is becoming increasingly visible in much of the short fiction being published. Nigeria still has the numbers, despite the tough home turf. The young Zambian magazine, Ubwali, is bringing unheard voices to the fore. Lolwe has the widest reach in terms of the diversity of fiction writers it publishes. It is also encouraging to see platforms like The Republic creating space for short fiction. Speculative fiction, meanwhile, has become a source of purchasing power for a younger generation of writers.
It is important to note that this list is limited to English-language fiction from Africa. This will remain the case until we begin to synergise more intentionally with literary translators and language experts. With that caveat, we present Afrocritik’s 50 Remarkable Short Stories of 2025, in no particular order and with no claims to exclusivity.
“Descent” (Clarkesworld Magazine) – Wole Talabi
Set in Wole Talabi’s co-orchestrated Sauuti universe, “Descent” follows Gwaato on a distant future planet with dangerous atmospheric storms. The lower one goes into the planet, this being precisely the reason why the inhabitants live in the upper reaches. However, our hero decides to volunteer in a team set to map the lower planet. The ensuing story throws economic, physical, and philosophical implications into a life-and-death adventure.
“The Return” (Omenana) — Jen Thorpe
In this thought-provoking story, Georgia and Lou become new parents in a new, hard-fought-for world where natural procreation is disallowed, rendered impossible, even by the government of the day. With the arrival of a pre-programmed child, Georgia realises that the child will change the dynamics of her family life in ways she has not planned for.
“Voicemail” (Joyland Magazine) — Abuchi Modilim
This is a thought-provoking story about the trauma of the diaspora. It details a young man’s intense search for identity and belonging through a passionate, and retrospectively meaningless, exploration of his sexuality. In the end, he finds some respite in his own ability to look inwards into his own doings and undoings.
“I Can See You” (Lolwe) — Immaculate Halla
This is a somewhat gothic tale told by a ghost. Add to that also a classic haunted house tale, and you have an adrenaline ride. What makes the story better than the typical haunted story out there is the author’s ability to explore individual emotional struggles of the characters, which manifest into the haunting itself.
“The Language We Have Learned to Carry in Our Skin” (Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V) (Print) — Shingai Kagunda
Shingai Kagunda’s story is perhaps this anthology’s most intellectually aggressive work, transforming political critique into corporeal terror. The parasite metaphor risks over-determination; one is always wary of fiction that explains itself too eagerly, but Kagunda’s tactile precision rescues the narrative from didacticism. By locating neo-colonial inheritance in the skin, she bypasses abstraction and forces history into the body. Memory, here, is consumed. And the achievement of the story is its refusal to allow readers the comfort of distance.
“Mr Freeman” (Chestnut Review) — Mhembeteur Jeremiah
The plot of this story develops a relationship between a neurodivergent boy, Monday, and his new teacher, the titular Mr. Freeman, who shows belief and affection for him, and for whom he develops a massive crush. The remarkable point of this story is the voice of Monday, which is curiously underdeveloped, and thus he talks in weird constructions and ellipses. The end of the story gives us the realisation that those who offer others help also have their own persistent demons and struggles.
“Sweet Meat” (Johannesburg Review of Books) — Megan Ross
Notable South African writer Megan Ross published a haunting short story this year about a woman whose physical size and large appetite gave her notiriety. . Initially admired and even desired by her husband Gabriel for her generous proportions, her relationship soon reveals a darker underside. What begins as devotion slowly transforms into control, as Gabriel isolates her, reshapes her life and body, and enforces restrictive eating rituals. This is a fictional dystopia on body positivity and the eco-dietary movements currently going on.
“The Anatomy of a Boy Who Never Became a Man” (Porter House Review) — Enyinna Nnabuihe
This is a story becoming or, for that matter, unbecoming. This story shows us what it feels like to struggle with one’s gender identity in a highly religious, conservative setting.
“Mgbeojikwe” (The Republic) — Ani Kayode Somtochukwu
A short, slow-burning melancholy tale of how societal constraints can keep people from living the life they could have lived. It’s a small village in Nigeria in the 20th century, and two men who love each other are forced to publicly put paid to their feelings towards each other. One marries a woman, the other (the titular character) remains unmarried into old age, for he cannot think of living a false life.
“Piss Corpse” (ZamaShort) — Muthi Nhlema
Charlotte, a Peace Corps volunteer from Iowa, US, arrives in Malawi to teach English and gets hit by culture shock at every turn. Many of her misconceptions about Africa create a lot of situational comedy in the story. A good read.
“Lagos Avenue” (The Republic) — Manasseh Azure Awuni
A riveting story that begins with a meeting between a man and a call girl on an infamous street in Accra. The ensuing story revolves around the psychological, economic, and impersonal world of sex work.
“We Begin Where Infinity Ends” (Clarkesworld Magazine) — Somto Ihezue
The prolific speculative fiction writer, Ihezue, came out this year with a philosophical story of a group navigating a world on the brink. It is interesting how Ihezue handles the relationships between people on one hand, and between people and Things.
“Not Like Other Boys” (Isele Magazine) — Josiah Ikpe
Similar to Enyinna Nnabuihe’s story above, this coming-of-age story explores gender and sexual identity in a society that crucifies non-conformity.
“Conversation in Transit” (The Republic) — E.C. Osondu
A typical E.C. Osondu story, this story’s plot (if we can call it one) happens entirely on a journey and involves two Africans having a conversation on an Uber ride. It’s an interesting conceit to explore the undercurrents of the African diaspora in America, and Osondu handles it well, using mostly dialogue.
“On The Stoep” (Doek!) — Simorne Januarie
A heartbreaking story of resilience and the power of free will in changing life’s course. Januarie’s “On The Stoep” tells the story of one family under siege in the hands of a militant, choleric father, and a mother too traumatised to seek help. After the arrival of an estranged sister, Chanté decides to steer her life’s boat.
“A Brief History Of Berlin In Ice Skates” (Hopkins Review) — Elnathan John
The story begins with the arrival of a Nigerian in Berlin to see a Nigerian friend living in the city. In Elnathan John’s deft hands, a story seemingly about skating reveals things beyond the precarious difficulty of learning skating late. The learning of skating here is a metaphor for a necessary adjustment in Diaspora, where the narrator acknowledges that one has to find legitimate ways to assimilate.
“Wrong Portraits” (Isele Magazine) — Frances Ogamba
In deceptively simple language, Ogamba renders the aftermath of Ikeobi’s death, his wife’s ritual of grief, and his family’s attempts to create versions of a son they did not fully know. Drama bursts forth on the surface, but beneath that lie attempts to make sense of a complicated man’s life after his early demise.
“Njugu” (Tomorrow I Will Be Here Anthology) (Print) — Natasha Muhanji
Natasha W. Muhanji’s “Njugu” operates with more inward authority. Here, the drama is consciousness itself, how memory presses inward, how identity forms through repetition and fracture. The peanut becomes an emblem, Njugu, as the author so recalls a lineage of interior fiction that values texture over declaration. Muhanji’s strength lies in restraint as she refuses the explanatory urge that may weaken much contemporary short fiction.
“Bridge Gringo” (Adi Magazine) — Innocent Chizaram Ilo
Writing as activism. A Toni Morrison epigraph on water and its perfect memory acts as a skeleton for this genre-bending note on class and environment — the many ways we contribute to its degradation, both consciously and unconsciously. We witness — in pointedly, precise terms — the dehumanisation of the lives at Bridge Gringo, the interplay between myth and reality as exemplified in Kabu’s relationship with the unusual woman, and the persistence of marginal lives to thrive in a world that has deemed them inconsequential.
“Cactiosis” (Agbowo) — Ola Halim
From one of this generation’s most talented practitioners of the short story form comes “Cactiosis”. “Cactiosis” is as psychologically astute as it is imaginatively fecund. Omoye, following a stillbirth, is entangled in the web of grief. She begrudges her husband for minute details, and is compelled to confront the horror of her loss.
“Angry Birds” (Lolwe) — Tony Mochama
Tony Mochama’s “Angry Birds” is a fiction burdened deliberately by history, and by the residue of real men who have already authored too much violence. The figure Hemeti, the current leader of Sudan’s RSF, is a vessel through which the story tests whether imagination can still wrest something human from geopolitical brute fact. Mochama’s strongest gesture is not the luxury he inventories but the pressure he applies between memory and authority, between a pastoral boy and the armored present. The story’s anxiety is palpable, as it questions can African political fiction escape reportage and become myth? Mochama answers cautiously in the same manner, aware that the shadow of power always risks overpowering the sentence.
“The Absence Of Stains” (The Republic) — Yasmine Zohdi
Propriety and bodily autonomy tussle in this story of quiet rebellion. Mariam contends with guilt amidst her exercise of autonomy as she must introspect on the impositions that religion and society make on her body and that of the women around her.
“Aunty Margaret” (Lolwe) — Jekwu Anyaegbuna
The familiar tug between tradition and modernity is represented here. With the inventiveness of the language, characterised by a distinct narrative voice and motion, Anyaegbuna renders it fresh. The riveting story follows the arrival of Aunty Margaret at her brother’s house on a random Wednesday morning.
“Mango Season” (Lolwe) — Piloya Innocent
Finely wrought in descriptive passages and a wonderfully rendered precocious narrative voice, “Mango Season” is seen through the eyes of a young girl, Lama. Set in the thick of the LRA war, Lama and her friend, Petra, discover a sinister plot in their foray into a teacher’s mango groove at break time.
“Chi” (Lolwe) — Obinna Udenwe
Udenwe investigates faith and belief, and what a man must do when presented with that which he fears the most. Bursting with suspense, “Chi” tells the story of a man’s stunning encounter with a strange woman
“International Soul Cultist” (Granta) — Toye Oladinni
Journalist, Bami, begins to see his father through a new lens following the visit of an old family friend. Written in intimate, tender prose, Bami encounters a series of revelations, each new one adding layers to a man he has only known as father. Oladinni asks what it means when the focus is turned away from a journalist’s external subject to his own immediate environment, and what response may be appropriate in the face of such conflicting information.
“Crystal” (Qwani 04) (Print) — Natasha Muhanji
In Crystal, Natasha Muhanji continues her insistent project of mapping interior life. As always her story’s strength lies in pressure, how desire accumulates, how wanting sharpens perception, how urban space becomes a collaborator in coming-of-age rather than a backdrop. Muhanji resists the anxiety of influence by refusing grand gestures as she writes inward, privileging emotional exactitude over any spectacle. “Crystal” is charting how a young consciousness learns to live with its own intensity. The result is a story that earns it through tonal control and moral patience.
“Midnights” (Afrocritik) — David Agyei-Yeboah
Our unnamed narrator is exhausted from the place of lust in his life, yet he pursues it with a ferocious passion. In language that bends and contorts to accommodate the depraved mind of its protagonist, we reach places beyond depravity — to a psychological diagnosis, and perhaps, to redemption.
“Trying Times” (Granta) — Adachioma Ezeano
The ties that bind mothers and daughters are very often tenuous and laden with tension: daughters do not extend as much grace to mothers. Mothers do not know or seek to truly know their daughters. This tension is the primary preoccupation of Ezeano’s quietly devastating tale on the many travails and dimensions of womanhood, and the choices one woman must make in order to survive in a system that is rigged against her.
“Singular Affections” (Afritondo) — Barnabas Karuma
Vividly imagined in wholly original voice, Singular Affections is a tale of love, class and choice. Set in traditional Zimbabwe, Nyasha is at crossroads and must make a choice between Garikai, who may yet save her family from a life of penury, and Tafirei whom her heart truly yearns for.
“The Blue Fighter” (The Shallow Tales Review) — Simbarashe Seteyn Kundizeza
A mother is forced to choose between her husband’s dream and the family’s sustenance. What we see is a powerful, moving story on the cost of dreams. Kundizeza writes on what it means to negotiate tough choices amidst a bleak reality and the sacrifices that must happen for life to thrive.
“Mothers Not Appearing In Search” (Granta) — Joshua Lubwama
Joshua Lubwana’s short story centres on Musa and Fatima, a meditation on naivety and innocence. Lubwana allows the world to be filtered entirely through the consciousness of young Musa, who does not yet possess the language or experience to fully comprehend what he observes.
As readers, we are therefore positioned to do the interpretive labour Musa cannot: to grasp the emotional and moral weight behind his innocent judgments. This is a finely wrought coming-of-age narrative that captures innocence colliding with social reality. It is sensuous and controlled, moving effortlessly between humour and brutality.
“The Boy Who Brought Balloons” (Afrocritik) — Maryam Abdulkarim
At its heart, this story is a portrait of memory and identity shaped by love. The narrator’s recollections of Farouq—from childhood interactions to adult encounters—reveal the subtle power of long-term attachment. The interplay between youthful infatuation and adult responsibility enriches the story, while the nuanced depiction of family influence adds depth and layers.
“Let The Church Say Omen” (Isele Magazine) — Emelda Gwitimah
This short story offers a richly textured portrait of belief, gender, and precarity in contemporary urban Zimbabwe. The story examines how superstition, faith, and inherited rituals become coping mechanisms in a world structured against working-class women through Shumi Bahati. Particularly effective is the use of communal rumour and conditional narration—“if you knew”—which implicates the reader in judgment and misunderstanding.
Equally striking is the non-linear structure: events do not proceed chronologically but surface in fragments, easing us into the character’s history in a manner that is both gentle and disorienting. This form commands attentiveness. It is not a story to be rushed; to read it hastily is to risk overlooking the precision and beauty through which its emotional weight is achieved.
“The Best Way to Eat an Elephant” (Lend Me a Scream Anthology) (Print) — Sonnie Karanja
Karanja’s story operates in the realm of parable, but it avoids the flattening effect that often afflicts metaphor-driven fiction. The elephant in this case is procedural, making what distinguishes the piece from other offerings in the anthology is its refusal of triumphalism, with any progress hinted at, being incremental and unspectacular.
Situated within an anthology shaped entirely by female editors and contributors, the story gains additional resonance as an assertion of collective literary labour in a year dominated by a mini print’s resurgence in Kenya/East Africa. One can be wary of the moral clarity a metaphor-driven short fiction implies, yet Karanja tempers this by grounding struggle in the intimate. The story understands that survival might be a method, learned slowly and practised daily.
“The Boy I Used To Love” (The Shallow Tales Review) — Chika Unigwe
Chika Unigwe explores the uneasy entanglement of love and ambition, and the devastation that follows their collapse. A failed marriage, stalled aspirations, and abandoned plans shape the daily realities of the unnamed narrator and her husband, Egbunike.
The story poses a subtle but unsettling question: what becomes of love when the futures it was meant to sustain no longer exist? In tracing the couple’s emotional erosion, Unigwe suggests that love, like ambition, is not immutable but vulnerable to time, failure, and unmet expectations.
“Fugue” (Ubwali Literary Magazine) —Rigwell Addison Asiedu
“Fugue” is a harrowing and meticulous exploration of religious violence, repression, and fractured selfhood. Rigwell Addison Asiedu writes with visceral precision, rendering trauma as a lifelong condition that metastasises into memory loss, dissociation, and coerced desire.
“Arewa Boys” (Evergreen Review) —Hussani Abdulrahim
“Arewa Boys” is a poignant and unsettling exposé of what it means to live under the weight of constant stereotyping. Written in the first-person plural, the story traces the collective voice of young northern men whose dreams of coming to Lagos to “make it” are swiftly crushed by the city’s hostility and moral contradictions.
The story is especially striking in its humane portrayal of Arewa boys—figures frequently reduced to caricatures or treated with suspicion in Lagos. By centring their inner lives, ambitions, and disappointments, the story resists dehumanisation and insists on their full humanity, reminding readers that they
“Shush” (The AprilCentaur) — Chisom Nsiegbunam
“Shush” is a searing exploration of sexual violence and the brutal economies of silence that sustain it. The story centres on a younger sister sexually assaulted by her sister’s husband, but its true subject is not the act itself, rather the aftermath: the systematic erasure of the victim and the quiet complicity that protects the perpetrator.
Through restraint and emotional precision, the story exposes how family, religion, and social respectability collude to turn violence inward, forcing the woman to bear both trauma and blame alone.
“Ishi Agu (Leaking Tigritude)” (CRAFT) — Kasimma
“Ishi Agu” is a rich tapestry of Igbo culture woven into fiction. The story evokes Chinua Achebe’s style, with such distinct writing that immediately feels rooted in the African indigenous worldview and oral tradition. It blends speculative fiction and magical realism, following a son confronting his father’s death and witnessing his father’s ability to leak into tigritude. “Ishi Agu” interrogates the boundaries between human and animal, life and death, and the spiritual and corporeal.
“Shelter Skelter” (lounloun)— Rigwell Addison Asiedu
“Shelter Skelter” is a tense, immersive story exploring alienation, desire, and the precariousness of belonging. Through Ebo Pinaman, the story interrogates identity, effeminacy, and societal censure, intertwining personal shame with political and religious unrest.
The storytelling alternates between intimate interiority—Ebo’s panic, longing, and humiliation—and the chaotic exterior world, culminating in violent sectarian riots, highlighting the fragility of human control. The story also examines power dynamics, loyalty, and survival, amplifying the tension between cultural expectations, personal freedom, and existential vulnerability.
“Like Skeletons Without Skins” (Southern Humanities Review) — Nwanne Agwu
The opening image of dogs crying at night sets a tone of premonition in “Like Skeletons Without Skins”. Told through Ekene’s eyes, the story vividly captures the anxiety of a child navigating maternal authority, societal warnings, and the unsettling presence of illness and death.
“Back to Base” (Isele Magazine) — Roseline Mgbodichinma
This story is an unflinching exploration of labour, exploitation, and bodily vulnerability. Through Ijeuru’s experiences as a costume performer under Ezra’s control, “Back to Base” exposes the physical and emotional toll of dehumanising work, amplified by gendered power dynamics and societal neglect. Readers feel the itch of ill-fitting costumes, the burn of menstrual pain, and the terror of predatory men. This story is both a critique of systemic oppression and a deeply empathetic character study.
“When Achi Lived in London” (We Shall Remain Anthology) (Print)— Duncan Mwangi
Duncan Mwangi’s contribution to We Shall Remain, the fifth Gerald Klaark anthology, situates itself openly within a tradition where literature is asked to testify as much as to imagine. London functions as a pressure chamber, compressing questions of gender, justice, and belonging into narrative necessity.
The risk, as always with socially committed fiction, is that purpose overwhelms aesthetic tension. Yet Mwangi largely avoids this by grounding his work in lived specificity rather than abstraction. The story then asserts that representation is not an accessory to art but one of its oldest justifications.
“The Prophecy” (The Weganda Review, Issue VII ) — C. I. Atuma
C. I. Atumah’s “The Prophecy” belongs to the tradition of stories in which innocence is educated by proximity to survival. Nonye, though sixteen, occupies the role of what you might call the story’s center of knowing, a consciousness shaped by necessity.
The contrast between her street-earned intelligence and a narrator’s middle-class insulation risks sentimentality, yet Atumah largely avoids this by refusing to sanctify the hardship. The story’s power lies in its refusal to convert suffering into virtue; as it asks an older literary question: who truly sees the world, and at what cost does that seeing come?
“Dinosaurs Once Lived Here” (Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V) (Print) — Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu’s story is the most overt act of imaginative rebellion in Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V, is also its most dangerous. By assigning narration to the god of drunkenness, Ndlovu embraces excess, linguistic, moral, and mythic, recalling the carnivalesque energies in writers who dare to disorder.
The Noah’s Ark inversion is clever, and it is also a challenge to inherited moral hierarchies. Yet, the story succeeds because it does not lean on allegory alone. Ndlovu understands that myth survives not through reverence but through mutation.
“The Vow” (We Shall Remain (The Fifth Gerald Kraak Anthology)(Print) — Liza Smith
Liza Smith’s “The Vow” situates itself within the Gerald Kraak tradition of ethical confrontation, where narrative exists to reckon. The story’s governing force is a woman’s decision to claim agency in full knowledge of its costs. You might describe this as a drama of will, one in which the character’s power lies not in the outcome but in resolve.
The story’s gravity is in its refusal to soften consequence as justice is not guaranteed, only action. Within an anthology committed to gender, resistance, and sexuality, “The Vow” asserts that autonomy itself is a radical act, and that literature’s task is to bear witness without diluting the moral weight of choice.
“The Clans” — (Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V) (Print) — Tonny Ogwa
Tonny Ogwa’s “The Clans” undertakes an audacious imaginative experiment: an Africa that defeats conquest but succumbs to belief. This is a story about the belatedness of resistance, and the idea that victory over armies does not guarantee sovereignty over meaning. The spiritual parasite is Ogwa’s most effective invention, suggesting that ideas colonise more efficiently than guns.
The story’s combustion comes from the collective realisation that power has been siphoned willingly. In proposing a return to ancestral force, Ogwa courts danger, but it is a danger inseparable from myth-making. A fierce inquiry into what sovereignty would have demanded—and what it might still demand.
“Much More Than a Pet” (EVENT Magazine) (Print)— Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu
In “Much More Than a Pet”, a family’s fragile peace is unsettled by the arrival of Chakulu, a mysterious, charismatic handyman who becomes the father’s unlikely confidant. But Chakulu does not come alone: he brings with him Ajibo, a strangely perceptive turkey that transcends a mere bird.
Told through the observant eyes of the family’s eldest daughter, the narrative unfolds in a Nigerian household where tensions simmer beneath the surface. The mother’s suspicion, the father’s blind loyalty, and the daughters’ curiosity collide as Ajibo’s presence grows increasingly unsettling. What begins as a story about companionship and gratitude soon spirals into a gripping exploration of grief, spirituality, and the unspoken bonds that transcend the human world.
“Mr Duiker Sang the Blues” (Johannesburg Review of Books) — Dyondzo Kwinika
This award-winning story is about Mr Duiker, a poor, aging man who spends his days singing and listening to blues music. Written in clipped, elliptical style, this is a poignant story about music, devotion, and the bonds of love.
Honorable Mentions
- “To Be A Woman Is To Be Without A Name” (Flash Fiction Online) — Chidera Solomon Anikpe
- “To Moult Or Not” (Ubwali Magazine) — Chideraa Ike-Akaenyi
- “Where Are You and Where Is My Money” (A Public Space) — Ucheoma Onwutuebe
- “Prerequisites for the Creation of a Possible Predicted World” (Clarkesworld Magazine) — Chisom Umeh
- “The Fog” (Johannesburg Review of Books) — Eckard Smuts
- “On Sundays, We Eat Rice and Lie” (The Thoughts Archive Substack) — Tomilola Adejumo