Features and Essays

VeryDarkMan
Who Needs the Government When You Can Tag Someone Else?

The ultimate measure of a functioning society is not how many generous citizens it can…

Nollywood
For How Long Can We Sustain This Thing of Ours?: On Bootstrapping and the Current Iteration of Nollywood

Nollywood filmmakers have proven their capacity for innovation under constraint, time and again, but there…

justice
Justice Needs an Audience: How Nigeria Turned Punishment Into Content

Once punishment becomes something to be watched rather than merely witnessed, the question is no…

workshop
The Workshop and the Invention of the Contemporary Reader

Yet what survives these intellectual revolutions within workshop culture, I believe, is rarely their philosophical…

African cinema
African Cinema’s Long Road to Freedom

African cinema can be regional, sure, just like any other cinema. But it is also…

Nollywood
How Contemporary Nollywood Uses Humour to Both Expose and Excuse the Politics of Marriage

Nollywood is mostly at its best when it deploys humour to laugh at retrograde values…

Afrobeats
After the Peak: What Is Next for Afrobeats?

Afrobeats to the World was a movement that had strong interest from important places, and…

Mavo
Zaylevelten, Mavo: The Case for the Nouveau Underground

Mavo’s generation takes creative inspiration from hiding: they’re almost elitist in the use of coded…

Afrobeats
On Afrobeats to the World: Where Is the Line Between Evolution and Identity Crisis?

Afrobeats’ current condition reflects the tensions inherent in global success. As a sound, it continues…

African music
There is Nothing New Under the Sun (That African Music Hasn’t Already Lived Through)

Is Afrobeats losing its creative spark, or is it in a decrescendo? These questions go…