Features and Essays

memories
In Absence, You Find Presence: What “My Father’s Shadow” Taught Me About Remembering

Remembering isn’t just about freezing time, it’s about letting memory evolve, the way grief turns…

Nollywood
Nollywood and Its Complicated Relationship with the Oscars

Whether or not an Oscar ever comes, Nollywood’s challenge is to chart a path that…

animation
Animating Africa: Inside the Rise and Realities of African Animation

Experiences vary across the continent, but the perspectives of these animators and filmmakers provide valuable…

Surnames
Whose Name Do You Bear? The Politics of Surnames and the Erasure of African Women

The erasure of African women through surnames is not tradition, and it is not culture.…

Macondo Literary Festival
Macondo Literary Festival 2025: East Africa’s Literary Vanguard Holds Its Fifth Edition

Macondo Literary Festival is now one of Africa’s essential cultural rendezvous, a yearly promise kept…

music videos
Are Music Videos Relevant in Afro-Pop Today?

Today, music videos in Afro-Pop no longer mainly serve to reach new audiences. Instead, they…

Marketing
Noise or Attention: What Really Sells Nollywood Films?

What separates fleeting attention from lasting impact is not merely scale, spectacle, or formula, but…

Labubu dolls
How Capitalists Are Exploiting Us Through ‘Must-Haves’

What Labubu dolls, AI therapists, and Stanley Cups reveal is not just the power of…

To Kill a Monkey
To Kill a Conversation: Nollywood, Criticism, and the Culture of Silence

The danger of the constant antagonistic resistance to criticism is that it fosters a shallow…

Nigeria
Nigeria’s Class Problem and the Nepotism Debate

Nigeria has a serious class problem. As with all such societies, the controlling oligarchy is…