Africa
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Teju Cole Made You a Mixtape
This is a Lasgidi of the mind, representing a meld of many club nights in Lagos and alternate Lagoses through the past decade. It is a cauldron of that vertiginous self-confidence that anyone who knows any Nigerians knows well. Put…
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The Rumpus Interview with Kara Richardson Whitely
Author Kara Richardson Whitely discusses her new memoir, Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds, surviving food addiction and the trauma of being molested, and what comes next.
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Nollywood in Vogue
Nearly a decade ago, Binvayanga Wainaina wrote an essay for Granta that changed his whole life. Now, he looks at the interior of African publishing, the landscape of literature on the continent, and the “Nollywoodification of the book market”: “I am least…
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Finding Kurtz
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is driven by the search and discovery of Kurtz, the man turned mad by Africa. Kurtz is the pale white colonizer who rapes the continent, is also worshiped by the native population, and provides fodder…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: love/Woman/thirty
They did not tell us that love was not something you could throw away once finished. That it would remain on us like blackened scars, underneath blouses and in those places only we could see.
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Here Be Dragons
For anyone from the global fringe, the flattening expectation created by a cultural stereotype is pervasive and familiar.
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Minot
The Rumpus talks with Susan Minot about MFA programs, Joseph Kony, and throwing out big chunks of text.
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The Rumpus Interview with Douglas Cruickshank
Writer, editor, and photographer Douglas Cruickshank talks about retiring to Uganda, his new book Somehow: Living on Uganda Time, and the perils of writing about Africa as a Westerner.
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“Black to the Future”
Black to the future was/is a radical, dangerous, and daring dream—an impossibility. Science fiction and fantasy (sf&f) is a rehearsal of the impossible, an ideal realm for redefinition and reinvention. For Africans and their descendants in the diaspora, decolonizing our…
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Feminist Victories You Haven’t Heard About
In a nation as solipsistic as the US, we don’t hear much about politics in other countries. This is doubly true when it comes to woman-centered movements, and triply true when those movements are in Africa. In an opinion piece…
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Caine Prize Controversy Continues
Prominent Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sparked outrage in the African literary community last week with comments she made about the Caine Prize, a prestigious annual award for African writers. Adichie said many things in her fascinating, no-nonsense Boston Review interview…
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“We Should Revere Him Better“
A fantastic essay at The New Inquiry inspects the recently deceased Chinua Achebe’s place in the Western literary canon. In an interview a few years ago, Norman Rush was talking about the ways he was influenced by African writers, and he mentioned that “No non-African…