Next year is the big year of Nigerian fiction, not only because the country’s no. 1 literary prize, the NLNG, would be awarded for fiction, but because I also believe 2025 will be a pivotal year of our fiction ushering a new age of Nigerian writing, that is already teeming with a new generation of writers. A new age which had bubbled and grew from interactions borne on the Internet circa 2010 till date, graduated, and seen a lot of thinkers and writing icons sprout on the homefront.
This dispatch will be short as it’s already the last day of the year 2024 and as I’d like to share with you our last publications of the year. Come next year, Afapinen will be very invested in what happens with the NLNG Prize for Literature, so subscribe now—with the button below this paragraph—to get the latest in book reviews and podcasts we shall put out in the coming months. In shorter words: “we will be there,” at every step.
In April I wrote an essay about why I started Afapinen, where I said everything is criticism and quoted Leo Tolstoy’s famous “All great literature is either of two stories. And although I thought it’d be a slow year for the magazine, we still manage to put out work and saw our stats shoot up. Our most reads for the year include Abah Onoja’s essay/listicle “Sade – Sublime & Ageless: A Selection of 10 Best Listens” (the no. 1 most read), Emmanuel Esomnofu’s essay “Lagos, Their Lagos,” Nzube Nlebedim’s “The Defeat of the Primary,” and “The Restless Muse of Umar Abubakar Sidi.” Other essays from last year managed to sneak in, toppling even this year’s most read essays, like “Shallipopi: Afrobeats’ New Whiz kid Trying to Invent a Subgenre,” and Bestman Michael Osemudiamen’s “Much Ado About the Criticism of Fourth Generation Nigerian Poetry.”
Our short stories are evergreen always: when it’s said Èkó ò ní bàjéyou will find this short story “Swipe Right to Cancel” by Adeyeye Okikijesu to embody that ethos. Sa’id Sa’ad’s “Qusumbi” remains refreshingly folkloric and beautiful in its exploration of djinn possession. Check our fiction section here to explore the catalogue.
We had the pleasure of having Ayodeji Ajibola as in-house music writer intern, who wrote a few short music essays, his last been on Olamide’s latest EP: “Olamide’s Art of Longevity In Ikigai Vol. 1.” ICYMI, we have curated the essays from last year on “The Debates of Fourth Generation Nigerian Poetry” for you to catch up the discourse.
And for our end of the year treat or December dispatches are this very interesting, rich, and engaging poetry conversation between Njoku Nonso and O-Jeremiah Agbaakin (a lot of quotable quotes here) in “Meaningful Art Carries the Risk of Sounding Obscure”; Emmanuel Esomnofu’s essay about his early romance with reggae, and on grooming his dreadlocks, with a touch of the politics of black hair, in “Wanted Dread or Alive”; Jamila Abbas’ beautiful poem “The City Is Alive Inside Me”; and “Coming In From the Cold: I” a dispatch essay by me, on Nigerian poetry in 2024, and some bit of Africanfuturism.
Hurray to 2024.