Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, speaking in Glossing Africa, questions the practice of briefly defining, footnoting, or otherwise clarifying the usage of indigenous terms in one’s fiction writing: There’s a part of me that just deeply resents the fact that there’re many parts of the world where the fiction that comes from there is read as anthropology rather than as literature. And increasingly that kind of anthropological reading then means that . . . you’re explaining your world rather than inhabiting your world.
The BBC has launched a Lagos-based online news service that delivers news exclusively in West African pidgin English — a mixture of English, local languages and street slang — spoken by millions of people across ethnic and cultural lines in the region. Reporters will be stationed in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon.
At The Republic, SOAS Ph D candidate Oreva Olakpe documents “parallel institutional arrangements Nigerian migrants have established in China,” including “an informal justice system” that “facilitates dispute resolution at a micro level — which, practically, the Chinese government cannot enforce due to the clandestine existence of many individuals.”
Bruce Humes 