A Country of Extra Ordinary Ghosts

James Currey, co-founder of the Oxford-based James Currey Publishers, who, together with Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, launched African Writers Series in 1962 decides to remember Rex Collins, the publisher of Wole Soyinka.

Jens-Petter Kjemprud, the Ambassador of Norway to Nigeria, recounts an encounter with Wole Soyinka, while he was in exile.

South African filmmaker, Mandla Dube, remembers how Wole Soyinka refused to take a selfie with him.

Nigerian journalist and culture promoter, Jahman Anikulapo, writes about travelling to Haiti, with Wole Soyinka.

Every page of the anthology, bears a recollection, an eulogy and love and admiration, celebrating Wole Soyinka at 87th!

Wole Soyinka: Encounters with the Grey Maverick is the chronicles of many, who believe that Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka is deathless.

Wole Soyinka: Encounters with the Grey Maverick

Saving Mungo Park

Hip Hop is Only for Children

The Lagos Cuban Jazz Club

The Beginning of Everything Colourful

The Space Bazaar

The Strangers of Braamfontein

Osas is a young and impressionable Nigerian painter, who escapes poverty and hardship in Benin City, into the chaotic and crime-ridden belly of Johannesburg, through the help of a travel agent. But to survive, he must live a life of adventure and spontaneity and criminality.

As Osas walks through the corners of Braamfontein, a suburb of Johannesburg, he encounters the Nigerian Janus-faced Chike, the Zimbabwean Machiavellian Chamai, the pawky Papi, the duplicitous Ruth, the saavy April and the fiendish Detectives Jiba and Booysen, leading to a bolt from the blue.

The Strangers of Braamfontein follows the lives of immigrants: the Nigerian drug-dealers, assassins, prostitutes, scammers, cultists, the Ethiopian human traffickers, the Congolese kidnappers, down to the Zimbabwean male-to-male prostitutes and drunks, the Malawian forgers, Angolan and Francophone syndicates, down to the South African blackmailers and gangs.

Laced with Nigerian and South African ethos, the sights and sounds of Braamfontein are subtly painted in this narrative of well-orchestrated and stereotyped characters.

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