Adaeze Okonkwo
One of the storytelling voices behind African Belief — every piece below carries their name because it was researched, framed, and checked in their voice.
Pieces by Adaeze
Orisha on Screen: What a Film Adaptation Owes a Tradition
Row F, forty minutes into the show. A character says a name — Ọya, maybe, or Èṣù — and somewhere in the dark a phone lights up and somebody types it into a search box, half-spelled, no diacritics.
Adinkra Symbols in Stone: How Ghana Buries Its Great Men
Drive west out of Accra along the coast road, past Kasoa and the roadside furniture stalls, and at Gomoa Mpota you come to a building that does not look like a tomb.
Adinkra Symbols: What Akan Cloth Says on a City Wall
The first one most people meet is a curl of black lines that looks like a knot tied in the air: two hooks facing away from each other, joined at the base.
African Mythology in Fiction: How the Story Reaches the Page
In a Yoruba household, a story does not start on its own. The teller calls out "Àlọ́ o" — roughly, a tale — and the room has to answer "Àlọ́" before anything happens.
Black Folklore: Why the Teller Keeps Stepping Out of the Story
Before the tale begins, the teller says a strange thing. We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
Children of Blood and Bone: What a Film Adaptation Announcement Can and Can't Do for Orïsha
The advice comes around with every trailer, and it came around again with this one: a big enough movie will finally teach the world about African religion.
Children of Blood and Bone: African Fantasy Fiction and Yoruba Belief
Children of Blood and Bone is not a book about Yoruba religion. That is a strange thing to say about the best-known work of African fantasy fiction of the last decade — a novel whose magic clans are…
African Mythology and Oral Tradition: Reading the Form
There is a question that comes near the end of almost every reading. A hand goes up somewhere in the middle rows, and someone asks the novelist where the magic came from — as though African mythology…
Magical Realism and Jungian Archetypes in African Storytelling
In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.