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Jungian Archetypes and the African Mother: How Authority Forms
In more than one household I have sat in, an argument has ended the same way. Someone older, usually a woman, says one short sentence, and the room puts the fight down. Nobody voted.
Fantasy Novel Review: Aido Hwedo, Bida, and the African Dragon
There is a moment, maybe forty pages into a certain kind of book, when the dragon stops being a dragon.
The Negative Father Archetype in African Myth: Mwindo and Yennenga
Twelve days. That is how long it took a Nyanga bard named Shé-Kárisi Candi Rureke, in 1956, to get through the story of Mwindo — twelve days of chanting and narrating and acting out the parts, with an…
Enkai: Maasai God of Rain, Cattle, and the Two-Coloured Sky
The sentence arrives early in almost every guidebook, documentary voice-over and travel blog: Enkai gave the Maasai all the cattle on earth, so every cow in the world is really theirs.
Unkulunkulu: The Zulu First Ancestor Who Came From the Reeds
In a church in KwaZulu-Natal, a congregation sings a name older than the hymn carrying it. Two valleys away, an elder uses that same word in an ordinary sentence about where the family came from.
Electronic Music Production and the Orisha: Three Ways a Sacred Sound Ends Up in a Track
You have met the word already, probably without being told what it was. Orisha, or Orixá, or Òrìs̀à with the tone marks left in, sitting in an artist name, a track title, a label's catalogue.
Oba, Emir, and Ballot Box: Traditional Authority in Contemporary Nigerian Politics
The convoy stops before the ballot does. In the months before a Nigerian general election, a candidate's motorcade turns off a highway in Ile-Ife, or Sokoto, or a town in Anambra State, and the…
Àbíkú and Ọgbanje: Reading African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling
The advice always arrives at the same moment. You have just finished The Famished Road, or Freshwater, or the chapter of Things Fall Apart where a stone comes out of the ground, and someone tells you…
Àbíkú and Ịgbanje: African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling, and the Label That Almost Explained It Away
Okagbue Uyanwa digs beside the orange tree while the compound watches. Ezinma, nine years old, has led the men down toward the stream and back again, in no hurry, and then pointed at the ground.
Magical Realism, Abiku, and Ogbanje: African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling
In most bookshops, Ben Okri's The Famished Road sits a shelf or two from One Hundred Years of Solitude, filed under the same two words: magical realism.