Olongo Africa, published by Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, is now available for your reading and submitting pleasure.
It’s been a good month for literary publications from the African literary ecosystem. On the 12th, we were introduced to the Imbiza Journal for African Writing from our friends in South Africa. Today we have discovered a new publication from Nigeria published by poet and linguist Kola Tubosun called Olongo Africa.
The Olongo, the orange-cheeked Waxbill bird famous for their call, a type of continuous twittering, is a very common in West Africa. Olongo Africa sees itself as a twittering community of opinion, literature, travelogue, journalism, and topical writing. Unlike in the other bird app Twitter where the loudest voices rule, the new journal fashions itself as a corner of the world where soft but melodious music makes an impact, nevertheless, above the din. Visiting the site, one can already find content to consume with poetry from Romeo Oriogun, a review of Ogadinma by Ukamaka Olisakwe, an essay on JP Clark, and loads more.
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, the magazine’s publisher is no new name to those who follow this site having featured in literary events across the continent like the Ake Festival, Lagos International Poetry Festival, Afrolit Sans Frontières, and the Abuja Litfest. The poet who wrote the collection Edwardsville by Heart: Poetry Travelogue Memoir (2018) was a Morland Writing Scholar.
The new web publication comes under The Brick House Collective new collaboration owned and operated by journalists across the world. We are informed that they will be paying contributors a modest stipend for their submission which is a welcome development that we are seeing in this fast-growing space.
