Brittle Paper

3 weeks ago | brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro

Griots are oral historians who transmit history and ideas through stories, poetry, and music. For centuries they have passed on stories of Kaabu, an influential precolonial kingdom in West Africa. The stories cover its rise and spectacular destruction of its capital, Kansala. Now, new archaeological work is uncovering the remains of that legendary city in present-day Guinea-Bissau. According to NPR, the excavation is being led by Sirio Canós-Donnay, an archaeologist at the University of Valencia.

4 weeks ago | brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro

Pope Francis passed away on April 21, 2025 and the funeral held a week later. There has been mourning worldwide for a man who many believed to be a spiritual leader and who affected the lives many beyond the walls of the Church. For some African writers—Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Yvonne Owuor, and Enuma Okoro—they remember the Pope specifically as a reader, who loved poetry and believed that writers help us think about the human condition and draw nearer to truth.

1 month ago | brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro

(V. Y. Mudimbe passed away on April 22, 2025.)I took a course with V. Y. Mudimbe while I was a doctoral student at Duke University sometime in the early 2010s. It was a course on Existentialism. We read Descartes and Husserl, but much of the semester was spent on a page-by-page study of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and his play No Exit. It was an intense course, once a week for about three hours, in a sun-drenched classroom on East Campus. Mudimbe taught in the Comparative Literature department.

1 month ago | brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro

Omenana released Issue 32 on March 31, and while the stories are great, the images deserve real attention too. For over a decade, Omenana has been pairing short fiction with visual art, and in that time, they’ve developed a signature feel. Some readers treat artwork in stories as simple decoration, an afterthought that just mirrors what’s already in the text. That’s fine. But those who know, know: the graphic work is its own act of world-building. It does serious work in storytelling.

2 months ago | brittlepaper.com | Ainehi Edoro

Anansi’s Gold by Yepoka Yeebo (Bloomsbury) is one of those books you approach the way you would a Netflix true crime series. You grab your popcorn and soft drinks, sink into the comfiest spot on the couch, and prepare to lose your entire Friday night because bingeing is the only option. The book tells the unbelievably wild tale of Dr. John Ackah Blay-Miezah—or “our man,” as he is sometimes affectionately, sometimes derisively called.