₦airaland Forum

microlayabout:
Maka Why na?

Leave her o

Lleigh:
What date in January will this start divepen

January 15

​

Sefi Atta prepares to release a book of her selected works soon.
In her words on her Facebook page, she said, ' Here it is – Sefi Atta: Selected Plays – 16 years of playwriting, 8 selected plays and 482 pages of family drama!
Special thanks to John R. Wilkinson, Sue Tyley, Sarah Seewoester Cain and Fauzi Fahm for critical feedback, editing and designs.
I will announce my book launch and play premieres in Lagos next year.
Cheers,
Sefi'
Also she said that the work had really taken her time and had worn her out. That makes awaiting the book exciting. What do you think we should expect?


https://olofoforeview./2016/12/08/sefi-attah-prepares-to-launch-book-soon/

Akposb:
Cool. Could you enlighten more on how these people were selected.

They sent in their stories - Novel(synopsis though but about 10k words) to be selected.

​Nigerians have shown themselves strong as 11 of them were shortlisted in Miles Morland Foundation. They were the top ranking country as 11 out of the 22 shortlisted were Nigerians. Infact South African which seems to trail after them has 4 people nominated. That is an achievement that can't be overlook. Despite the hard work to make sure the best people were chosen, the organiser were really impressed by the talents displayed and really commended their effort in making it work. However, they expressed their disappointment in the fact that only one Nonfiction writer was chosen for the competition and they are encouraging writers to tell more of African stories.
In her word, Miles Morland said" Our only disappointment is that, although we had a number of non-fiction submissions, only one made it to the short list. We are actively trying to encourage non-fiction, Africans telling Africa’s story.”
The decision on who the winner would be made on 12th December by the carefully selected Judges- Ellah Wakatama Allfrey (from Zimbabwe, who will in the chair), Femi Terry (from Sierra Leone who will serve as the assistant) and (Muthoni Garland from Kenya). Each of the winner would be given £18000. Find below a list of the shortlisted ones.
Abdul Adan – Somalia
Jekwu Anyaegbuna – Nigeria
Ayesha Harruna Attah – Ghana
Rotimi Babatunde - Nigeria
Dayo Forster – Gambia
Amy Heydenrych – S Africa
Abubakar Ibrahim – Nigeria
Nneoma Ike-Njoku – Nigeria
Julie Iromuanya – Nigeria
Hamse Ismail - Somalia
William Ifeanyi Moore – Nigeria
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi – S Africa
Nick Mulgrew – S Africa
Otosirieze Obi-Young - Nigeria
Okwiri Oduor – Kenya
Adeola Opeyemi - Nigeria
Olawale Olayemi – Nigeria
Troy Onyango – Kenya
Mary Ononokpono – Nigeria
Koye Oyedeji - Nigeria
Bryony Rheam – Zimbabwe
Sandisile Tshuma – Zimbabwe


https://olofoforeview./2016/12/08/nigerians11-shortlisted-for-18000-in-miles-morland-scholarship/

Tallesty1:
My problem with feminists is that when they contest in something and lose to men, they automatically conclude that they lost because they're women.

I was talking with one the other day and she said that a woman cannot become president in Nigeria because Nigeria men hate women and I asked.

"Are Igbos women? Why is it difficult for them to become president in Nigeria?"

It's simple, they don't plan well.

Clinton lost because Trump did something better.

Adichie should stop wailing and return home if she's comfortable with Trump being American president.

I will agree with this

thesicilian:
Nigerians should leave Americans alone to govern themselves the way they like. You'll leave your country in tatters and go and be blowing grammar in another man's country. Is it not because they too good care of their own that you found it desirable to go and live in?

Since they are there they have to fight for their own o.

xnsandrxns:
Maybe Americans are not so smart as we thought
Maybe they've just been waiting for someone to champion their shallowness
Let's see how things unfold
Let's hope they've not elected their own version of Buhari
Someone being propelled by hatred

Hmmm. This is insightful.

Congrats

Three Nigerians Made it to the longlist of PEN America.
While Helen Oyeyemi's What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and Igoni Barrett's Blackass were nominated for PEN Open Book Award ($5,000): For an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2016; Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things made it for PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000): For a book of essays published in 2016 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.

Read the full list at



https://olofoforeview./2016/12/08/three-nigeriansteju-cole-igoni-barrett-and-helen-oyeyemi-made-pen-american-longlist/

LONJITARLE:
So is Nigeria bro.

Lol... But there, there is freedom of speech even after the speech.

ccffwx:
Adichie hit the truths that humanity has been running from. We know it but don't say it and don't address it.

That's the truth. Most of us scream it out in our minds, bringing depression on ourselves and frustration at others.

LONJITARLE:
After all this English you are still living in America.

lol ... America is free for all.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
On December 2 The NewYorker published an article by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , the Author of three Novels, which intricately requests that people should open their eyes to racism and feminism. She expressed her anger at the way the Americans treated Obama during his time as the President. Below is the full article.
NOW IS THE TIME TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE ARE ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT
"America has always been aspirational to me. Even when I chafed at its hypocrisies, it somehow always seemed sure, a nation that knew what it was doing, refreshingly free of that anything-can-happen existential uncertainty so familiar to developing nations. But no longer. The election of Donald Trump has flattened the poetry in America’s founding philosophy: the country born from an idea of freedom is to be governed by an unstable, stubbornly uninformed, authoritarian demagogue. And in response to this there are people living in visceral fear, people anxiously trying to discern policy from bluster, and people kowtowing as though to a new king. Things that were recently pushed to the corners of America’s political space—overt racism, glaring misogyny, anti-intellectualism—are once again creeping to the center.
Now is the time to resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. Now is the time to speak up and to wear as a badge of honor the opprobrium of bigots. Now is the time to confront the weak core at the heart of America’s addiction to optimism; it allows too little room for resilience, and too much for fragility. Hazy visions of “healing” and “not becoming the hate we hate” sound dangerously like appeasement. The responsibility to forge unity belongs not to the denigrated but to the denigrators. The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.
America loves winners, but victory does not absolve. Victory, especially a slender one decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, does not guarantee respect. Nobody automatically deserves deference on ascending to the leadership of any country. American journalists know this only too well when reporting on foreign leaders—their default mode with Africans, for instance, is nearly always barely concealed disdain. President Obama endured disrespect from all quarters. By far the most egregious insult directed toward him, the racist movement tamely termed “birtherism,” was championed by Trump.
Yet, a day after the election, I heard a journalist on the radio speak of the vitriol between Obama and Trump. No, the vitriol was Trump’s. Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever. Pretending that both sides of an issue are equal when they are not is not “balanced” journalism; it is a fairy tale—and, unlike most fairy tales, a disingenuous one.
Now is the time to refuse the blurring of memory. Each mention of “gridlock” under Obama must be wrought in truth: that “gridlock” was a deliberate and systematic refusal of the Republican Congress to work with him. Now is the time to call things what they actually are, because language can illuminate truth as much as it can obfuscate it. Now is the time to forge new words. “Alt-right” is benign. “White-supremacist right” is more accurate.
Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about. “Climate contrarian” obfuscates. “Climate-change denier” does not. And because climate change is scientific fact, not opinion, this matters.
Now is the time to discard that carefulness that too closely resembles a lack of conviction. The election is not a “simple racism story,” because no racism story is ever a “simple” racism story, in which grinning evil people wearing white burn crosses in yards. A racism story is complicated, but it is still a racism story, and it is worth parsing. Now is not the time to tiptoe around historical references. Recalling Nazism is not extreme; it is the astute response of those who know that history gives both context and warning.
Now is the time to recalibrate the default assumptions of American political discourse. Identity politics is not the sole preserve of minority voters. This election is a reminder that identity politics in America is a white invention: it was the basis of segregation. The denial of civil rights to black Americans had at its core the idea that a black American should not be allowed to vote because that black American was not white. The endless questioning, before the election of Obama, about America’s “readiness” for a black President was a reaction to white identity politics. Yet “identity politics” has come to be associated with minorities, and often with a patronizing undercurrent, as though to refer to nonwhite people motivated by an irrational herd instinct. White Americans have practiced identity politics since the inception of America, but it is now laid bare, impossible to evade.
Now is the time for the media, on the left and right, to educate and inform. To be nimble and alert, clear-eyed and skeptical, active rather than reactive. To make clear choices about what truly matters.
Now is the time to put the idea of the “liberal bubble” to rest. The reality of American tribalism is that different groups all live in bubbles. Now is the time to acknowledge the ways in which Democrats have condescended to the white working class—and to acknowledge that Trump condescends to it by selling it fantasies. Now is the time to remember that there are working-class Americans who are not white and who have suffered the same deprivations and are equally worthy of news profiles. Now is the time to remember that “women” does not equal white women. “Women” must mean all women.
Now is the time to elevate the art of questioning. Is the only valid resentment in America that of white males? If we are to be sympathetic to the idea that economic anxieties lead to questionable decisions, does this apply to all groups? Who exactly are the élite?
Now is the time to frame the questions differently. If everything remained the same, and Hillary Clinton were a man, would she still engender an overheated, outsized hostility? Would a woman who behaved exactly like Trump be elected? Now is the time to stop suggesting that sexism was absent in the election because white women did not overwhelmingly vote for Clinton. Misogyny is not the sole preserve of men.
The case for women is not that they are inherently better or more moral. It is that they are half of humanity and should have the same opportunities—and be judged according to the same standards—as the other half. Clinton was expected to be perfect, according to contradictory standards, in an election that became a referendum on her likability.
Now is the time to ask why America is far behind many other countries (see: Rwanda) in its representation of women in politics. Now is the time to explore mainstream attitudes toward women’s ambition, to ponder to what extent the ordinary political calculations that all politicians make translate as moral failures when we see them in women. Clinton’s careful calibration was read as deviousness. But would a male politician who is carefully calibrated—Mitt Romney, for example—merely read as carefully calibrated?
Now is the time to be precise about the meanings of words. Trump saying “They let you do it” about assaulting women does not imply consent, because consent is what happens before an act.
Now is the time to remember that, in a wave of dark populism sweeping the West, there are alternative forms. Bernie Sanders’s message did not scapegoat the vulnerable. Obama rode a populist wave before his first election, one marked by a remarkable inclusiveness. Now is the time to counter lies with facts, repeatedly and unflaggingly, while also proclaiming the greater truths: of our equal humanity, of decency, of compassion. Every precious ideal must be reiterated, every obvious argument made, because an ugly idea left unchallenged begins to turn the color of normal. It does not have to be like this.

What do you think.


https://olofoforeview./2016/12/08/now-is-the-time-to-talk-about-what-we-are-actually-talking-about-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/

Toyin Adewale-Gabriel has taken to Facebook to show her hatred for Women violence.
She and her co-workers at Development Social Organization posted the picture below. in her words 'Last Friday, we made a photo-documentary at the office on gender based violence. Staff demonstrated various actions depicting gender based violence'.



https://olofoforeview./2016/12/08/popular-poettoyin-adewale-gabriel-fights-against-women-violence/

iyababs:
I am still wondering why 3rd mainland bridge did not make it into the first 50?It was a good story after the wait,i read all the stories.

I also love that story

slap1:
This shows that people are losing interest in the popularity contest that this prize is. Last year, with over a thousand votes, I could not make the Top 50. Now people are making it with a few hundred votes.

Over a 1000? Wow...

opuama:
Thank you Lord my story "The Rise of Tura" was listed in the top 50. Fingers crossed

Congrats

Franky826:
go guys we believe in you and we'll support you as we'll

If there were other ways to support I would have

voting over sef

tremzy07:
https://prize.etisalat.com.ng/flash-fiction/all-stories.php

Obinau, Lalasticlala.. oya enter o

tremzy07:
They've released it o! Just checked and you were right! Thank you...im so happy. I'm number 6, the wages of Wrath.

awwnn
Congrats are we still voting

I think so..