The Three: November Edition

Cultural happenings that caught my eye this month.

Another month, another edition of your favorite monthly newsletter. Previous editions here and here.

Hauwa Ojeifo Wants Young Nigerians to Pay Attention to Their Mental Health

With all that’s been going on in Nigeria and how many of us are still reeling from the state-sponsored violence in Lagos and the subsequent looting of warehouses with COVID palliatives across the country, I thought now would be a good time to have a conversation about mental health and young Nigerians. Hauwa Ojeifo is a multi-award winning certified Mind and Mental health coach, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Emotional Freedom Techniques therapy practitioner. Hauwa uses her experience and expertise to advocate against sexual violence, for mental health across groups, schools and organisations. She is the Founder and current Executive Director at She Writes Woman - an award-winning movement of love, hope and support that gives mental health a voice, taking back the existing misinformed narrative, connecting help with hope, creating safe places and normalising the mental health and sexual violence conversation in Nigeria. Check out her website for more information on her work here.

Hauwa and I discussed mental health as it intersects with parenting, politics, and Nigerian society, and how we can all be better advocates for improved mental health for others and ourselves.

Alright, let’s get right into it. You’ve said in a previous interview that “mental health is not a death sentence,” and you’ve outspoken about the pervasive misconceptions about mental health. What would you say drives this kind of thinking?

I would call it lack of awareness. We don't know what mental health really is, so we don't know what mental health conditions are. So say you have "Hauwa has Bipolar Disorder" and then "Hauwa slapped her mother". What people will then say is "Hauwa has bipolar disorder, so she slapped her mother." What we have, then, is an incomplete story. This is how we begin to create images that are not in line with what mental health is, because we haven't got a good understanding of what mental health issues are. Similarly, we have people who would say that "oh, mental health means I'm going to commit suicide" but it doesn't mean that at all. That's why we say that mental health conditions are not a death sentence. It doesn't always mean you will lose your life. Just the same way that your body has stressors and trauma, your brain has that, too.

On social media, we see a lot of mental health terms being used decoupled from the mental health context. Trigger, for example, gets used a lot, as does the term "safe space." As we're having a conversation about what mental health even is, maybe it'll be good to also engage on the topic of "safe space." What constitutes a safe space?

Broadly speaking, it's a space that's diverse and allows for inclusion, but in a way that everybody in that space feels a sense of belonging. It's not so much about the words we tell people, it’s about practice. It means that "I feel safe, so I can drop my guard" and that “I can say things and would not be cloaked in shame". We have at She Writes Woman a "safe space" that was once a physical place but is now a virtual space. Here, we strip things of cultural shame or societal shame, and allow for vulnerability. That's what I think about in terms of safe space. It's a place where I feel like I can drop shame. It’s a place where it is safe for me to be vulnerable. Psychological safety is the most important part of any interpersonal relationship. It requires mutual trust. Vulnerability, shame, belonging are huge parts of psychological safety.

This feels especially instructive when we're talking about the #MeToo movement and the kinds of conversation that have emerged on diversity and inclusion.

Absolutely. We see what this is when certain groups of people are not made to feel safe in some corporate spaces. They talk about corporate places making an effort to be more diverse, but there's a difference between having more diversity in the room and for one to feel valid in the conversation, if you're truly given room and are included. Belonging means that not only am I allowed to speak, but I feel safe here.

Nigeria is a tough place to live in. I wonder if you can share exactly the ways you think it is tough and makes it difficult to have safe spaces, especially for young people.

Things are so interconnected, that you can't solve one thing without trying to solve other things as well! With regards to young people, we can't focus on just individual things. There's an individual responsibility that everyone has to take with regards to their mental health. It's impossible to separate the structures of the system and the deficiencies with it, from the individual. We tell people "take care of your mental health" but then you look at the environment and poverty is the number one issue to be dealt with. At the most fundamental level, people cannot think about mental health when they don't have the most basic thing, such as food to eat. It's such a privilege to be able to see from a point of view of personal responsibility. When you're talking about a place with one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children in the world and poverty rates, there's a space and time for certain kinds of advice. We have a system that's made people poor, and equitable distribution of resources is not a reality.

What about the most privileged among us? Would you say that they are shielded from the challenge of mental health?

No, having the power to take personal responsibility doesn't always mean that you can. Just because you've got privilege doesn't mean that you don't experience the kind of stressors that can cause mental health distress, like violence or other situations. Mental health issues are not respecters of wealth. If you're able to take personal responsibility, you have access to good healthcare, and are making sure that you can take better care of yourself, then you should. It's up to people who have higher social class or levels of access to use that access and take better care of themselves.

I know you see a lot of gender-based violence (GBV)-related conversations on twitter. Given the work you do, is there something you wish is talked about more where GBV is concerned?

I see a lot about people being more empowered and feeling safer now, not necessarily because there's more justice, but because there's a collective consciousness-raising. they know that there's other women like them who have experienced similar things, so there is a general feeling that [sexual violence] is more prevalent than we thought.

What I don't hear enough about, though, is how people have gone about their own healing. It's all well and good to share our voices because we're bringing awareness to a broken justice system; you can only do as much as the justice system lets you do. I'd love to hear what more women are doing to heal from their experiences of violence. The women I deal with through my work are navigating the effect and ramifications of their trauma following violence that happened sometimes even 20 years ago.

There is a lot to learn from this, because of the way trauma can change how your brain functions. There is science that shows how trauma can affect how your brain reacts to different situations, how it reacts to reward and safety. These things translate to how a person can be, their general wellness. It's why we talk about the socioeconomic cost of violence and trauma. These things are connected. I would love for there to be more of those kinds of conversations.

And it's not just about counselling. Counselling is a good first aid, but it doesn't deal with the lingering effects of trauma. That's more like therapy, which is not as easily accessible to everyone.

I've heard of people who tried to access counselling or even therapy, and were turned off by the religious nature of the engagement, or felt that they faced judgement. What are some of the things that mental health professionals in Nigeria often get wrong?

Let's look at the tertiary level. In Nigeria, we have 1 psychiatrist to every 1.3 million people. There's just barely about 250 in the whole country. That aside, we also have an education issue. When we think about that, we think primary and secondary school, but there is also an issue in how we train professionals. A lot of the ways that health-related professionals are trained are not enough for the present day issues we face. Methods are different, and a lot of professionals only got their method from Nigeria and not any exposure to courses abroad.

There's so much our healthcare professionals don't get when training in Nigeria. The average Nigerian psychiatrist is only good at psychotherapy, for example, but that's being phased out. Internationally, we are seeing more and more the importance of other methods, like: alternative therapy, energy medicine, energy healing. This is because they've realised that it is important to deal with the whole person.

Also, you can't separate the systems people were raised in from from people's training. When a society thrives on stigma, you can't expect the people to be any different. We've seen people walk into a mental health facility and the nurse laughs at them. That's also a larger systemic issue. We need to have these conversations about how religion, culture, the larger society, and education play a role.

Can you expand a bit more on what you mean when you say that our “society thrives on stigma”?

It’s a vicious cycle. If you’ve ever experienced any mental health issue, chances are that you don’t speak about it very freely. You talk about it, you get stigmatized; you don’t, you are fueling the stigma. Every time you don’t take an opportunity to correct the narrative and humanize mental health story or journeys, we are giving the power to stigma to continue to thrive. That’s what I mean.

Another way to look at it is that inherently as human beings there’s a “we vs. them” embedded in all of them that crosses between shame and sense of belonging. And if someone doesn’t share our experiences or [he or she] is not a way that we understand, we somehow put them aside because it helps us to not look inwards at our own shame.

I assume it must be difficult for parents of young people facing trauma or mental health difficulties of any kind. Is there anything that parents -- or really, loved ones in general -- need to know to be a better support system? What have you learned about negotiating that intergenerational engagement in a country like Nigeria where the parent and child relationship can be a pretty discipline-led one?

Indeed, it’s very difficult for parents. We put an expectation on parents to understand and support, but parents are really just a function of their society. So if society has a lot of stigma and prejudice, then it’ll be a stretch to expect different from them because they're a part of society.

Mental health is not necessarily about mental illness; it’s about your emotional and psychological well-being, everything that affects how you behave and why. If we look at it like that, we see that it affects everything, even how our children show up as a result of our parenting. When we talk about support systems, we as parents need to unlearn certain ideas of what the world should be as opposed to what it is. When we’re good to go regarding that, then we can begin to have certain conversations with our children about what they feel.

I think a lot of us have normalized shame and are comfortable not having uncomfortable conversations. And usually it is in the uncomfortable conversations that you find out what’s affecting our mental health. Support looks like having conversations, unlearning and realizing that perhaps a lot of the things we’ve done or have learned over the years are not necessarily true or psychologically safe for the people among us. Also, centering the person you’re trying to give support to is important. So if you’re giving support to kids, it’s realizing that it’s about them and not about you. What a lot of us do is that we make ourselves the subject and if it gets uncomfortable we act from that place, as opposed to understanding that it is not really about us.

Let me talk a little bit more on the inter-generational linkage. Parenting is a difficult job, and it is a very sensitive topic, because if you say something wrong with [my] parenting, it looks like you’re saying something wrong about me as a parent. There’s no reason why that wouldn’t be touchy. I generally am an advocate of conscious parenting. It’s about re-thinking parenting as a whole. We’ve taken parenting as an identity, and not as a role. When you realize that something is not an identity, it gives you space to process the in-betweens. But when you say it’s an identity, you have become one with the role, so any attack on the role is an attack on yourself and when you remove yourself from that role you are nobody. That has consequences in how we show up for children, how we let children be children and let them navigate life. When you see it as an identity, it means that you think that however the child shows up or turns out is a reflection of you, which I don’t believe has done us a lot of good. But when I say it’s a role, I say it’s an opportunity for the parent in particular to understand their own traumas. Because how you show up for your child, or how your child irritates you or makes you behave, we make it about the child but really is about your own traumas. How come a child that is helpless and knows very little about the world gets you so triggered? How come a child makes you feel less of your self? How can a child make stir up emotions in you? Shifting that to a parents’ ability to look inward into their own trauma and how they see life and why they see life the way they do, is how I tend to navigate engagement with parents in an environment that’s more discipine-led.

The consequences of discipline-led parenting is that a lot of us had our childhood experiences denied, our realities invalidated. That has consequences now for us as adults, because now we’re constantly struggling to be seen and heard. We’re doing the same thing that was done to us, which is trying to deny other people’s realities because it helps us feel better about our own realities being denied. When I think about it like that, it may not always make a lot of sense for some people, but mental health is about the granular things.

NBS and UNODC did a survey in 2018 funded by the EU that said that “Over the past year alone, nearly 15% of the adult population in Nigeria (around 14.3 million people) reported a “considerable level” of use of psychoactive drug substances—it’s a rate much higher than the 2016 global average of 5.6% among adults.” Weed is the primary drug of choice (~10.6m people, but opioids and cough syrups are at about 7m people). What is it in particular that links drug use to mental health? Is there any link at all?

Yes and no. There's already a misconception we're trying to deal with that mental health conditions are people's fault. Substance abuse starts with a decision, while mental health does not. There's a bill in the National Assembly that couples substance abuse and mental health, and we're talking to the National Assembly about decoupling that bill because it is the very thing we are fighting against.

I'm sure that reinforces the stigma as well.

Yes, it does. Even rehabilitation is not necessarily used in mental health issues, except for when drug abuse causes mental health issues. I remember when the BBC documentary on codeine came out, and NDLEA banned things. That’s fine as a first step, but you cannot deal with it that way. We have to start looking at the root cause. Why are they abusing substances? What mental health issues are they trying to deal with? Why do they get a sense of belonging in places where abuse of drugs is a thing? Every time I've mapped problems facing a particular challenge in my work, I’ve realized that the root causes always come down to poverty, unemployment and education. If you don't solve those issues, you're just deferring the problem, whether that's coming in the form of a chronic disease, or not.

We hear anecdotally (don’t know if there’s figures) that northern Nigeria has a high rate of drug addiction, and that women in northern Nigeria are key drivers of that trend. From the work you’ve done on addiction with northern women, are drug addiction and the ramifications of it really so different in north and south? How do the differences in society broadly speaking, drive drug abuse in either region?

There’s actually also data supporting the assertion that the region does have higher rates of drug use. A couple of things: what we don’t understand is that it affects everything and it can be affected by everything. We cannot extract the subsequences of our culture from our mental health, we cannot separate the consequences of the interpretations of the practice of religion, or the socioeconomic status of a people from their mental health. That’s why we always say it’s the bedrock of every economy, because it has social, economic and financial costs. If you look at those factors, that should give us a sense for why the mental health outcomes differ. The north has peculiar religious practices. I say “peculiar” because the north isn’t the only place that has Muslims, but they’re predominantly Muslim. The South has a lot of Muslims as well, but there’s a huge difference in the practice. There’s something about how religion came to the north, how religion is interacting with culture and the socioeconomic outcomes of the people. We know as Nigerians that the north has been deprives of a lot of socioeconomic development for whatever reason. It is why even the social vices are more amplified in the north.

Further, when you look at religion and culture, it’s already a more conservative environment. Additionally, there’s a strong patriarchy and that women ought to be a certain way and women’s lives are driven by the other gender where women should be like this or shouldn’t do or say this. The pressure is so much to either conform or pretend to conform. We see years of trying to stay in line, and we’re seeing more and more women trying to find outlets. So whether the outlet is becoming a rebel, or receive death threats as we see on some northern Nigerian feminist activists; or whether the outlet is now drug addiction, northern women are now seeking a form of liberation. Although there are people who accept or love the culture whether as a result of conditioning or even by choice, I do know that a majority of northern Nigerian women see [the culture] a lot differently, and that they [want a culture that] allows them to have the space to think and feel and behave in certain ways that are not hindering of their full selves. That’s what I see, and that’s why I think we see a lot of drug addiction. It’s why I think they find it hard to come to the realization that the LGBTQIA movement is also in the north as well but they don’t want to have that conversation because they can sense it. It’s a lot of people having their realities denied at the cost of themselves and their mental health. And it’s inevitable that they’re going to crack, or they’ll seek ways to bounce back which includes being deviant of the culture in some way.

You’ve talked about the larger systemic issues facing mental health in Nigeria, from underfunded psychiatric hospitals to bureaucracy. Can you talk a little bit about what gaps organizations like yours can help fill? What would you say is the role of NGOs in this large patchwork of issues?

I remember when I first started the organization in 2015, and we asked ourselves this question.

One of the first things we decided on was social support. We lack social support for young people as far as healthcare is concerned. We did a lot of work with regards to young people, and we realized that people have to deal with a lot of chronic health issues by themselves. Social support goes a long way in accelerating the way you respond to healthcare. It is why we started a monthly support group where people, including carers and people who live with mental health conditions, can hear perspectives. Just the fact that you hear your story echoing in others’ experiences can make you feel like you're not on this journey by yourself. So that's important.

Secondly, First Response. Especially at the primary healthcare level, we're not seeing a lot of integrated healthcare. That's the level of first response that is not in the Nigerian healthcare system. Being able to have a crisis health hotline gives you a first response, and from there you can link them to social support as necessary.

Third: intersectional advocacy. We have the power to hold govt accountable and get them to take on certain kinds of policies. Government can be very detached from the people, so we need to make sure that their policies and actions are in tune with what needs actually are on the ground. That is why we're able to sit down with government and tell them "this bill is not reflective of what's available on ground”, or that it is important that healthcare is affordable and close to home for every Nigerian and not a matter of social class.

Finally: Whilst seeking healthcare, your fundamental human rights also need to be respected. There's a lot of awareness needed.

Here comes my final question: How do you take care of your own mental health? What works for you?

I sleep! I’m a sleep advocate. Everybody should sleep. I sleep 9-12hrs sometimes. It’s not even sometimes about the length but the quality of the sleep. I think some of us are not getting quality sleep even when we sleep long hours or just “catch up on sleep” over the week. That’s tied to a couple of things, such as the stresses of life in Nigeria or socioeconomic issues that one can’t escape, like poverty and all of those things. My morning routine works for me as well. I say my morning prayers, I do a lot of affirmations and meditations. I feed my mind.

Taking care of my mental health is not an event for me, it’s a lifestyle. Some things are embedded in my day that I’m very discipline about because they give me a sense of bliss. All of these things, such as being very careful what I feed my mind, whether it’s the books I read or social media I consume. Also what I listen to, because I realize how easily those things interact with what’s already in our minds and can create and influence our self-talk. I move as much as I can, I’m also vegan so I don’t take anything for granted. I realize that in order for you to have good mental health in a society that is largely places health at the backburner and puts everything at a cost to your health, being mentally healthy is an act of rebellion, a self-revolution. I have to be deliberate and intentional to not be like most other people.

Learn more about Hauwa’s work on her website.

The Record for Broken Ears

Tems has been busy these past couple of the years. She’s been on a bunch of hooks and features (this one with Poe and her verse on SDC’s Too Bad are my favorite), and has given us a few singles, most notably the excellent Try Me and less so Mr. Rebel. Mainstream success of individual singles aside, she’s an artist I find exciting because she has a sound that’s not like anyone else’s, and seems to have been able to find her tribe of collaborators that let her be herself. Just a decade ago, there would have been no room for someone as idiosyncratic as she is to attain even a little mainstream success. Seeing her ascend the heights of mainstream consciousness and collaborating with artists like the British electronic music duo Disclosure and Naija Starboy Wizkid is exciting because it shows how much the Nigerian music industry has grown to accommodate different kinds of artists.

Perhaps the clearest sign of Tems’ intentionality is her videos. In her latest video for Damages, she’s in a house with a group of young women as she sings about a breakup with a wasteman who isn’t even granted a walk-on role. I couldn’t help but compare the video with what she did Try Me, where she and her mostly-female crew were being held then chased down by a group of men and had to escape them. In either of the videos, there is no main male subject, as much as there is the threat of their existence. I’m inclined to think that depiction is on purpose, insofar as centers her experience and personhood as a woman above anything else. Womanhood and its depiction is something she certainly thinks about a lot, and it is clear in her Native Magazine cover story. She’s quoted as saying:

“I’ve been trying to balance being myself and being a woman in this industry” Tems says, sounding almost defeated by the amount of effort she has to put in to ensure that this is the case. “I like to look nice. I like girly things too, but I want my music to come first. I need people to understand the message behind the music, not just seeing one sexy, hot girl, who can sing”.

The story Tems’ latest EP For Broken Ears tells is much like the one we see of her in that Native profile. It is the story of a young woman who is strong and defiant, albeit this time in the face of a situation — romantic or otherwise — where she’s not getting their due. The EP begins with Interference, which is a proclamation of the record we’re about to hear as a safe space to say what she wants. Ice T expresses care and love, even though she keeps having to make do with being given a fraction of what she deserves. Free Mind is about recognizing the need for space from a bad situation, while Higher and Damages are about the breaking free and leaving that bad situation behind. She then ends the EP on a self-affirming note with The Key.

The record is a perfect length — six songs and a really cool interlude featuring her mother — not least because of its moodiness and its arc. None of the songs on the EP are necessarily weak, but Free Mind and Damages are the clear standouts for me in terms of individual tracks. This is likely because both songs are inflection points in the story she tells — the former the second she realizes something needs to change and the latter when she finally leaves. Seeing how each of the songs all piece together makes me forgive the sameness of the songs in terms of mood that’s all to evident when you listen through the first few times.

Whatever Tems does going forward, I hope she collaborates with people who will push her into new territory and make her experiment with different sounds. When artists in Nigeria stand out just by dint of their artistic predilections, they tend to get too comfortable and stay where they are. It legitimately took Adekunle Gold, for example, three albums to finally try out a new sound that is still very much in line with who he is as an artist but feels more interesting and a bit riskier than is typical of him. Brymo is another example who has fallen into this trap (Besides his being a shitty human being, of course), as has Simi. Tems will need to show a willingness to experiment and show us the limitless potential of that voice. I think she can. I’m rooting for her.

Wizkid Grows Up, and So Do We

Since dragging myself from the doldrums of protest-related despair, the first album I really dug into with enthusiasm was Wizkid’s, which I honestly did not believe he would drop until days before because he had been teasing us for more than a year. Made in Lagos is a statement about who Wizkid is as an artist right now, much the same way Burna Boy’s Twice as Tall was for Burna. It’s immensely gratifying to see Wizkid’s growth over the past decade, and I love that we have an industry that has evolved so much that Wizkid can grow with his audience. Bolu Babalola tweeted what I think is a lot of people’s first impressions of MIL: “In university his music documented sweaty houseparties, as I got older, he continued to punctuate the best of times, now I’m nearly 30 and I’ve mellowed out a bit, I want grown and sexy afrobeats, fun, but calmer, more mature and Starboy delivered.” It also augurs well that an artist like Wizkid that we first saw in 2011 is so at ease with his growth that he can demonstrate it as confidently as this.

The record is called Made in Lagos, a nod to Wizkid’s roots even though texturally the music feels like laidback London summer vibes. It starts off with Reckless, which really tells us where he is at this point in his career "I know say dem go pray for my downfall/I’m still the winner inna inna inna inna, I no go let them play on my banjo”. That’s as boastful as it gets on this record. There’s nothing about his cars or houses or his bling. There is not even the backhanded humility of in the Jaiye Jaiye era “Lagos today and London tomorrow, Oluwa lo se’yi o”. The closest he comes to that is on Blessed and Grace, but even those reflections came out more introspective than boastful. Instead, Wizkid is much more preoccupied with sex than I remember his music being, and not even in a blanket, boastful “all the ladies love me” kind of way. Songs like Essence, True Love, Piece of Me, Sweet One and Longtime are really about that one girl, so even here he’s not casting his net too wide. Coupled with the mood of the record, Wizkid feels like a man in cruise control, with nothing to prove and nothing to do but enjoy the ride.

Wizkid ear for effective collaborations with artists local and global has continued to sharpen since Skepta and Drake collaborated on a remix to his classic Ojuelegba. Ginger is a better track for Burna Boy’s presence on it; Ella Mai and Tems elevated my favorite songs on the record Piece of Me and Essence respectively; Damian Marley gravelly voice added depth and soul to Blessed, and I think it’s always amusing how nobody feels like they can do a playful song with him; Tay Iwar sounded great on the hook of the other brilliant album standout True Love.

Although MIL is definitely an album with some gems, one wonders if there’s more that he could have done to elevate some of the other songs. Longtime opens with a solid Skepta verse, but even that early on in the record it already feels like a song that you can skip because you just know there’s better songs coming. Mighty Wine and Roma sound like filler, not one of the more unremarkable loose singles he’s dropped in previous years like Blow. In a record with eight of its 14 songs being collaborations, the fact that Wizkid was still able to put together a record that sounds cohesive is impressive, but it is also true that as a body of work is sounds too safe. I do not think you necessarily sacrifice cohesiveness or maturity when you switch up the mood (Burna’s last two records are a good example of this), and MIL would have benefited from some thoughtful experimentation. This is the other side of the coin of Wizkid’s current ease with where he is in his career and life, a creeping tendency to rest of his laurels and do the same thing over and over again. It’s a tendency I want to see him fight in the coming years.

Ake Festival Goes Online

A lot of the conversations at Ake Festival’s online edition this year felt urgent as hell, likely because of our current political moment in Nigeria. The theme for this year was “Africa Time”, and the panels covered — as always — major topics driving popular discourse across the continent. I’m just highlighting here a few of the panels I really enjoyed, but feel free to catch them all on the Festival’s YouTube page.

With Nigerian women bringing to bear their organizational and mobilization skills during the #EndSARS protests, the panel on feminism and their role in African development. Ugandan feminist Stella Nyanzi in particular talked about her feminist praxis, her use of her body in her activist, her suspicion of feminists who aim for respectability, and her arrest; writer and activist Mona Eltahawy talked about the use of her privilege in the fight against patriarchy; and writer and blogger Minna Salami talks about her book “Sensuous Knowledge” and how it offers us feminist frames with which to think of about the larger geopolitical issues like climate change and race. Listening to these women talk about what feminism means to them and their expansion of how It turns out that a lifetime of having to come together to fight oppression that colors your daily life is pretty good practice for fighting all sorts of oppression.

Another really informative panel was this one on media and its duty to African youth. They discussed the current state of media on the continent, and I especially like Yemisi Akinbobola’s comments around the 14th minute on the importance of representation in the media of youth at different age groups, and the impact Black Lives Matter had on black people getting more media representation in the UK. I also really liked Wale Lawal’s contribution somewhere around the 38th minute about the way Nigeria’s media space belies the extent to which the issues we face here are connected outside the country. Chude Jideonwo makes a point somewhere in the 42nd minute about how, even though a lot has changed in terms of the channels through which stories can be told, the laws and predilection for restriction has barely changed. I learned that Nigeria is far from the only country facing social media restriction bills under the guise of checking fake news. There was an interesting conversation in here about the link between media, access to information on its citizens, and how the panic by the lack of access to that information is shaping governments’ decisions on restriction of social media. A lot of the challenges really clearly illustrate a point I’ve made in the intro of last month’s edition about how youth-led digital media is a hugely important part of the adhocracy that we as Nigerians have built in response to a key failure of our existing institutions.

There’s always a bunch of book chats, and this year’s edition had a few as well. Bolu Babalola on “Love in Color”, her brilliant short story collection that remixes older mythological love stories into short stories set in modern times. There’s also a book chat for Raven Leilani’s book “Luster,” of which I’ve heard great things. I was really excited to check out the book chat with Maaza Mengiste, who wrote the incredible Man Booker-shortlisted novel “The Shadow King”. This novel is a feat in its portrayal of and meditation on war, masculinity, privilege and colonialism. I had planned to do a big review of this book, and I still might. For now, here’s the book chat below.

Make sure to check out the rest of the panels as well. There’s even poetry readings from around the world, and a great live concert.

Until next time.