Speaking and Singing: (papers and Poems)

Collected Plays

Winner of the 2009 NOMA Award for Publishing in Africa

From Zamfara up north to the Niger delta down south, with a finale in Lagos, this collection of stories and a novella respond to and amplify the newspaper headlines in a range of Nigerian voices.

Lagos, January 1976, six years after the Nigerian Civil War. A new military regime has been in power for six months, but rumours are spreading that a counter-coup is imminent. At an art exhibition in the affluent Ikoyi neighbourhood, Remi Lawal, a Nigerian woman who runs her own greeting-card shop, meets Frances Cooke, who introduces herself as an American art dealer, in Nigeria to buy rare beads. They become friends and over the next few weeks confide in each other about their aspirations, loyalties, marriage, motherhood – and Nigeria itself, as hospitable Remi welcomes the enigmatic Frances into her world. Remi’s husband, Tunde, naturally suspects Frances – like any American in Lagos – of gathering intelligence for the CIA, yet she is unconvinced. Cynical about the country’s unending instability, and alienated by the shallowness of the city’s elite, she willingly shares her views with Frances. But the February 13 assassination of General Muhammed prompts Remi to reconsider one particular conversation with her new acquaintance in a different light.

Dami Ajayi’s second volume of poems, A Woman’s Body is a Country, interrogates the ramifications of affection. A work of impressive artistry, these are poems of life turned inside out, where time cheats on writers, and the people and things at the brunt end of our oppressive pleasures come back to haunt us.

Ebinimi, star mechanic of Kalakala Street, is a man with a hapless knack for getting in and out of trouble. Some of his troubles are self-inflicted: like his recurring entanglements in love triangles; and his unauthorised joyriding of a customer’s car which sets off a chain of dire events involving drugs, crooked politicians, and assassins. Other troubles are caused by the panorama of characters in his life, like: his sister and her dysfunctional domestic situation;

Ranging back and forth between satire, metaphor and stark realism, Ngugi unfolds a tangible landscape both beautiful and horrfying, as tribalism and village life are manipulated in the name of progress by the cynical bureaucrats.

Michael Owoyemi is about to close a multi-million dollar business deal on behalf of his demanding employer. On the Monday morning scheduled for the closure of the deal, Biola Owoyemi, his usually reserved wife, physically restrains him from leaving their Ibadan home, insisting that he must stay at home to protect her and their first and only child, their two-month old son, from unnamed forces keen on snatching their child away from them.

In this fabulous follow-up to the internationally acclaimed The Lazarus Effect, newspaper reporter Vee Johnson reprieves her role as Cape Town’s most feisty female investigator. Vee and her ever-faithful sidekick, Chlöe Bishop, have been banished from City Chronicle’s newsroom to review a tourist lodge in sleepy Oudtshoorn. But Vee and Chlöe are barely checked in to their rooms when the first body is discovered… hanging from a tree, with Vee’s purple silk scarf used as a noose. But is it suicide or strangulation? As Vee investigates the death, she is pulled into a bewildering world of conferences and corruption, dog-walking and drug addiction, break-ins and black    economic empowerment.

On her deathbed, Leona seeks forgiveness by confessional. Dastardly as the sin is, it is an act of love, loyalty, disobedience, and perceived fairness. How did she get here, where she, an internationally renowned model, is forced to kill her father-in-law to avenge her mother’s death?

Religious fervour culminates in an exorcism for one unfortunate maid. A harrowing encounter on a train haunts Añuli. A mother abandons her child in search of personal freedom. A wife joins her husband, only to be met with news that threatens their relationship.

Even if you do not have a clue about about NYSC, you will discover in this entirely relatable story what can happen when one person ventures into the amazing, challenging unknown – and the strange adventure that unfolds.