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Christians were being massacred across the country, farmers barely holding on to their farmlands against herders; To Jioke, his friends and the rest of New Jerusalem Academy, it was all just news. And then, it wasn't... What baffled Jioke the most was not the meaning or the implication of the word; it was not even the unfamiliarity of it, for indeed, that was the very first time he’d heard it. It was the fact that the word came from the lips of Chidi. As far as he was concer

What happens when blood stands in the way of love? If you were to tell this story in colors, you would not use red, or blue, or any of the primary shades, because they would be too basic to capture the intricacies within the hue of your voice; you would use a canvas, buckets of different pigments and a paint brush; you would draw layers upon layers of different colors; you would create the most beautiful rainbow. If you were to tell this story as music, you would sit in the

A simple mistake and a past that refuses to stay buried. As Ebere’s world collapses under the weight of accusation and memory, his life easily turns to horror; he must face the scars he’d suffered to hide or risk becoming the monster he once feared. It was the carpet. It came with bad omens camouflaged under irregular beauty, Ebere thought. He was not far from the truth. One with an observant eye would have seen the carpet for what it was, what it had always been, a bringer

The first part of a five-pack series on my journey through The Den. This very essay was written by a younger, inexperienced Onu. I had the urge to rewrite it, alright, but I believe it would make more sense to read it from the perspective of the Onu who saw and felt theses things as they were no matter how raw he must have been when he wrote them. Discretion: This is long personal rant. Like most Nigerian students of history that I know, I never intended on study

PAY ATTENTION! The grasses may be greener on the other side, but it might get even more poisonous. A Nigerian boy wins it cheap for an exploration beyond the horizon. His dreams, to make enough money for himself and his family, is about to become a reality. But his fate is sealed even before he finds out what the job entails. I wonder what I have become, and what has become of me. But I don’t wonder how I got here because I know exactly how it all happened. I remember exact

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS TRIGGERING QUOTES. No religion is infallible. Every religion is borne of loopholes that are painstakingly obvious to the eyes of logic. Things like the stars being small matters and the earth being flat and the universe being nonexistent and several other false claims. Interestingly, these loopholes are always invisible to the adherents of these religions. Perhaps, due to cognitive dissonance or… just ignorance, believers always try as much as p

IN YOUR (OWN) ARMS Cold wind blows. The chills are coming down. Bright is sitting by the grave again; this is the seventh time he’s been there since she was laid to rest. Each time, he spends hours through the night, staring, as he is now, at Bridget’s grave. The tears, they’re already streaming down his face. Each struggling to make it down to his chest first, and remind him of the fond hole in his heart that might never be filled. Nobody understands the emotional tortures

He told himself he was leaving home to feed home; maybe he was trying to escape his own reality through a means his heart couldn't hold. T he first time I got a call from home, it was Dede. Almost a month since I left home and not a single person had called in that time. He said he just wanted to know how I was doing. “Are you alright?” He asked. “Yes, yes, everything is fine. Everything is going well.” I wanted to ask him if he was alright too, if everything was fine at h

Bato, a soldier in the Nigerian army, takes an instant liking to Audou his housekeeper and treats him like he would his own son. But Geraldine, his wife, seduces Audou into falling in love with her and sharing a bed whenever Bato is away. The sea of pleasure flowing through Audou’s being while engaging in his illicit sexual affairs with Geraldine, does nothing to exterminate the silhouette of fear constantly hanging around the walls of his mind. T hose were the words that ca

To Dera, there’s nothing as frightening as breakups, especially in a relationship she’s had to fend off wolves and lions to sustain for so long. But the twists come from the sickness, not the symptoms. T hey are all dumb. All of them. Is what Chiza says. You look at her face which is riddled with care and affection for her twin brother. And you think about the dumb she means. Is it dumb as in they did not know book? Or… “I mean they can’t talk.” She continues, immediate