My sister Biira is not; she’s my cousin. Ehuu! Ever heard of King Midas’s barber, who saw the king’s donkey ears and carried the secret until it became too much to bear? I could not hold it in any …

“She was the kind of woman I imagined my lover’s wife was, a woman for whom things were done.”

As a young girl in college, Anna followed the latest fashion trends. Our nails were covered in shockingly bright pink nail varnish, absolute white, screaming reds, and ultra-fashionable black and g…

- - -McSweeney’s Issue 59 brings with it the conclusions to three thrilling cliffhanger stories, the first halves of which were published in Issue...

‘Mama leaving home with my brother Folu was the last straw, the final stage in the process of Papa’s descent into that great darkness.’ New fiction from Chigozie Obioma.

Fiction: “Ogechi tried to think of it as a fair trade, a little bit of her life for her child’s life.”

‘We are back in Paradise and are now trying to come up with a new game.’

‘She had held the day up with pegs; not only her day but his too.’ Leila Aboulela questions our concepts of tradition and modernity and our sense of belonging in a global world.

Marta Naigzy Woodward considers herself an American child of East Africa, and a member of the African diaspora at large. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to parents of Eritrean descent, and raised in...

I look at the menu, turning every page and fighting the urge to offer Jenny helpful suggestions on what to eat. I stop myself as it would make me what I seek to forget, and I am not that person any…

‘She has the most genuine intentions of any woman out there.’

Nigerian novelist Chika Unigwe explores what Nigeria means to her in this short story about home and identity.

Mbozi Haimbe's ‘Madam's Sister’ is the African regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Mommy never got up this early; but today she did, with yawns, to take me to my first day of school. I had my hair in bangs of plaits, swinging on the side of my face… [10mins]

My grandpa’s hair is light and fluffy. There isn’t much of it left. But there’s enough to play with. It tickles the inside of my palm when I rush my hand over it. It looks like candy floss… […

Boundaries of Taste: And as I parted my lips and then, later, my legs, watching the last clouds of smoke slip upward, I kept hearing my mother’s voice say, “Jesus is a fire.”

Nyamwezi knew love. Uchi introduced it to her and she learned that it was simple. She learned love as fast as she learned attraction, chemistry, and the demanding task of obsession…[4mins]

New fiction: “Nothing changed when Raphael came to live with us, not at first.”

With little time before the rally, Tsitsi had to apply her mind on how to best improvise the party regalia so that it was figure-hugging, flattering, and functional. She stood the Mother in front of...

A talented young Nigerian who was educated in missionary and government schools, Chinua Achebe won a scholarship at the University College in Ibadan, where he took his degree in the arts. He studied...

‘It is their turn to be silent. Your hand is throbbing in protest. There is blood on your knuckles.’ New fiction from ’Pemi Aguda.

The Strain Yewande Omotoso Jumoke, a friend of Femi’s, collected me from the airport. ‘Porpous Estate,’ she said when I told her where I was headed. ‘You know am abi?’ she said to her driver. He...

Our Father, They murmured in unison as he opened the door. He arrived home in time to lead Bible studies. It was the only time he felt like the head of the house… [3mins]

Fiction: “How could any of us have imagined, in the innocence of those days, that there had been this darkness at the school?”

New fiction by Nuruddin Farah: “He wishes he were an artist and Ahmed a nude subject, posing to be drawn.”

‘When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters.’ 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for Africa.

Sitting on the terrace in a Louzingou cafe, the talk turns soon enough to the civil war and oil in this new story from Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson

And so it came to be that there would be a wedding. It was a good match they said: he so dark, small, and wise; she tall, fair, beautiful, well muscled and firm….[10mins]

‘He didn’t know their language but understood it in their boiling voices, the heat on their faces, how they singed each other with their eyes.’ NoViolet Bulawayo.

The Skype message had read; “Hey you :) , long time! I’m back in Nairobi in two weeks…would be great to catch up, maybe even plan to meet? Can we Skype next weekend? Hope you’re well!” [7mins]…

Read a new short story from Nnedi Okorafor, author of Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King.

In the beginning, I liked the fact that Yasir was already married. It meant he had more to give. It meant that even during a time where decapitated bodies had decorated the streets of Xamar, this m…

‘We are not burying one of us in snow.’ The winning entry for the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.

There is a pot of water on the kitchen stove, the new one. Te’ele will use it to boil rice and realize when she tastes it that she forgot to add salt. She won’t mind, where is her appetite anyway? …

An excerpt from “Little Family,” by Ishmael Beah

Clothes, everywhere. Clothes removed with an urgency of passion that now seemed spent. Two lovers lying on a poster bed. Bed in a hotel room with its balcony door open. A sultry wind beckons at the…

It is an especially humid day. The air is stifling and rivulets of sweat run down my back and stain my white shirt. “Ma,” I say. “Why don’t we open a window? This heat is killing me.” My mother is …

“I cannot say why, but I had the painful impression that I was not the first, on that beautiful, sun-drenched day, to press her against the ground and possess her.”

Now that his father was gone, and Benji was the only remaining male in the family, and having been bequeathed such an expansive estate, he’d do well to …

The brother of the Arab murdered in Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” tells his story.

When a friend confessed that she too had done it, whispering over coffee in an overpriced Nairobi café, Illuminata felt she was joining a sisterhood.

It was the week before Christmas when he found out. He’d gone to the supermarket to buy exactly 3kg of chicken breast, a bottle of vinegar and breadcrumbs. Mueni would marinade the chicken in her s…

At the bottom of every well, there dwells a mystical little creature with large bat-like ears and big round eyes the colour of charcoal. Its skin is the dark brown of moist loam, and between little…

Short story, set in Mogadishu, Somalia, about an encounter between a young insurgent soldier and an old man.

“Every man had something to say about the cows he’d once owned and those he would perhaps, one day, own again. ”

There were difficulties in her life that he wanted to know more about, parts of her thick, shapely body that he longed to touch, but he was wary of …

Priest’s road trip

The first time I reported a boy in my class for biting and breaking my pencil, I did not know how to express what he had done. I knew how to speak Igbo properly, but we were prohibited from speakin…

WOULD Aramide’s diet obsession starve their love?

Ammar was devastated to find out that Superman would not feature at his seventh birthday. He stood there, furiously mute, with his red and blue school bag still on his back… [8mins]

Outside, the weather is changing. Autumn is coloring leaves red and purple and gold. It is cold but not yet cold enough for the heaters to come on. Inside, it is sweltering. Añuli’s guests have pee…

My neighbor Vinny Capriani is a great neighbor. I'm happy to have him as one. I live in a state where a man shot another because his kids' basketball fell into his neighbor's yard. So I'm happy Vinny...

“Brothers, brethren, sisters, sinners, this is the wondrous Word from the Lord Our God, the Creator of Creation, the Commander of Captains, the Dispeller of Demons, the Maker of Man, the Protector …

White flakes float from her head and rest on her collar. Every so often she pats her head like there is no brain to care for inside and more flakes fall down… [5mins]

“The first time was experimental, you could say,” said The Plug. “The prototype formula was underdeveloped, yes, but you must understand it was an emergency… [8mins]

Fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window . . . . The second time our house was robbed, it was...

New fiction from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Fishermen.

This story took place in ‘99, near the end of the old millennium. I suppose the dawn of a new era paves the way for mysterious things. That year, I was a final year student of Banking Finance in th…

There are two ways to enter Ajegunle: from the front, past the noisy market and the frenetic traffic facing the store-front displays of clothes and household wares; or from the back by boat over the...

A story circulated among the Nigerian community in Dakar. Somewhere in the city, a long-forgotten pimp returned alive. No one knew with certainty her name, the name of her street or neighbourhood.

Hyacinth Ike planned to die on a Friday because it felt right that he complete his life on a day when other people tidied up their office desks for the week and headed for nightclubs, bachelor...

The first thing Njideka saw when she opened her eyes was her children standing in front of her with wide eyes and mouths bent in a frown. They had been standing there and staring until the sheer fo…

I grew up thinking He was folded into her body, like when she folded icing sugar into egg white. The 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner from Africa.