Jalada is a Kenyan online literary magazine run by a collective of writers, whose first issue was published in 2014. Issues typically have a general theme or include texts that have been workshopped at a collective writing retreat. The magazine publishes short fiction, literary non-fiction, poetry and multimedial works. It also publishes translations of original works into several African languages. This dataset catalogues all works in the magazine from its inception in 2014 until its closure in 2021. 

Feature about author David Maillu in Kenyan national newspaper The Star, based on an interview conducted in March 2025 in Maillu's home in Lang'ata in Nairobi, Kenya and his country estate Mathemboni in Makueni county, Kenya, a few days later. In the interview, Maillu talks about his writing and his wish to create a university of African witchcraft. 

This article reads two narratives that were self-published on the now defunct Nigerian free-to-use reading and publishing platform Okadabooks as addressing the theme of waithood. The narratives center on young adults in Lagos, who struggle to get out of a life of precarity. They are read as interpellating a reader who like their protagonists is stuck in waithood. Waithood has been defined by Alcinda Honwana as a prolonged period in someone’s life in which they wait for opportunities to secure a job, to start a family and to take on the responsibilities associated with adulthood. Because of this contextual frame, the texts are caught in a bind: they tacitly promise the reader the arrival of a brighter future for the narrative’s main character, but ultimately do not represent this moment of arrival since the texts themselves are written from within waithood, a point from which the mechanics of upward social mobility are difficult to imagine. This means that there is a silence at the centre of the narrative, a crisis of representation. This article argues that this silence should not be understood as “lack” or the absence of a missing component, but read as an affordance that structures a specific mode of reading. As with reading practices shaped by Pentecostal traditions and motivational rhetoric, both widespread in Nigeria, this mode of reading centres on what is unknown and unsaid, which is understood as a threshold to hidden meaning and to hope, rather than as an absence of meaning.

The primary aim of this article is to think through how silence can be considered as generating meaning in literary prose. For this purpose, the article focuses on Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera’s last novel, The Stone Virgins (2002a), which has often been described as ‘breaking the silence’ about the genocidal violence remembered as Gukurahundi. As a secondary aim, the article sets out to rethink Vera’s idea and argues that rather than ‘breaking’ the silence, her novel explores different forms of silence, some of which are necessary for healing and regeneration. However, silence is not just a theme or motif in the novel: Vera also uses silence in her own writing to generate new meaning. Using an essay by Elleke Boehmer as a point of departure, this article proposes a conceptualisation of silence through two terms: the unsayable and the unsaid, where the former refers to meaning that is suppressed and the latter to that which has not yet been said. It argues that the novel presents a poetics that aligns with its theme of meaning, generative silence, which uses opaque and imprecise syntax and referentiality in a way that maximises the possibility of the unsaid to be said.

Our chapter looks at negotiations of form and language in chick lit from India and Nigeria. Later years have seen an influx of chick lit on Anglophone literary markets in the Global South. This relatively recent and fast appropriation of a form that is typically associated with metropolitan and economically affluent Western spaces prompts us to ask to what extent Global South aspirational iterations of chick lit can accommodate the cracks inherent in the tension between the genre and regional inflections of English. In the emerging ecologies of chick lit in Nigeria and India, social mobility and aspiration are key issues that are also inscribed into the form itself. Englishes – which overlap with other vernacular languages and work at different levels of proficiency – are central in both cases, and this chapter is concerned with thinking through the tripartite constellation of language, aspiration, and genre. Our main claim is that different englishes are used to signal rootedness in the local but also connectedness with lifestyles and identity constructions that are associated with spaces located in the Global North and that this relation between the local and an ‘elsewhere’ is central to chick lit in its Indian and Nigerian forms.

This article looks at the relatively recent tendency to aestheticize life in Nairobi’s working-class and informal neighbourhoods in different forms of art and media. It focuses on two case studies – Steve Bloom’s photobook, Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi (2009) and the first issue of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? (2003). These are compared to the collectively performed poem ‘Mistaken Identity’ (2019) by a group of poets from the neighbourhood of Kayole, to show that the street aesthetics in the two cases rest on distance, while the meaning-making in the poem rests on proximity. Distance in this context takes several forms, such as the gap between socio-economic classes and actual physical distance, but I register it on the level of epistemology. The poem also articulates a form of epistemological proximity between, first, the forms of meaning-making that can be seen in both the text and the visual and performative components of the video, and, second, the place that is portrayed. Rather than arguing that proximity is preferable to distance as a basis of meaning-making, this article attempts to theorize the emergence of a specific aesthetic. This aesthetic presents itself as an aesthetic because the particular forms of social stratification and concomitant social distance between communities and neighbourhood (which have emerged in Nairobi since 2000) allow an economic, political and cultural elite to re-discover the city, which they experience as simultaneously strange and familiar.

This paper begins with the assertion that world literature is in danger of becoming a closed system, whereby literature anticipates its critical reception in both its form and content. Emergent African literary forms are often excluded from the field of world literature precisely because they demand methods of reading that challenge this anticipatory logic. We refer to this emergent literature circulating in African urban spaces as "African street literature." This paper focuses on three such street forms: ephemeral print literature, flash fiction, and spoken word poetry. In all three cases, the literary form registers its situated-ness, and as such its location is co-constructive of the field of the literary text. The methodological intervention that the paper makes explores ways of reading context, material, form, and content as combined and codetermining without losing attention to the literariness of the text under examination.