Dear reader,

We welcome you to another issue of Lolwe. We hope, in the middle of all that is happening in the world at the moment, that you have been taking care of yourself, taking breaks when you need them and using the means at your disposal to make the world a better place, in your own little way. 

No other medium on earth has as much power to induce empathy as the written word. When we read, we become the characters we read about, whether real or imagined. We know their pain, we know their joy, we love what they love and fear what they fear, no matter how far away in time or place or how different a culture they belong to. It affirms our sameness, our shared humanity. It makes more room for the subtleties of the human condition and less room for prejudice. Amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of current times, and the risk of desensitisation from our constant exposure to extreme human suffering, this issue of Lolwe is a call to reclaim and remember our shared humanity. You will find works of non-fiction baring the souls, the deep seated vulnerabilities, of their authors. I will provide no synopsises to these; I want you to discover them, unsullied, and love them as I did but for your own reasons. When writers write, they put the most intimate parts of themselves out there for the world to see. Consciously or not, it is an act of self-sacrifice in the hopes that our hearts will see and recognize each other, and in so doing, heal each other. When you read this Issue, keep this in mind. Tune out the noise, read with intention and attention. That is the best gift you can give an author in return for their self-sacrifice.

In ‘The Rain Translates My Bibi to Me’ iman adam writes of a grandmother struggling to understand the world her granddaughter inhabits. It made me reflect on the ways in which we are often blinded by external elements, divided by our specificities when they should only highlight the commonalities of the human experience. The short stories in this issue, in a sense, translate our world back to us, using the prisms of fantasy, horror, speculative fiction and magical realism to reflect our own pains and desires. They speak to us in the lyrical language of dreams – and the occasional nightmare. Longing is everywhere: the lust for money that leads to a Faustian bargain in B.T. Karumah’s ‘Hallowed Is the Flesh’; the yearning for motherhood, as explored in the dystopian ‘clean read’, where Davina Philomena Kawuma plays with form to better highlight the stark needs of the women she features; the bittersweet ache for love in Fatima Abdullahi’s ‘The Weight of Our Walls’; and the yearning for what has been lost, in Chioniso Tsikisayi’s ‘A Grain of Rice In the Heart of Genocide’. Each story has tapped into the most visceral of needs, and offered them to us in prose so beautiful, so alive that it nearly dances off the page. 

As I was going through the selection of these poems, one thing that particularly stood out to me was how despite the distance, I learnt something from each of the authors without even having interacted with them personally. Granted, a lot of writing can be pure fiction but what if it isn’t. What if it’s true? That would mean, for instance, I now know that somewhere in Ghana, Tawiah Mensah has a brother who is made of water and wisdom. I also know now that a Fadairo Tesleem exists and that he is a Nigerian Arabic speaker, and that Alvin Kathembe discusses football with his mates (and is most likely an Arsenal fan). There is an intimacy to writing (and ultimately reading) that makes it far beyond solitary. The people who have written these poems have left pieces of themselves that go beyond poetry – that force you whether willingly or unwillingly to see them and to see the smaller stories and details that make the whole. 

Both Aaliyah André and Bongani Khumalo present striking photographs with such rich depth and extraordinary storytelling. While the narratives diverge, the visual show the substantial work that goes into the attempt to tell a complete story with just a single image.

We hope you enjoy these brilliant stories, poems, essays and photographs that come together in a mosaic of wonderful imagination!

Ya Mallen Jagne is an award-winning Creative Writer living in The Gambia. She is interested in literature and film as a medium of cultural preservation and sociological study. Her work was recently featured on Google Arts & Culture. You will find a collection of her creative literature on YÉMU, a personal literary blog.

*

Nadu Ologoudou is a Beninese writer and avid reader who defines home as the place where her books are. Her short story “Who we were there, who we are now” was longlisted as part of the 2018 Short Story Day Africa contest and published in their ID anthology. She is working on her first novel.

*

Tamanda Kanjaye is a Malawian writer and poet with a small scattering of publications. Some of her work has been published in the anthology Water Birds On The Lake Shore, The Kalahari Review and Doek!. She is also a senior editor with Africa in Dialogue. Tamandakanjaye.com is her tiny corner of the internet.