The launch of Victor Ehikhamenor’s Central Hotel at the J Randle Centre in Lagos on October 31 turned into something between a conversation and a communal gist on October 31, as the Nigerian visual artist and writer introduced his first fiction collection to a Lagos audience and made a pointed case for African writers to stop explaining themselves.
Published by Masobe Books, the hardback arrived in Lagos on October 30, 2026, with international publication expected in the first quarter of 2027. It contains 11 illustrated, interconnected stories that move between Nigeria and the diaspora, following characters shaped by family, migration, military rule, religion, sexuality, power and survival.
The event was hosted by writer and filmmaker Wana Udobang, who set a playful tone from the start. She promised readings and conversation, then warned the audience that she intended to relieve them of their money. ‘The merch must sell,’ she said, urging guests to buy books and T-shirts.
Introducing Ehikhamenor with a string of titles; photographer, painter, artist, novelist, satirist, she opened proceedings with a reading of her own, an excerpt from “Madam,” a story that features a dwarf and a journey to Italy.
Ehikhamenor then took over, reading from the title story, “Central Hotel,” in which a bicycle repairer named Paco dispenses wisdom from his village shop. “There’s no magic in the city,” he said, introducing the passage. “Village is where the magic resides.”
He described home as something like helium: easy to carry, impossible to hold on to. Nostalgia, he suggested, is what happens when a person returns to find that things they remembered as huge have shrunk, or that the world has simply moved on. The story, he said, plays with the magic of childhood Christmas in the village set against Christmas in the city, and with home as a spiritual as well as a physical place.
Udobang noted that the collection holds Christianity and older belief systems side by side without any sense of internal battle. She pointed to a line in “Madam” in which a girl curses someone “in Jesus’ name’.
Ehikhamenor said the duality reflects how he grew up. His grandfather, he recalled, was a traditionalist who was never preached to, and he joked about the idea of that grandfather being condemned to hell by later zealots. His answer to the tension, he said, is that there is room for everything. He compared it with carrying two phones, one for each network.
On language, Ehikhamenor was blunt. There was a period, he said, when Nigerian and African writers strove to be more sophisticated than those who owned the language, and that made much of the writing inaccessible to ordinary readers. He recalled the struggle of reading a notoriously dense text as a first-year student fresh from the village.
His conclusion: “You don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Just tell the story the best way you can.” He writes, he said, in the rhythm in which the story comes, and that is why the book uses so much Nigerian Pidgin. He does not have to prove he can do the English language, he added.
Asked about the pressure on African writers to translate themselves for Western audiences, he said Nigeria now has about three generations of writers and enough readers at home that nobody needs to explain or define things for outsiders. Breaking into Western publishing remains difficult, he acknowledged, because agents and editors must first understand the work, and writers risk writing for them while forgetting the audience at home. He chose early, he said, to write for his own people, so that they would not have to roll their eyes at the page.
The same principle drove the book’s structure. The stories are not linear, and characters reappear under different names in the village, in Benin City and in Lagos. “It’s a bit of a rebellion’” against the Western expectation that linked stories should follow a neat sequence, he said.
For the second reading, Ehikhamenor chose” Head of State,” set among cadets at the Nigerian Defence Academy. The excerpt follows Geoffrey, a young officer woken for the morning drill and consumed by thoughts of Grace, a nurse who runs a bar and whom he suspects is already the interest of a senior officer. Beneath the desire runs a darker vein of rivalry, betrayal and the cold arithmetic of power. The passage ends with Geoffrey tasting blood and imagining how he might kill someone.
The stories span the 1980s to the early 2000s, and Ehikhamenor said military life was the reality of his own teenage years. Udobang called the collection both history and archive, and pressed him on its casual portrayal of violence, including a scene in which people watch killings as spectacle. She recalled her own childhood memory of seeing a public execution on television, and asked whether Nigerians swap memory for amnesia, and amnesia for memory.
Ehikhamenor said the violence was not a conscious project but a lived experience, and that he did not want to romanticise it. He added that the collection also holds beautiful moments of love and friendship. He said he anchored some stories with real historical names and events so that readers could place them in time. His broader point was that, if the dates were removed, one would have to ask whether the system had really changed, or only the actors.
Udobang praised the collection’s treatment of male friendship, citing “Passport to Heaven,” in which a friend gives the protagonist frank advice about life in America. Such tenderness, she observed, is usually reserved for women’s stories in literature.
Ehikhamenor said friendship in the village is a serious commitment: “If I say I’m your friend, I’m your friend.” He argued that Western readings of African male closeness, such as men holding hands, have robbed Africans of an easy tenderness, and that many men now struggle to express themselves. He also rejected imported definitions of masculinity, saying he does not have a word for it in his own language and that the idea has become a university subject alien to the way people live.
On the pressure of being read as anthropology, Ehikhamenor said African writers should not allow others to prescribe how they see their world. He recounted being told by foreign audiences at residencies and exhibitions that his country is in a bad state, and said Nigerians may criticise Nigeria at home but need not feed outsiders a single story. He said he knows where he comes from, and if anyone sees that as pride, it is their problem. Social media, he added, offers Africans new platforms, though writers must still be mindful of how they use them.
The themes echo the author’s statement in the publisher’s release. “I had grandmothers who competed to tell stories every night,” he said there, adding that they taught him to surrender to a story and let it go where it needs to.”I believe we must tell them on our own terms,” he said,” “without surrendering our perspectives or allowing others to prescribe how we see and understand our world.”
Each story opens with a full-page pencil drawing and closes with a small portrait of one of its characters. The black-and-white illustrations are in Ehikhamenor’s signature style of elongated limbs, contorted bodies, repeated figures and spiralling patterns, and are meant to be revisited after reading.
Several stories pre-date the book. “The Supreme Command” received a Highly Commended Award from the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association in 2003. Earlier versions of “Who Will Bury the Dead” appeared in Wasafiri in 2006, “Passport to Heaven” in Farafina Magazine in 2008, and “A Picture from Ireland” in AGNI in 2010. In 2015, “Madam” was presented as short fiction, alongside the drawings “Postcards from Italy,” in the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor.
Ehikhamenor was one of three artists to represent Nigeria at the country’s first national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC and CNN. He maintains studios in Lagos and Maryland, United States.