Toni Kan

Toni Kan is the award winning author of The Carnivorous City, Nights of the Creaking Bed, Songs of Absence and Despair, Ballad of Rage and When a Dream Lingers Too longer as well as 7 biographies. Fondly refered to as the Mayor of Lagos, he is co-founder of thelagosreview.ng

A Review of ‘The Visit And Other Stories’ by Ebele Mọgọ Akumbu Uche

The titular story ‘The Visit’ which takes on the perspective of a ghost shows a willingness to look past realism and venture into speculative fiction. This experimentation is repeated in ‘The Curse’ in which supernatural and material realities coexist, and ‘Going West’, an imagined future where Lagos is engulfed by terrorist attacks. Although the story in ‘The Curse’ feels incomplete and the chronological sequence of certain events in ‘Going West’ could be more finely tuned, these are minor missteps in the grand scheme of things.

Victor Ekpuk – Old and New Rhythms – Akumbu Uche

Joy is an emotion Ekpuk repeatedly visits in his work — his 2014 site-specific drawing for the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts was even titled Ode to Joy — and this exhibition is no different. Praise Be (2026) a digital painting featuring two dancers outfitted in ukara cloth captures this so well to the extent that the viewer can see the dynamism in the figures’ static pose. Some might see a clash between the church depicted in the painting’s background and the dancers’ cultural clothing, an indigo-dyed cotton wrapper originally worn exclusively by members of the Ekpe secret society