The next evening, we gathered at Rovingheights for a book reading. I read an excerpt from my then-unpublished novel, The Inheritance of Days, straight from my phone. Mariam and Charity took it upon themselves to photograph me. I am not usually one to seek out a camera, but they kept adjusting angles, and insisting on one more picture.
Essays
For at least three times, gravity threatens to overwhelm this marvel of human invention that glides on air like a winged thing. Blood will drain from your head, and you sway. It is like an incoming state of inebriation, but without any of that soothing numbness two bottles of Heineken can elicit.
For a club inseparable from Enugu’s football identity, the result also sharpens an old question: what travels when a team plays away from the city associated with its history? The home leg took place at the MKO Abiola Sports Complex in Abeokuta. Enugu remained central to the narrative, even when the match-day crowd and physical surroundings were somewhere else.
Born in Madrid to Moroccan parents, Hakimi developed at Real Madrid, became a senior international for Morocco and built club careers in Germany, Italy and France. His importance to Morocco became especially visible at the 2022 World Cup, when the national team reached the semi-finals, the first African side to do so. PSG’s player profile also records his 100th international appearance during the 2026 World Cup.
I must commend the developer Shalom who clearly took the saying “the devil is in the details” to heart. From Quilox, Freedom Park and iFitness to Owambes, Third Mainland Bridge traffic and the occasional robbery by area boys, Lagos is not just a backdrop but a fully immersive world that is part of the joke, charm and appeal of the game. Abuja and Port Harcourt are represented too, giving Nigerians a digital playground that feels like home.
Somewhere between those readings, shared meals and quiet conversations, the people I had met at the airport stopped feeling like strangers. The city outside the workshop continued moving in its usual Lagos way, but inside that room, I had found a slower kind of movement—the movement of ideas between people.
The grief of living is not the grief of losing. It is the grief of trying, of being in the middle of something hard with no clear end date, no guarantee, no moment where someone officially tells you it is okay to feel how you feel. It is the grief of a salary already spent. Of a father’s diagnosis that rearranged everything and the relief that he is fine now, which somehow does not cancel the weight of what it took to get there.
Now, I would be dishonest if I stood here in 2026 and spoke about the future of the creative economy without naming the force that is already remaking it: artificial intelligence. And I know the fear in this room, because I share the caution -that the machine will flatten our voice, that it will make every story sound the same, that it will take the bread from the animator and the editor and the writer. That fear is not foolish.
She’ll wrap her arms around you when her inquiry into your well-being causes your spine to collapse. Sensing your discomfort, she will sit beside you quietly, covered in your musty duvet. A movie will watch the two of you until Uber Eats arrives. You will take a few pizza bites for her sake and find that it struggles to push past the permanent lump in your throat. Too numb to protest, you’ll get into the bath she runs you and sit there sobbing while she changes your linen.
Femi Osofisan has always understood that stories can shape a nation. He has used them…
This essay reflects on the life and unfinished intellectual trajectory of Pius Adesanmi, tracing his…
March 10, 2026 marked seven years since multi-hyphenate – Poet/Prose Stylist/Academic/Public Intellectual, Pius Adesanmi, departed…