Asiri Media

Health, Faith and Human Dignity .  In the 1300s, the bacterium Yersinia   pestis , almost decimated the population of Euro-Asia. Lost for hope and for direction, all that most people could do was go on processions and vigils –praying for God to rescue them from the hands of “the black death” who was pictured going around harvesting souls – no one was safe; no refuge was in sight. In the 1500s, when small pox hit Mexico and South America, “the Mayas in the Yutucan Peninsula” for instance, “believed that three evil gods, Ekpetz, Unnankak and Sojakak, were flying from village to village at night, infecting people.” In parts of pre-colonial West Africa, growing infant mortality either from sickle cell or other related illness forced people to conclude that some children were inflicted with an evil spirit – the Yorubas called them “Abiku,” the Igbos called them “Ogbanje” – which marked them as “born to die.” When HIV hit the world around the 1900s, many believed that it wa...

Welcome to our Literature corner. We serve you up with the best of literary works from around the world.                                   *                               TEAM . My name is Carissa Richetti, and I am a writer. I studied Creative Writing at the University of South Florida. I write about feminism, entertainment and personal finance. My works have appeared on New People News, Luna Luna, The Women Inc., The Malvern Daily Record, and The Penny Hoarder. I live in Pennsylvania. CONTACTS. Email : crichetti@mail.usf.edu Twitter : @richetticarissa. I am Prospero Anuforo, writer and a poet —both page and stage. I serve as editor at Asiri Media, and also provide content on Pigin Paarol as Pipiro. I live in Lagos, Nigeria. CONTACTS . Email : pipiro44@gmail.com Twitter : @pipiro44. To find all th...

                                             1. You see, I was so smart as a kid. And this made me learn to read later than I should have. Yes, I had to throw away my smartness and conform to the often illogical axioms of the English language. I had gone to stay with granny. And a cousin was there, too.  She was attending a good private school where they even thought phonetics. It was a Saturday, and she was in the hallway, reading aloud. I spelt out every word in my head after her. Coz: Mister. Me: M. I. S. T. A. Coz: John. Me: J. O. N. Coz: Said. Me: S. E. D. Coz: Our. Me: A. W. A. I picked  up the reader later, and tried to  confirm that my spellings were just perfect. Well, slight differences which my smart-ass self thought was just a matter of choice: Mister is almost the same as Mista. The one I couldn't take was their spelling of a...

I was in JSS3 around the time. And we had moved from Surulere, a place fast becoming completely industrial,  to the crowded, residential area of Igando. I was schooling at Sanya Grammar School in Surulere, and had to finish my  JSS3 there before applying for a transfer at the Lagos State Ministry of Education to a school closer to our house in Igando. So, for one full year, I had to wake up really early to beat what I still think is the father of all Go-Slows in the whole of Lagos: the Iyana Ejigbo to Jakande Estate jam. Faada Lawd . It's not exactly a jam, if you looked at it another way. Rather, it was a daily conference of frustrated Lagosians, sardined in rickety buses, hiding the dogging poverty of the various slums they were coming from in fancy clothes and sophisticated perfumes, fanning themselves, speaking English, hoping the buses they were on would gain even an  inch every 20 minutes. These were the ones who worked in the Industrial areas on the mainlan...

The house, because it is so arresting, led to my arrest as its owner and builder. By Moyo Okediji.                               I. I was arrested by the Nigerian Police on July 5, 2018. To be fair to them, they were angry with my new building, the ÀKÒDÌ ÒRÌṢÀ, in Ile Ife. The police landed in trucks, arms, uniforms, and plain clothes to storm the construction site. There were about ten workers at the site when the police came. The previous day when the police arrived the workers fled into the surrounding bushes, abandoning their tools, unused building materials, and the entire construction area. “Who is the owner of the house,” one of the plain-clothed officers barked at the cowering plumbing workers, the master bricklayers, carpenters and laborers at various positions around the building. But this time the workers did not flee. Sticking to their plan, they carried their union identity cards wi...

                             By Hymar David .        It was 1998. The year Ebbe Sand and his Danish compatriots destroyed the Super Eagles in the second-round stages of France 1998. The year Sani Abacha died and my father and his friends celebrated, filling our parlour with beer, loud conversations, music and laughter. It was the year my best friend Elijah received Jesus into his heart and started avoiding me.        We met one afternoon at school as I was doing my best to stand up to Jamiu. Jamiu was in Primary three, but he had the body of a primary six pupil. He was a half-wit bully who repeated classes and dusted his punishments like the strokes of cane were caressing his palms and back.        I was walking towards where some boys were playing football, licking a lollipop and resisting the urge to bite into it so I could get to the gum in t...

The question, if anything, should be: what new perspective will this structure bring to our literature?    Courtesy: Panel discussion at KABAFEST. As it stands, there are two camps of Nigerian writers now: the pro-KABAFEST camp; and the anti-KABAFEST, placard-carrying camp. The latter is almost a complete list of uninvited guests, sadly, raving at how wrong it all is: writers must boycott KABAFEST altogether because Mallam Nasir El-Rufai is an evil man, and has his stash in it; writers must be good; writers must be activists; writers must eschew this treachery, and not go wine and dine over the graves of murdered Shiites; literary festivals are for hungry writers looking for free meals. Let's at least begin with the truth: Literary Festivals, Cultural Exchange Programs, and anything of that ilk, are events where writers and scholars should be made comfortable: lush meals, fine wine, expensive hotels. It’s so everywhere in the world. I don't know of any programs w...