“I am the one who takes the little stories from friends in the neighborhood and adds my own twists to make them more captivating, more hilarious, or more dramatic”. – Achille Ronaimou

By Jerry Chiemeke

In his feature debut, Diya (Le Prix Du Sang), Achille Ronaimou crafts a morally complex drama that interrogates the collision between ancient customs and modern realities in contemporary Chad. 

The film follows Dane Francis (Ferdinand Mbaïssané), a working-class driver whose accidental knockdown of a schoolboy named Younous plunges him into a labyrinthine system of traditional justice that threatens to consume his family’s future. 

Dismissed from his job, stripped of his licence, and unable to secure employment due to his criminal record, Dane becomes a study in systemic failure. Ronaimou resists easy moralising, instead presenting a society where corruption, poverty, and rigid adherence to custom create seemingly impossible choices. 

Ferdinand Mbaïssané delivers a compelling performance as Dane, his weathered features mapping the psychological toll of a man caught between worlds. The actor’s restraint proves particularly effective in conveying the quiet desperation of someone whose moral compass is being systematically dismantled by circumstance. 

The film’s exploration of the Diya system proves particularly valuable in contemporary African cinema, where traditional justice mechanisms are often portrayed in simplistic terms. Achille Ronaimou avoids both romanticising and demonising the practice, instead presenting it as one element in an intricate web of social, economic, and political relationships that determine individual fate. 

While the film occasionally overreaches in its ambitions, its commitment to moral complexity and its refusal to provide comfortable resolutions mark it as a noteworthy first feature. 

In an exclusive interview with Afrocritik, Achille Ronaimou reflects on the events that inspired writing Diya, locations as characters in film, rigid traditional practices, and the use of cinema to alter perceptions of the African continent.

Diya, in the context of this story, translates to “the price of blood”. Can you walk us through your decision to render this concept both as your film’s title and its central moral dilemma? 

Interestingly, I never thought of any title other than Diya. I found this title even before I started writing the script. The first versions of my script tackled the subject from a rather violent angle, to the point of offending the sensitivities of some readers who believed that the film could provoke strong emotions in the Muslim community, which is very sensitive to religious issues, and label me as an anti-Islam filmmaker. 

That’s because, indeed, Diya in Chad is a poor translation of the surah ‘Al-Nissat’ from the Quran. Therefore, for me, Diya, the price of blood, is exactly the title that will resonate best for this film. Even though the script was revised several times to produce this current version, the depth of the content has remained the same.

How did you first encounter this story that would become your feature debut?

During a family ceremony, a cousin of mine, long consumed by guilt, decided to confide in me. He told me that he killed a 10-year-old child. Several years later, he was scammed and ruined by the latter’s family, in the name of the Diya. In Chad, 7 out of ten people are directly or indirectly victims of this practice called Diya or blood money. 

Hence, it’s a practice known to all, but the story of this cousin in particular touched me so much because it is the death of a child, an innocent person who pays a high price. One morning in January 2015, I set out to write the first draft of the script.

This is your first feature after directing shorts and documentaries. How did your documentary work on Minors in Prison (2013) and Kanoun (2012) inform your approach to bringing Diya to life?

My initiation to cinema through documentary was very decisive for the continuation of my career. Before that, I wrote short stories that, unfortunately, never got published; I love imaginative creation. I am the one who takes the little stories from friends in the neighborhood and adds my own twists to make them more captivating, more hilarious, or more dramatic. I have always loved writing, and documentary filmmaking has equipped me with another narrative channel because I can now combine both in my narratives, which are mostly scripted real events.

N’Djamena and Northern Chad almost become characters themselves in this story. How did you use geography and location to reflect the cultural and economic divides at play?

Diya is primarily a story of geography and religious confession. The setting and attire are characters in their own right. Following a civil war in 1979 in Chad, pitting southern Christians against northern Muslims, the population remained divided and dispersed according to their geographic and religious affiliations. 

Thus, in N’Djamena, there are northern neighborhoods inhabited by Muslims, characterised by religious austerity, where one can hear the calls of the muezzin for the 5am daily prayers. 

Women are all veiled and covered from head to toe, and men wear long boubous. However, in the southern neighborhoods inhabited by Christians, one will find bars, nightclubs, churches, and men and women proudly strolling the streets in Western attire. Therefore, one can never speak of Diya without referencing these very important details.

Ferdinand Mbaïssané’s portrayal of Dane moves from guilt through frustration to desperation. What did you look for in casting this role, and how did you guide him through this emotional arc?

I was looking for a broken man, a sober man, intelligent but crushed under the weight of society. Ferdinand was that young man among others who reflected this image a bit. He was recommended to me by my first assistant, Cyril Danina, for whom he acted in one of his films over 15 years ago. We still had to work on him a little bit, especially with his acting. For almost a year, we worked with him so that he would be more comfortable in the character of Dane. 

Working with (cinematographer) Cyrille (Hubert) and (editor) Guillaume (Talvas), how did you create the tension, dread, and chaos that mirror Dane’s psychological state?

Cyrille Hubert is a gem. I would say that the gods of cinema were with me (laughs). They sent me Cyrille from Heaven. I did not expect to have such a young, brilliant, and brave director of photography on set. It was his first time filming in Africa and in Chad where it’s over 40 degrees celsius in the shade. 

Just like me, it was also his first feature film as a director of photography, but he had more field experience than I did. He fell in love with the script from the first reading and committed to shooting it by my side. He followed the script to the letter, and it hurt him every time I had to modify or remove a scene. He continually proposed a thousand angles for each shot, giving us multiple options in the editing room. 

By having Ferdinand rehearse the scenes repeatedly, we ended up exhausting him, which sometimes isn’t a bad thing because that’s exactly when he can express the tension, fear, or chaos we’re looking for. I learned a lot from Cyril, and I would like to work with him again on my upcoming projects.

Guillaume Talvas is a very meticulous, rigorous, and creative editor; with him, we rewrote the script, focusing more on the psychology of the characters. He was the one who succeeded in bringing out Dane’s chaotic side on screen. I agreed with almost all his editing suggestions. Starting with a 150-minute rough cut, Guillaume did a remarkable job meticulously combing through every sequence to achieve a final film of 96 minutes, which is more fluid and dynamic.

The film poses questions about what really passes for good and evil. Without spoiling the ending, how do you want audiences to grapple with Dane’s ultimate choices?

I want the public to rise to the level of Dane’s spiritual maturity. After all he has endured in the name of Diya, it would have been legitimate for him to take revenge or to denounce his captors to the authorities. Instead, he chooses forgiveness. By handing little Younous back to his father, Dane breaks the chain of violence and vendetta. He rises above human baseness.

The ancient law of retaliation meets modern legal systems in your film. What does this collision reveal about justice in contemporary African societies?

Most Chadians and Africans wonder how such a practice can survive in the current era, where justice and human rights are known even to children. Diya is normalised, and Chadian authorities agree to concessions for its application. A practice that was originally intended to reconcile communities and avoid reprisals has today become a means of fraud and domination of the strong over the weak. 

Thus, a murderer can pay the Diya to the family of the deceased and be free from any legal pursuit. It is a true social tragedy that outrages new African societies.

Diya is distributed by Canal+ and produced by Sic Productions and Artisans Du Film. How important was this partnership in bringing authentic Chadian stories to wider audiences?

It is a beautiful collaboration that opens a global window on Chadian cinema, which is still unknown to the international public. I believe that I will be able to collaborate with Sic Productions for a long time; it’s one of the few Chadian production companies that has the vision of a revolutionary African cinema.

Looking beyond Diya, how has this feature debut shaped your vision for future projects? What stories are you burning to tell next?

This first feature film, recently praised by the public at TIFF, made me realise that there are things worth discussing. Where politicians have failed and tarnished the image of Africans, cinema can correct this by shedding light on it. 

Thus, I want to continue along the same lines by addressing a topic as burning as the Diya. It concerns the conflict between farmers and herders, which is a conflict skillfully perpetuated by African leaders to keep the populations divided. 

Livestock and agriculture have been the two nourishing pillars of Africans since time immemorial; they must be nurtured and energised, not hindered in their development through an endless conflict.

Diya screened in the Centrepiece section at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, The British Blacklist, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.

The post In Conversation: Achille Ronaimou on “Diya”, Confronting Tradition, Justice, and Forgiveness in Chad first appeared on Afrocritik.

“The notion of resistance always having to be loud, glorious, and heroic comes from the fantasies of people who have never actually had to fight for anything. Effective resistance is often quiet, careful, and requires a delicate balance.” – Zamo Mkhwanazi

By Jerry Chiemeke

Drawing from personal history, South African filmmaker, Zamo Mkhwanazi, transforms intimate memories into powerful cinema with her feature debut, Laundry (Uhlanjululo), which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). 

The film emerges from the painful story of Mkhwanazi’s grandfather, whose thriving laundry business in Durban was seized when the apartheid government consolidated its grip on power. This gaping wound becomes the foundation for a quietly devastating portrait of a Black family navigating the precariousness of operating within, but never truly belonging to, the violently stratified world of 1960s South Africa.

Set against the backdrop of apartheid’s tightening noose, Laundry centres on the Sithole family’s laundry business, granted rare permission to operate in a whites-only area of town. Patriarch Enoch (Siyabonga Shibe) walks a careful line between protecting his family’s fragile foothold and contending with his son Khuthala’s (Ntobeko Sishi) dreams of musical stardom. 

When Enoch faces imprisonment, the family’s survival depends on choices that pit pragmatic endurance against creative freedom.

“Prosperous black men like my grandfather were an unwelcome challenge to the myths of white superiority”, says Mkhwanazi. “This film is my way of not being silent. It is the story rarely told in the glorification of the struggle heroes. It is about the smaller moments that take place in the midst of the great injustices”.

Building on her extensive background in South African television and her internationally acclaimed short films, Mkhwanazi brings both intimate knowledge and artistic sophistication to this project. Her approach treats the laundry itself as a character: the steam-filled back rooms reflecting confusion and uncertainty, while the incandescent front space embodies the family’s determination to maintain control.

In an exclusive conversation, Afrocritik caught up with Mkhwanazi during the Festival to discuss stylistic choices, Black joy, the deployment of music in filmmaking, creating story worlds, and the exploration of resistance in African cinema.

Where does this film come from? Describe the combination of ideas and/or real-life experiences that culminated in the birth of Laundry as a screenplay.

My grandfather owned a laundry in Durban, South Africa, and when the apartheid government came into power, the laundry was taken from him. 

What conversations, if any, did you have with surviving family members about their experiences during Apartheid, and how did those inform the authenticity of this film?

Many. The choices of my mother’s family members were limited after these events, and I made sure to place some of these limitations on the characters in the film. Some of the phrases used by white characters are direct quotes that have been said to my family members. 

Music is very important to South Africans, and the stories around how music was made, the places it was played, and the characters that inhabited that world filled out a lot of people for me. The limitations placed on African women that essentially relegated them to the status of children were something my mother navigated directly. 

Laundry captures the perennial shadow of oppression that pervaded that era while maintaining moments of joy and hope. How do you navigate showing systemic brutality without letting the film fall into some sort of “joylessness”?

It is surprisingly not difficult for me as a South African. Black rebellion in South Africa has always had an element of the joyful. In the words of Steve Biko, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”. 

There is an understanding that not allowing the enemy to hijack your joy is the first weapon we can wield against oppression. If we can find joy in the fight, we can endure it. 

From a character perspective, how does Khuthala’s musical ambition function as both personal expression and political act in the context of 1968?

I do not believe anyone wakes up in the morning wishing to fight a system or to fight oppression. What people wake up wanting to do is to fight for their dreams. I chose a commonplace dream. Not particularly admirable like being a doctor, or realistic like running a laundry or noble like being a teacher. Just an ordinary, somewhat selfish, possibly foolish dream. 

In the context of a world where black bodies were actively being turned into industrial fodder, a dream that does not create goods and services is the antithesis of a body that is meant to be an input of production. 

Music serves as both escape and resistance in this film. Can you discuss how you developed the musical elements and what specific South African musicians or musical traditions influenced the soundtrack?

The music was mostly created by Tracy September, Tshepang Ramoba, and Mpumi Mcata who are the musicians seen in the film. They have all been making music for decades and are some of my favourite musicians from my country. 

These are musicians who are not afraid to experiment with the traditional to create wholly unique sounds. I did not want the music to sound too ‘familiar’. It needed to have an edge, a feeling that they could have added something significant to the musical cannon of the time. 

The film draws parallels to real musicians like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who had to flee South Africa. Was there a conscious decision to explore the stories of those who couldn’t escape?

Yes, there are many more who never had a chance to share their talents with the world, who never had a chance to escape the circumstances and the iron fist of a fascist regime. 

This feature focuses on the intimate textures of family life rather than grand historical events. What influenced your decision to tell this story through such a domestic lens?

There are more of those ordinary folk who quietly fought the system daily in their lives. Most films are not made by people who have had to survive any kind of oppression. The notion of resistance always having to be loud, glorious, and heroic comes from the fantasies of people who have never actually had to fight for anything. Effective resistance is often quiet, careful, requires a delicate balance, and can even seem illogical. 

For example, when you read South African history from the 1980s, you will hear much about the burning of schools – which were indoctrinating black children into willing slavery (called Bantu Education). But you will not hear about the resulting effect because to this day, that history is being told by people who think struggle is only valid when it’s highly visible. Mothers stayed home with their children, who had no classrooms to attend and were in danger of being on those burning streets where apartheid police were shooting us from Israeli-designed tankers. 

The government didn’t care about us burning our schools, but they could not continue without the labour of so many black mothers. Stayaways became even more effective as a tool than burning down those schools. 

We could be outgunned in the arena of violence; however, staying home and withholding labour was even more crippling for the regime. But I think when we look for drama, we look at the burning of schools and the faces of manufactured heroes shouting slogans. I wanted to look at the home front, where real resistance is held down. 

Laundry is a period piece. Tell us more about how the world for this story came to be, from the visual design to the fashion and verbiage.

Production design is what we started with; creating these environments to reflect both the times as well as class and lifestyle differences. This was also a family that owned a laundry and had access to the best seamstresses and fabrics. 

The family was not rich, but it was important that they be well turned out, especially compared to a character like Albert, who was a street urchin surviving on the margins. The wardrobe for Lillian was important, as she was the character who linked the world of the father and son. 

The actors had much work to do, and we had to place each character within context. Enoch, the father, was a missionary school product who had a strong command of the English language and would pepper his speech more with English, but his wife did not have the same education and was less confident in her speech in general, especially with regard to figures of authority. 

His children were already victims of the Bantu Education system and were far more stimulated by their home life, which included a musical, mechanical, and business education. The younger sister retained a certain innocent curiosity about the world, while Khuthala was more single-minded. Therefore, they all spoke a little differently from each other to reflect those historical and personal realities.

How did you work with your actors, particularly Ntobeko Sishi and Siyabonga Shibe, to capture the complex father-son dynamic at the heart of the story?

Both Ntobeko and Siyabonga are fairly experienced actors. I am a fan of stillness in performance as it forefronts emotion over action. With Ntobeko, it sometimes felt unnatural to the character, and so I was selective about using the moments of stillness as a punctuation mark in the story. 

Ntobeko was truly a collaborator in creating his character, and sometimes, instead of directing him, I would ask him questions as his character and let him answer with his performance. Siyabonga is an actor with a phenomenal physical presence, and sometimes his stillness could be right down intimidating, which was useful in certain moments with his son. 

But it was important to find the warmth of the character while maintaining the stoic dignity required for the storyline. For this, Siyabonga mastered the micro-expressions of the steady Enoch. 

The concept of “uneasy privileges” that your characters experience – being granted limited rights within an oppressive system – feels relevant beyond apartheid South Africa. Was this universality intentional?

Oh absolutely. In South Africa, we have the concept of the ‘the better black’, in the USA it is the house negro. Latin America is replete with examples of differential privilege. I am a middle-class person in the most unequal society in the world. These uneasy privileges are very much part of my life. And I am fully aware that as long as these systems of oppression thrive, those privileges are only borrowed. 

The laundry business becomes a gathering place for the Black community in the film. How important was it to show these spaces of connection and mutual support within the oppressive system?

The laundry is a place where they are served according to when they arrive, as opposed to most places where whites would always be served first. This is never explicitly mentioned, but is clear in the way customers line up when Enoch is present. It is also important to make it clear that while the area is declared white, most of the people given patronage or working in the area are black. 

Apartheid was incredibly nonsensical; a capitalist system that thought it could thrive by keeping the majority of consumers without any buying power. So places like this laundry show that these laws were nigh to impossible to maintain. 

After exploring your family’s past so intimately in Laundry, how has this experience changed your approach to storytelling and what stories you want to tell next?

What changed the most for me was when I had the screening here (in Toronto). Honestly, putting the work in front of an audience that connected so strongly with the work assured me that the issues that interest me remain relevant, even as I feel that political storytelling from Africa, particularly stories that challenge white supremacy, are being strongly discouraged both locally and in the international festival space. 

Having an audience that responded to the story with enthusiastic appreciation of the difficult themes was a blessing. My next project retains a strongly political point of view, with feminist themes. It’s set in the future and concerns bodily autonomy.

Laundry screened in the Discovery section of TIFF.

Jerry Chiemeke is a Nigerian-born writer, film critic, journalist, and lawyer based in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared in Die Welt, The I Paper, The Africa Report, The British Blacklist, Berlinale Press, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Culture Custodian, Olongo Africa, and elsewhere. Chiemeke’s work has won or been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ken Saro Wiwa Prize, Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Quramo Writers Prize. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection, Dreaming of Ways to Understand You.

The post TIFF 2025: In Conversation With Zamo Mkhwanazi, Director Of “Laundry” first appeared on Afrocritik.

“When I write child characters, I think about how big some of my childhood moments felt and I try to channel those moments as much as possible” – Uche Okonkwo. 

By Chimezie Chika

The Nigerian writer, Uche Okonkwo, has been quietly building up her reputation for the better part of a decade, especially for her short stories. Over the years, these stories have appeared in many prestigious literary magazines and anthologies, including A Public Space, Zyzzyva, Kenyon Review, One Story, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Lagos Noir, Ellipsis, Saraba, and others. 

Her accolades include residencies, scholarships, and grants from MacDowell, Elizabeth George Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Art Omi Writers’ Residency, Anderson Center, Tin House, and Bread Loaf; a 2020-2021 George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy and a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellowship. 

Uche Okonkwo also has an MFA in Fiction from Virginia Tech, a master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, and is presently a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. 

Uche Okonkwo’s debut story collection, A Kind of Madness, which was released by Tin House in the US in 2024, has enjoyed critical success. The Nigerian edition was published in March this year by Narrative Landscape Press. In this interview with Afrocritik, she speaks majorly on the book as well as on related craft matters. 

I found the title of your book, A Kind of Madness, quite intriguing. Is this filled with gothic stories of mysterious lunacy? I wondered. At first, I thought it was the title of a short story in the book. It was only when I finished the book that I realised the title’s efforts at thematic cohesion. What inspired this title? 

Madness was never an organising principle for the stories while I was writing them; it’s a theme that emerged much later. The idea of “madness” came late in the process, when I was thinking about a title for the book, and it felt fitting because all the stories in the collection have to do with some kind of flawed thinking. At least one of the stories deals with literal madness, but for most, the madness is more figurative. Specifically, the title came from a line in the first story in the collection, “Nwunye Belgium.”

Most of the ten stories in this collection revolve around children and adolescents. In short, the world of children and adolescents litter your stories, whether as main characters, which is most of the time—from stories such as “Eden”, “Debris”, “Animals”, “Milk and Oil”, “Burning”, etc—or as peripheral ones. Why really young characters?

There’s something magical about childhood, and I sometimes think that my affinity for child characters might be a way of dealing with my nostalgia for my own childhood. 

When I write child characters, I think about how big some of my childhood moments felt and I try to channel those moments as much as possible. Writing child characters also makes me more aware of the illusions of control that we hold on to as adults, and puts me back in that space where the adults in charge of you basically shape your life. 

Also, I feel like the innocence of childhood, and the ways in which children try to mimic the adult world, renders the strangeness and hypocrisies of adulthood starkly. 

It’s interesting that you say that about childhood. Perhaps that was why I was more often than not thrown off by the distinctly adult-like thoughts of child characters in stories such as “Milk and Oil”, “Burning”, “Shadow”, etc. Do you genuinely believe children think like adults?

A piece of advice that I have heard about writing child characters, and that I have observed from stories that do justice to child characters, is to take their concerns—no matter how whimsical or how much you know better from an adult perspective—seriously. Children may not have the language for everything they see or feel, but they are capable of complex reasoning, perhaps more than we often give them credit for. 

One consistent theme that seems to feature in many stories here is mother-daughter relationships and its complexities. In “Nwunye Belgium”, it takes the guise of a comic-tragic pursuit of a fortuitous marriage ambition; in others, it seems to be predicated on the respective religious or attention-seeking compulsions of madness. What is it about mothers and daughters that fascinates you as a fiction writer?

I am drawn to the emotionally complex dynamics between families and close friends because I think that through the lens of these interpersonal relationships, we’re able to capture the wider structures and politics and hypocrisies of the societies we live in. I also really enjoy reading mother-daughter stories because I find them compelling; I think there’s an inherent tension that mother-daughter relationships often hold. 

Mother-daughter relationships can be at once tender and sensuous, while also being fraught with contradictions and power struggles as the mother seeks to shape the daughter. I’ve been inspired by books I’ve read about mothers and daughters recently, including The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, and many others. 

This may be partly why your stories work strongly as irony. The plots stretch ironies to their limits. This may be due to the contrasting effect of your matter-of-fact prose on stories with comic or satirical themes. It has led me to wonder, in a general sense, what your writing process is like. How do you begin a story? What comes first? Image, plot, character? Do you think about themes when you write?

I try to never think of themes while I write. This quote from Rick DeMarinis’s The Art and Craft of the Short Story rings true to me: “the term ‘theme’ is part of the critic’s vocabulary, not the writer’s.Don’t analyze a work in progress for its deepest meanings. Don’t think of your work as having a major theme before you’ve produced a draft. You might hamstring your imagination if you do. 

Remember this: You don’t begin with meaning, you end with it”(61, 62). Of course, during later drafts, and while revising and editing and considering feedback from trusted readers, I then give some thought to possible themes, but while writing early drafts I avoid thinking about theme. 

And it’s important to remember too that readers will bring all kinds of meaning to your work, uncovering themes and interpretations that you may not have considered yourself. I think that’s part of what makes writing and reading so rewarding. 

When thinking of a new story idea, the first thing that I start with is the situation, or an inciting event, or even the climax, and then I try to work my way through the rest of it: how do we get from A to B to C? Who are the characters? Where does this story take place? 

As a Nigerian, every detail in your stories—language, attitudes, consumer products, cities—is familiar. So close are they to the Nigerian reality that they may even be sometimes uncomfortable or even painful. That is what I felt with “The Harvest”, which for me is the best story in the book. It is the kind of unassuming satire of Nigerian Pentecostalism that is bound to elicit a certain touchiness if read to a Nigerian audience. What particularly stood out for you while working on the story?

I can see how “The Harvest” might cause feelings of touchiness. The world that Alfonso inhabits is one that I think is very recognisable to many Nigerian Christians. I’ve often wondered how it feels to be on the other side of the pulpit, but with “The Harvest,” I primarily wanted to dramatise the slow death of a dream. 

Sometimes I think that Nigerian Pentecostalism, and prosperity preaching more generally, encourages this view of faith as a kind of currency. But what happens when it fails? I wanted to explore that through Alfonso’s failures and resentments, and also through the breakdown of his relationship with his wife. 

Let’s talk about boarding schools, where a couple of stories in your book are set. As a boy, I did not find the boarding school experience a pleasant one. The girls in your boarding school stories would apparently agree with me, though they of course have very peculiar female experiences. The important thing in those stories seems to be the fact that they are not narrated by the protagonists. Do you think this device helps with your portrayal of the Nigerian girls boarding school experience?

I was not consciously thinking of specific narrative devices with regard to “Long Hair” and “The Girl Who Lied.” With each story, I try to figure out what I think would be the most interesting or effective lens from which to view the story’s events. 

My boarding school days were not particularly pleasant either, although there were fond moments sprinkled throughout. It was a very formative time, and a Nigerian boarding school is a great setting for all kinds of drama. 

A lot of drama indeed. As a whole, how was the experience of writing A Kind of Madness and how long did it take to write it?

I did not start writing with the intention of putting together a short story collection, and so the experience of writing the book is not necessarily a cohesive one. I kept writing single stories until I had enough to put into a collection, and at that point, reading the stories together as a single text was an interesting experience—it let me see what obsessions and themes were recurring in my work, and how the stories speak to each other across a long span of time.

What next are we expecting from you? A novel? Another collection?

Without going into the details, I’ll just say that I have a few projects in the works. We’ll see how things go.  

Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1

The post “Readers Will Bring All Kinds of Meaning to Your Work”: Uche Okonkwo, In Conversation with Afrocritik first appeared on Afrocritik.

Steven Harrington is making his Frieze New York debut with a sunny slice of Los Angeles. Known for his psychedelic-pop aesthetic and his beloved character, Mello, few artists can pull off such chaotic yet composed illustrative acts.

Staged at The Shed’s top-floor lounge, Harrington transforms the space into a lush technicolor environment where a moment of meditative play cuts through the clamor of Art Week, inviting viewers to slow down, linger in the now and, as the title suggests, stop to smell the flowers.

For his cozy, living room-like immersive installation, Harrington teamed up with LG to bring his vibrant universe into motion on their ultra-thin OLED screens. At the heart of the display, Mello waves from blooming fields on a transparent TV turned digital canvas. Elsewhere, he can be seen floating serenely through space and clinging onto cartoon palm trees ablaze.

Alongside animated scenes, the installation features works from Harrington’s inaugural museum solo at Seoul’s Amorepacific Museum, including a painting from Harrington’s original Stop to Smell the Flowers series, and a 10-foot dog sculpture, decked in blooms and bugs.

To celebrate his first Frieze New York, we caught up with Harrington to discuss his inspirations behind the presentation and what it’s like incorporating technology into his practice. Read on for the full interview.

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“Being an artist, something that’s really important to me is simply honoring the process, it’s really about constantly going back to the basics – pencil on paper – that’s where it always begins for me.”

Can you tell us about some of the themes behind this presentation and how it came to be?

A lot of the work was originally created for display at Frieze in Los Angeles and because of the current events that happened at the beginning of the year, we pushed it to New York.

The theme here is exploring my Stop to Smell the Flowers series. It was developing during the later stages of COVID, and I just wanted to bring some vibrancy, optimism and hope to myself and the world. I worked with LG to create my static paintings in an animated form, and it was just really exciting to work with the team and use the new transparent TV.

What was the process of translating static paintings into dynamic animations?

Being an artist, something that’s really important to me is simply honoring the process, it’s really about constantly going back to the basics – pencil on paper – that’s where it always begins for me. It’s always about that initial development and refining that development over time until I create a work of art.

How do you envision emerging technology or digital tools becoming a part of your practice?

As an artist, I’ve always embraced technology and though a lot of my practice relies on traditional painting, drawing and sculpture, I’ve always thought that it was important to kind of explore what’s ahead. I think these days, a lot of artists are exploring technology more and more, and you’re seeing a lot of brands explore art more and more — I think there’s a really interesting balance there.

“Art making, for me, has always been uncomfortable, and you just learn how to navigate that intuition.”

Here, we’re seeing Mello in present-day Los Angeles. In the last several years, he has taken on many forms, journeyed across so many places, and most recently, you teased your first bronze sculpture. Where can we expect to see him next?

I don’t necessarily know where I see Mello going next, and that’s what keeps me kind of chasing him. That’s what keeps me in that creative space, and keeps me pursuing the act of making art.

What’s a piece of advice that you wish you received as an early-career or emerging artist?

My advice for my younger self or anyone else that’s interested in making art would be to learn how to become comfortable in an uncomfortable setting. Art making, for me, has always been uncomfortable, and you just learn how to navigate that intuition.

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