Africa Is a Country

Teju Cole's 'Open City'

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Teju Cole's 'Open City'

By
Africa is a Country

The writer Teju Cole (remember him from the Africa’s World Cup panel at The New School and his excellent, short novella about Lagos, “Every Day for the Thief“) was recently featured in The New York Times’ T Magazine in a short feature on new “first time novelists.”

Teju Cole, 35
‘‘Open City’’ (Random House, $25)
The book: A hypersensitive Nigerian-German psychiatry resident sizes up the emotional cityscape of post-9/11 New York.
The back story: Cole is American by birth but grew up in Nigeria. His first published work — a cartoon — appeared in a magazine in Lagos when he was 15. Since then he’s been a medical student, an art history professor (Netherlandish and African), a photographer, a gardener and a dishwasher. ‘‘I still do a lot of dishwashing,’’ he says. ‘‘But not in an official capacity.’’

“Open City” is also getting a lot of pre-publication high praise.

The writer Colm Toibin is moved:

Open City is a meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude. The soft, exquisite rhythms of its prose, the display of sensibility, the lucid intelligence, make it a novel to savour and treasure.

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.