Africa Is a Country

Teju Cole takes the City

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

Teju Cole takes the City

By
Sean Jacobs

Our man Teju Cole’s novel “Open City,” set in post-9/11 New York City, is doing better than very well. The critics can’t stop raving about it. Now people need to buy it. A lengthy review in “The New Yorker” (reviewer James Wood writes: “Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition”). The review was illustrated with a full page drawing by Swiss graphic artist/designer Grafilu (above). New York Magazine’s popular “Approval Matrix” deemed it “high-brow brilliant,” The Daily Beast‘s reviewer liked it, The New York Daily News, so does Bookslut, etcetera. Cole was also interviewed by NPR, by David Ebershoff (watch the video at the link), his Random House editor. Even The New York Times is on board (“a masterly work”).

You can also keep with him at his website. (Also, get his earlier novella, published in Nigeria, “Every Day is for the Thief.” Congratulations to Mr Cole.

Further Reading

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.

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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.