In February 2023, Lagos-based critic Oris Aigbokhaevbolo launched a new online literary magazine, Efiko, with a piece entitled “The Death of Nigerian Literature,” in which he indicted the hollowing out of Nigeria-based literary platforms and flight of writers to creative writing programs abroad. [1] The next month, a young poet-critic whose Substack moniker is Eliot of Lagos asked whether contemporary Nigerian poetry was really “Nigerian” rather than American. He claimed that alongside...