In February, Communique — a publication that every African creative should be reading — published an incisive breakdown of our work at Open Country Mag, with a title four years overdue: “Open Country Mag makes a case for African longform writing.”
The feature, by Oritsejolomi Otomewo, is so thoughtfully written, it makes me happy. (As does the other insightful commentary I’ve seen by Words for Worlds’ Gautam Bhatia.)
Some passages:
In December 2025, when a new profile of Wole Soyinka began circulating online, the dominant reaction in many corners of the internet was a quiet sense of intrigue. Not because of what the piece said, but because of what it was. A definitive chronicling of Soyinka’s life, it ran to nearly 20,000 words. It moved deliberately across the literary giant’s lifetime, lingering on his early career, intellectual formation, literary battles, exile, and the long arc of a life lived in public thought. It read less like a magazine article and more like a historical document.
This was striking because, at the time, the dominant story about Soyinka was far smaller: a viral political moment. In the month before, headlines across local and international publications had focused on the Trump administration’s decision to revoke his visa. It was the latest episode in a long-running feud the Nobel Laureate has had with the US president, dating back to his 2016 election, when he tore up his US green card. In the compressed logic of contemporary media, Soyinka had been reduced to a symbol in a political argument.
The longform profile did the opposite. It refused immediacy and resisted the gravitational pull of the news cycle. Instead, it attempted something much harder: to chronicle the full intellectual and historical weight of one of Africa’s most consequential cultural figures.
. . .
Despite these structural challenges, Open Country Mag’s work carries a symbolic and practical significance. It shows what is possible when African publications commit to longform storytelling: that the continent’s writers, thinkers, and cultural figures can be chronicled with nuance, rigour, and ambition. Even if its model is difficult to replicate at scale today, it establishes a blueprint, a proof of concept if you may, that longform in Africa is not only feasible but essential for documenting the intellectual and cultural life of the continent.
Brief as it is, this piece gets to the heart of my vision for longform writing, our use of it to slow down and hold attention and make us Africans — and our many non-African readers — to see the models of achievement before us. It sees the big and small details. Thank you, Oritsejolomi.
Unlike many, I am a latecomer to the essential work that Communique is doing covering the forces in Africa’s creative economy. But what a discovery to go through their archive and see the clarity with which they capture the ideas and visions driving change. Please subscribe and read this platform.
Read: “Open Country Mag makes a case for African longform writing”
