Intellectual magazines are flourishing in Africa

LAST OCTOBER young Nigerians took to the streets to protest against police brutality. At first “none of the traditional media companies were covering it,” recalls Wale Lawal. A few years earlier he had started the Republic, a quarterly magazine of ideas and analysis, and now his readers wanted to discuss the movement that was swelling around them. So he and his team in Lagos ran a series of online pieces on the protests, later collected in a special print edition. This kind of in-depth coverage of under-reported stories was “exactly what we were set up to do”.

Mr Lawal says he hopes the Republic will one day become “a New York Times for Africa”. But in temperament it is more like the protest movement itself—youthful, tech-savvy and decentralised, its freelance writers touching on topics as diverse as modern slavery or the sexism of Fela Kuti, a revered musician. The publication is an example of the new intellectual spaces that have opened up in Africa over the past decade, from long-form journalism to literary magazines, in an efflorescence of political commentary, criticism and fiction.

African intellectual journals have an illustrious history. The independence era of the 1950s and 1960s produced titles such as Présence...