This week, my friend Hannah Hoechner, a doctoral student at the Oxford Department of International Development, wrote me expressing concern about the political discourse on banning the almajiri system of education. Having spent over a year between 2009 and 2011 researching the almajiri system in Kano, including four months in Albasu, a small rural town in the east of the state, her perspective on the almajirai has been formed through close interaction with almajirai and their teachers. Together with nine almajirai from Kano, she produced a Hausa film/docu-drama, Duniya Juyi Juyi, which shows the views and concerns of almajirai. I reviewed the film in November 2011, and it is online for public viewing at http://www.qeh.ox.ac.uk/research/video/video-hlg. I hand over my column this week to her. I welcome your reactions and responses. – Carmen

Read more: Rights and respect versus bans and blame: What serves Nigeria’s almajirai?

The last few weeks (as usual) have been full of bad news: the cultists attack in Nasarawa, attacks in Southern Kaduna, continued attacks in the northeast leading to the declaration of emergency rule in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. Last week, I talked about the tensions I feel in celebrating film in the midst of so much suffering, but concluded with the thoughts that the multitude of stories coming out of Nigeria are important because they challenge what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the single story.” As the griot in the Dani Kouyate film Keita: the heritage of a griot, said “‘Do you know why the hunter always beats the lion in the stories? If the lion told the stories, he’d win sometimes too.’ The logic of the proverb extends even further to the antelope, which is hunted by both the human and the lion. Because when the oppressed, those ‘antelopes’ caught between lion and hunter, tell their own stories and are heard, they have the potential to affect audiences for centuries.”

Read more: Nigeria’s Four Caine Prize Nominees

I have spent the past week reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, the 477 page Americanah (Farafina 2013), and I think it may be my favourite of her books so far. It is a love story that grows from the Abacha years to recent events, from the university strikes of the 1990s to the rise of celebrity bloggers, Nollywood, the music of Bracket and Obiwon, and the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama. Ifemelu and Obinze are secondary school sweethearts. Obinze is drawn to Ifemelu’s sharp-tongued candour and she to his bookish confidence. He is obsessed with American literature and dreams of going to the United States. But when the University of Nsukka and other universities around Nigeria go on strike during the Abacha regime, it is Ifemelu who gets a scholarship to a university in Philadelphia, leaving Obinze behind in Nigeria. Told in seven parts, through a series of flashbacks, the novel focuses on the story of Ifemelu’s life in America but also devotes a brief section to Obinze’s struggle to make something of himself in the U.K. Of the two lovers, Ifemelu is the more successful at settling into a new lifestyle abroad, as well as the more vocally critical of what she finds. After struggling to financially support herself with sometimes demeaning jobs during university, she starts a popular blog about race in America that garners her invitations to speak at diversity workshops, features in magazines, and a fellowship at Princeton University. In spite of her success, however, she is left with a simmering dissatisfaction with her comfortable life in America—even with the success of her opinionated blog. Finally her longing for Obinze and Nigeria draws her back to Lagos.

Read more: An Americanah takes on Race and Class in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie latest novel

Last week, feeling melancholy about the death that seems thick in the air, I visited the vegetable market where I had heard several vendors had lost relatives in Baga. We talk for a few minutes, and then one of them tells me that there is a film being shot down the street in the Jos museum. “Ibro is around,” he says.

Read more: For the love of Kannywood