In any era, literary anthologies exhaust all the trappings associated with a healthy artistic tradition; they are one of the essential markers of cultural civilization. Think about the Japanese age that produced the Man’yōshū. Think about the Indian epoch that birthed the Vedas and the Upanishads. Think about The Garland, curated by the Greek poet Meleaga of Gadara. Historically, in Africa, anthologies have been the skin of our literary tradition since the start of our new literature in the twentieth century. It is safe to say that every decade since then has produced its fair share of anthologies, each with different motivations, structures, qualities and aesthetics. In 2025, the tradition continued with African Urban Echoes, edited by the Nigerian poets Jide Salawu and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan. An impressive gathering of diverse voices, the anthology seeks, as the editors state in their preface, to ‘enter poetry into the dialogue of African urbanity’ and counter the often fragmented or stereotypical representation of the continent’s cities.

While African Urban Echoes is not the first anthology to be solely about African cities (vide Enter Naija: The Book of Place, edited by Otorisieze), it is the first of its kind in poetry and about the cities across the whole continent as opposed to cities in a single African nation. Also, unlike many predecessors that focus on national identity or broad continental themes, African Urban Echoes simply zooms in on the cityscape, a dynamic force shaping lives, histories, experiences and consciousness of metropolitan inhabitants. Consciously, the editors avoid sequestering the poems by thematic or regional structures: they allow the poems to present individually and collectively, effectively mirroring the multifaceted, even unpredictable, nature of urban experience itself. Featuring 46 poets, with poems almost double their number, from Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Togo, Tanzania, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Gambia and Liberia, the anthology brings together a diverse choral of voices, both emerging and established, to map the physical terrains, navigate the currents of change and, ultimately, sound the echoes of resilience that reverberate through Africa’s towns and megacities. Quite the ambitious project, it aims to arrest the ‘polyvalences and unique characters’ of these urban centres as it moves beyond narratives of dysfunction to embrace their sheer complexities, their sensate beauties, their glowering histories, their buzzy energies and the polychromatic facts of their inhabitants’ lives and circumstances.

Preferring readers to ‘feast as they like’, Salawu and Gbolahan avoid the seductive, if somewhat spent, structure of thematic and regional sequestration of the poems. Instead, they offer the poems to readers to encounter the continent’s urban centres in a deliberately nonlinear fashion. Therefore, a cluster of poems one might assemble in this feast speaks directly to the physical and psychic cartography of African urban spaces. The poems map the streets, landmarks, as well as the very soul of the city that each poem engages: they explore how place shapes identity, how history clings to the concrete, and how urban environment becomes a complex character in the lives of its inhabitants.

For example, Jumoke Verissimo’s featured poems show us incredibly observed snapshots of specific locales. In ‘Lagos Island’, the sensory experience is immediate, almost suffocating: ‘the stifled air in the market / is not open for discussion / but everyone is engaged’, so the poem begins. It then goes on to combine, quite predictably, if a tad interestingly, the relentless energy of commerce in survival (‘life goes on / in / sun-baked plastic bags’) with the physical decay and infrastructural failure precisely descriptive of Nigerian urban places (‘backdrop of skyscrapers / and dazzling signpost / overlooking potholes / swallowing one tire at a time’). Such resonant imageries. Verissimo so captures Lagos’s paradoxical nature and feel: a historic center grappling with the heavy, non-negotiable demand of modernity, where ‘every day is a party day’ amidst both developing and collapsing architectures. Though, one doubts the veracity of everyday being a party day, not only for every Lagos Islander but, symbolically, for every common Lagosian. The final lines, ‘something is always changing in this city / and it is not the weather’, address a cruder, perhaps more unsettling, urban metabolism. Meanwhile, when she goes overseas to Ghana in ‘Oxford Street, Accra’, Verissimo presents a different kind of urban performance, a space curated for materialistic consumption and tourism:

clothes and hotels
tourists and owners
tro-tro
billboards and frozen smiles—traders too afraid to frown

 This ‘street is a synecdoche / of the unexplored city and its desires’ (which is the same thing as the desires of the tourists), packaging Africa for easy digestion. In another observational engagement with the physical hustle-bustle of the Nigerian economic golden city, Lagos, Gbemisola Adeoti’s lengthy ‘Oshodi’ plunges us into the raw, kinetic energy of a Lagosian transportation hub. Standing in for Lagos as a whole, Oshodi is a place of moderate scale but of perpetual motion, where ‘a flowing river of heads / waved together in common destiny / but facing disparate destinations’. For Adeoti, Oshodi and, by symbolic consequence, Lagos is a macrocosm of urban existence where stark contrasts, relayed through a fine paradoxical passage, coexist:

Here,
the phony and the real
are yoked in stable disorder—
fake soldiers, sham policemen
con-artist[s], swindling state officials
the profiteer and the fraudster
all in pursuit of compromised edge
riding on the horse of teeming credulity.
They are matched in silent conspiracy
against the honest and the decent.

The poem continues earning its length by also presenting the city as a space of both peril (‘a vehicle will crush dozens of haggling heads / in one mad orgiastic possession’) and relentless continuity (‘life rolls on with all “busyness” as usual / and Oshodi warbles on, unperturbed.’) Featuring dubious ‘moving clinics’, hopeful gamblers and itinerant preachers, the poem paints a picture of a city node teeming with desperation, ambition, faith, commerce and sheer survival instinct.

Continuing the same narrative procession for Ibadan as Adeoti does for Lagos in a poem of the same name as the city, Obari Gomba opens with an unarguable statement: ‘Ibadan—a city of many firsts / and the bards love to sing your praise.’ The poem, aided by its lexically bare but historically loaded title ‘Ibadan’, carries the onus of literary history while failing terribly, however, to reach the navel of its best poetic historians like J. P. Clark-Bekederemo in his impossibly short poem and Damilola Omotoyinbo’s recent variation on the same theme, each of the same title, sounding the physical tremendousness of the city. Clark-Bekederemo’s ‘Ibadan’ reads in its entirety:

Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold-flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.

The first four stanzas of Omotoyinbo’s variation reads, with equal gorgeousness as Clark-Bekederemo’s, as thus:

seven hills beckon
the sun to a dance. two steps
forward, another to the left. kongas powder

their rhythm on the rusty face of Beere & Òjé.
like a blooming peduncle, Bódìjà gives her arms
to the wind. bejeweled hips

of Agodi sway in joyful
abandonment. amidst the seamless blend
of Sángo, houses with smelly

gutters cluster like beehives. here,
street children stomp their feet
with hysterical laughter.

Even though Gomba’s underlying observation about the city is precisely right (Ibadan does boast historical uniqueness and endless possibilities), being figuratively lifeless, the second stanza of his own ‘Ibadan’ unwittingly supports the claim that there must be something more to poetry than narrative sincerity and right observations through its exquisite procession of clichés:

Set where the old and the new embrace
and collide, many come to you
in the seasons of life:
those who seek the stature of grace,
those who read signs on rusty roofs,
those who interpret weather-beaten dreams,
those who nurse their resilience
through the evil forest,
those who return with scars from
their journeys through time.

Meanwhile, Tade Ipadeola, writing about the Moroccan city of Marrakesh, the Nigerien city of Niamey and the Ugandan city of Kampala, circumstantiates the extent of what is achievable in poetry through the discipline of figurative liveliness. Originally featured in the magisterial book The Sahara Testament more than a decade ago (alongside ‘Niamey’), ‘Marrakesh’ is still as fresh as coconut water. The poem begins by presenting the city as a place of deep history and substantial aesthetic sensibility:

Marrakesh is a hummingbird standing still in the sun
A thesis in motion, stilling tongues and dialects.
I have watched as her streets dissolved in fun
At night, a Möbius rendering of joy’s analects

Leaving Casablanca and its dreams unfurling
With the calligraphy of seismographs, we try
For a trail left by old Almoravids, night calling
The party to a closet of camphor, bracing and dry

As the desert air.

In Marrakesh, ancient legacies rendezvous with modern life, leaving an impression of ‘neat sculpted quatrains / And [is] jagged, as of the edges of distant Pyrenees.’ ‘Niamey’, in its turn, connects the urban present to a prehistoric past. The poem is a contemplation on the skeleton of a dinosaur in a museum in the city and so draws parallels between ancient predators and modern power structures:

Crossing swords with Carbon-14 dates, the museum
Of natural history in Niamey resurrects a dinosaur.
What fed that beast? What prey paid premium
Price? How glad Tenere should now be that power

No longer flows from carnivore diktat? What man
Is there so free from muscled terror now?
Will appetite now fail to gobble what it can?
Though hominid, is one not lion and the other cow?

Using these cities, including the Ugandan city of Kampala which ‘shape-shifts / from raucous boda-boda men [at one moment]. . . / into a bevy of resplendent ladies [at another]’ to engage different facets of time, culture and power across the continent, Ipadeola forcefully and beautifully resists any monolithic idea of the ‘African city.’ The alternation of previously published poems such as these with new ones is the best editorial decision that Salawu and Gbolahan make in the making of this important poetic project.

Another such decision is the inclusion of Pamilerin Jacob’s short poem ‘Imeko Nocturne.’ In this anthology of metropolitan celebration and consideration, ‘Imeko Nocturne’ features, dashingly, like a countercultural song in a conservative concert. The poem finely, if not so subtly, implies the aesthetic and emotionally transformative transcendence of the rural while artlessly castigating the endless self-preciousness, outright pretentiousness, o insensate essence of the urban:

My God, the stars. Cities are a curse.
They hide beauty & God, reduce awe &

lore. Here, a single sky glance awakens
the heart, burns more calories than mindless

jogging through city blocks. No muggers here.
No soot-coated walls. Only pure oxygen

from God’s mouth himself, filling every lung
like a balloon. Loneliness means nothing here

in the company of crickets & pigeons, hens
& hawks. Every account of the afterlife

is fiction. Yet, I hope
for something similar to this.

There is no rapping around about it; the poem is just worth quoting in full. Although James Yeku, in his poem ‘The Stars Over Lagos’, try to redeem the urban from the harsh criticism Jacob’s ‘Imeko Nocturne’ heaps on it, the argument is already lost by such poems as Verissimo’s ‘Lagos Island’ and Adeoti’s ‘Oshodi’, each annotating the unforgiving, even smothering, ambience and gruffness of the place. The argument is lost even more so by the beginning of Yeku’s poem, which cops to Jacob’s caustic claims as thus: ‘The stars over Lagos say cryptic things at night.’ Conversely, Imeko’s stars, being rural as well as radiating beauty and intensifying ‘awe & lore’, stay silent if they have nothing clear to say.

Together, these poems and poets chart the sweeping geographies of African cities: they move beyond simple descriptions and empty, superficial celebrations to tell us how these cities feel, how they shape consciousness and how individual lives are lived within their complex, often contradictory, embrace. In these poems, the city is rendered as history, as sensory overload, as aspiration, as wound and, finally, as a lasting, multifaceted soul.