In November 2010, after the Kwani? 06 editors selected the final stories for the issue, we continued to receive stories of great quality. In addition, after receiving several hundreds of short stories from all over Africa, there remain stories that didn’t quite make the Kwani? 06 cut because of editorial horse-trading, the absence of an additional end-paragraph, a final rewrite from the writer, a tweak of characterisation. There was also the fact of deadline pressures and just space. Since then we have re-adressed that by creating a Kwani Online fiction platform called the Kwani? 06 Redux series. We will be publishing 3 short stories from our call-out every two months. The Kwani? 06 Redux series starts off in West Africa with stories from:

Iheoma Nwachukwu  -  A Good Daughter

It happened every time Odinakachi smelt talcum on women old enough to have suckled her. Like the woman she had just passed. Her mind would trot off and she would imagine the things that could have been. She was returning from her friend’s house where she had gone to wean her baby, whom she carried on her back. The woman had passed by her on the street, pulling along a smiling little child with missing teeth whom Odinakachi assumed to be her granddaughter. They had greeted, and Odinakachi, sniffing the talcum scent, looking into the carved face fringed with hoary hair where her silk scarf had missed strands from ear to ear, found herself drawing images of her mother.

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Olujide Adebayo-Begun -  A Brief History of Desire

Father Abraham has many sons,
Many sons have Father Abraham,
I am one of them, and so are you,
So let us praise the Lord
Right hand, left hand, move forward!
      -Popular nursery song in Nigeria

The day they brought the quit notice, John Olatoye, twenty-seven years of age, a teacher of Social Studies and Government and Introduction to Philosophy, discovered he was in love with Azeez Oduwale—his neighbor and a boy ten years his junior.

Through the green netting of his window, he saw Azeez’s brother, Waris, wave the notice informing his family they now had seven days to pack out of the house they had lived in for twelve years. Mama Biliki did not look at her son, nor did she stop peeling the leaves off the ewedu vegetable stems she held in her hands. His sister, Biliki, whose tap-tapping pestle and mortar provided the only rhythm in that afternoon heat, stopped pounding and took the paper from him.

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A. Igoni Barrett  -  THE SHAPE OF A FULL CIRCLE

Dimié Abrakasa was fourteen years old. He had small ears, a long neck, and the sensitive, flexile fingers of a pickpocket. His grandmother said his skin was the colour of polished camwood. His mother hated his eyes.

The house that bore the number '197' on Adaka Boro Street was painted a sunny-sky blue. On the wall above the doorway, in black paint, were written the words:

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