Sanya Osha's new novel, An Underground Colony of Summer Bees begins with Jerome Akpata moving from Johannesburg to Durban. "He had become tired of having to live looking constantly over his shoulder wondering if someone was coming at him with a gun or a blade."

We get thrown into the murkiness of that life of constant terror. We immediately know that Jerome Akpata is one of those fragile, destabilized, and constantly displaced and itinerant citizens of the world. But what is he searching for; why is Jerome Akpata moving from Johannesburg to Durban?

He is in search of kinship and community; for a foothold in a slippery, dangerous, and dynamic world; a rapidly changing and mercurial world of drugs, pimps and prostitutes (...)

[Read Obi Nwakanma's full article published in The Vanguard]