On 24 October, Oreoluwa Mojola wrote for EscapeMag Online about Victor Ehikhamenor bringing the Black Muse Art Festival back to Benin City ("For Those Who Astonish the Gods: Black Muse Art Festival Returns to Benin City"). In that piece Ehikhamenor told us that art in his community goes beyond what hangs on the wall. A week later he proved it again, this time between two hard covers.
The book
Central Hotel is his first fiction collection, out in Lagos since 30 October as a 276 page hardback from Masobe Books, with international publication expected in the first quarter of 2027. Its eleven stories move between Nigeria and the diaspora, and characters walk out of one story and turn up in another, so by the last page the collection feels like one small world you have lived inside. The long shadow of military rule runs through it, along with the hunt for a life somewhere else, the grip of religion, family, sexuality and power. Women sit close to the centre, and a lot of the book's thinking about desire, expectation and who gets to choose runs through their lives.
The drawings
This is where you remember who wrote it. Each story opens with a full page pencil drawing and closes with a small portrait of one of its characters, all in that unmistakable Ehikhamenor hand of long limbs, twisted bodies, repeated figures and spirals. The drawings change on you as you read. You look once going in, and when you turn back after the final line you are looking at somebody you now know.
Twenty years in the making
Book signing
Some of these stories have been with him for a long time. "The Supreme Command" was Highly Commended by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association in 2003, and earlier versions of "Who Will Bury the Dead", "Passport to Heaven" and "A Picture from Ireland" ran in Wasafiri, Farafina Magazine and AGNI between 2006 and 2010. In 2015 "Madam" was shown with his drawings Postcards from Italy in the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and two years later he was one of the three artists in Nigeria's first national pavilion at Venice.
Where it comes from
Ehikhamenor traces all of it back to childhood. "I had grandmothers who competed to tell stories every night," he says. "From them, I learnt to surrender to a story and allow it to take me where it needs to go." He is just as clear about who the stories belong to: "I believe we must tell them on our own terms, without surrendering our perspectives or allowing others to prescribe how we see and understand our world."
That second line is the one I keep sitting with. Too many Nigerian books reach us only after they have been approved somewhere else first. Central Hotel lands in Lagos a whole season before it reaches readers abroad, and that order feels like part of the argument he is making.
Central Hotel is out now in hardback from Masobe Books. If you are heading to Benin City for Black Muse from 7 to 10 November, it will make very good company on the road.