Illustration Credit: Dante Besong
2015 has been a busy and experimental year for us at Bakwa and we’re very thankful to the interns, editors and contributors who’ve worked very hard to make sure we produce the kind of quality articles we uphold. We continue to value our readers and are very concerned with what they read as well as what they like to read, thus we study our metrics and stats to make sure we deliver relevant quality articles without straying from our editorial vision.
The most-read stories on Bakwa in 2015 reveal two things: firstly, that our readers are mostly interested in reading reviews (music, TV & books), and that our readers do not have a problem reading longform. Of the three most read articles, none of them is less than 1000 words; in fact, the second most-read article this year is way beyond 2000+ words. Another interesting fact worth knowing is that 2015 is the first year in which we’ve had a short story among our most-read pieces.
In compiling the list of our ten most-read articles of 2015, we disregarded pieces published before 2015, even though write-ups such as Kangsen Feka Wakai’s “Jovi; a New Chapter in Cameroonian Hiphop” and “Petit Pays; Nudity and the King” are among our most-read. Other articles disregarded because they weren’t published in 2015 include “Rules of Football When We Were Kids” and “The Joys of Somali Poetry: the Beauteous Melancholy of Warsan Shire’s Poetry“.
Our Ten Most-Read Pieces of 2015, arranged in chronological order:
Adewale Maja-Pearce’s The House My Father Built
Sex as Soft Currency; Another Look at Bekolo’s Les Saignantes
The Simpsons and the Challenge of Portraying Believable Nigerian Characters
Pop, Hip hop and Politics in Olamide and Phyno’s 2 Kings
The Simpsons’ Nigerian Characters
Creative Writing Workshops in Tunisia: A House in the Making
Nameless Narrators in African Fiction
I’m not a purist, but I want to be able to hear your roots in music
Tu Know Ma Life; TV Comes to the Web
The Clairvoyant