About The Kalahari Review

The Kalahari Review

The Kalahari Review is a web-based African literary magazine based in Botswana, founded in 2012. It publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, essays and cultural commentary from Africa and the African diaspora. Littafi's guide to African literary magazines lists its host location as Botswana, online, its founding year as 2012 and its founder as Oremeyi Akah, and describes its territory as fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, essays and cultural commentary. In a Medium interview, the founder explained in his own words that the idea came at university in the United States, and that after moving to Botswana he could not find the literary journals or the stories he wanted to read — so the Review was modelled on The New Yorker, The Paris Review and the 1960s and 1970s Esquire of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. Announced in 2012 as a new literary magazine in Botswana seeking material that explored Africa and Africans in unique and avant-garde ways, it has continued publishing for well over a decade, including through a Substack edition active in October 2026.

Founded in 2012, From a Reader's Frustration

The Kalahari Review's founding story is documented in the founder's own account, recorded in a Medium interview with the magazine. The idea came while he was at university in the United States; after moving to Botswana, he could not find the literary journals or the stories he wanted to read. The Review was his answer to that absence — a journal made in Botswana because the journal he wanted did not exist there. Littafi's guide names the founder as Oremeyi Akah and the founding year as 2012, and Creative Writing News announced the magazine in January 2012, ahead of an expected launch on 1 April 2012, as a new literary magazine in Botswana calling for submissions. That combination of sources — a guide's listing, a contemporary submission announcement and the founder's retrospective interview — gives the Review an unusually well-attested origin for an online literary title. It was not an offshoot of a university, a publisher or an arts council in any source consulted; it was an independent, web-based founding, built to supply a kind of reading its founder missed.

The Models: New Yorker, Paris Review and Esquire

The founder's stated models for the Review, in the Medium interview, were The New Yorker, The Paris Review and the Esquire of the 1960s and 1970s associated with Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. Those three names describe an ambition precisely. The New Yorker stands for the polished weekly mixture of fiction, reporting, essays and cartoons; The Paris Review for the literary quarterly's devotion to the short story, the poem and the writer interview; and New Journalism-era Esquire for long, stylish, personality-driven nonfiction. A Botswana-based web magazine modelling itself on those titles was declaring that African writing deserved the same editorial seriousness — the same lengths, the same finish, the same mixture of fiction and reported prose — as the celebrated journals of New York and Paris. The Review's documented sections reflect that template: fiction, poetry, essays and humour, together with photographs, art and cartoons, and feature articles, profiles, conversations and interviews, as its original 2012 submission call described them.

What the Review Publishes

The Review's remit is consistent across every guide that lists it. Authors Publish and submission guides describe it as a weekly African literary magazine based in Botswana, open year-round to work from the continent and the diaspora. Its original call, reported by Creative Writing News in 2012, sought material exploring Africa and Africans in unique and avant-garde ways, across sections for fiction, poetry, essays and humour; photographs, art and cartoons; and feature articles, profiles, conversations and interviews — originally offering payment on publication. Littafi's guide summarises its published forms as fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, essays and cultural commentary from Africa and the African diaspora. Bookshy's survey of African literary magazines describes it as a web-based, African-centric magazine publishing fiction, poetry, essays and humour pieces. Taken together, those listings define a general literary magazine with an African centre of gravity: not a poetry-only journal, not an academic review, and not a news site, but a mixed-form weekly in which a short story, a poem, an essay, a cartoon and an interview could all appear under one masthead.

A Space for Africa to Speak for Herself

The Review's mission, as quoted in Bookshy's survey, is to provide a space for Africa to speak for herself — in all its triumphs and faults, beauty and ugliness. The same survey records its interest in material that explores Africa and Africans in unique and avant-garde ways and tells new stories from everyday life as told by the people living it, and its aim to seek out voices of unique quality and provide them a space to show and develop their talent. That mission statement explains the magazine's editorial openness — year-round submissions, new and developing voices alongside established ones, everyday life treated as seriously as grand themes. It also explains the title. The Kalahari, the desert that covers most of Botswana, is an unlikely name for a cosmopolitan literary weekly, and that is its point: a journal named for Botswana's defining landscape, publishing the continent and its diaspora to the world, from a base in the country the desert defines. No source consulted attributes the name's choice to a stated reason, so none is invented here; the name's local grounding, in a Botswana-based title with a pan-African brief, speaks for itself.

Weekly, Online and Open Year-Round

The Review's form is part of its significance. As a web-based magazine, it was never limited by Botswana's small print market, its distribution costs or its newsstand geography; its readers and contributors could be anywhere the African diaspora reads English-language literary work online. Submission guides describe it as publishing weekly and accepting submissions year-round, a rhythm closer to its New Yorker model than to the quarterly rhythm of most literary journals. Year-round openness matters for a developmental mission: a writer who finishes a story in any month has somewhere to send it, and an editor building a weekly magazine has a constant incentive to read new work. The original call's offer of payment on publication, recorded in 2012, is also part of the record — literary magazines that pay, even modestly, make a different claim on writers' best work than those that cannot. Whether that payment policy continued is not documented in the sources consulted, and this profile makes no claim about it.

The Review in the African Literary Magazine Ecosystem

Guides to African literature consistently place the Kalahari Review in the modern wave of online African literary magazines. Bookshy's African Literature and Literary Magazines survey discusses it alongside titles such as Klorofyl, founded in 2009, Lawino, begun in 2014 for Ugandan writing, and the print tri-annual Mosaic — company that situates the Review among the independent journals that, in the 2000s and 2010s, moved African literary publishing online and opened it to writers without access to London or New York publishers. Littafi's guide to popular magazines of African literature likewise treats it as a notable title in its category. That ecosystem role is the context for the founder's founding frustration: the journals he could not find in Botswana were, in that period, being invented across the continent by editors in his position. The Kalahari Review is Botswana's entry in that documented continental pattern — the point at which Botswana appears on the map of African literary magazines not as a subject but as a publishing base.

Continuity: From kalaharireview.com to Substack

The Review continues publishing. Its home is kalaharireview.com, and it also publishes through a Substack edition at kalaharireview.substack.com, which was active in October 2026. A literary magazine founded online in 2012 and still issuing work in 2026 has outlasted most of its print contemporaries anywhere; in the African online-journal world, where titles frequently appear for a few celebrated issues and then go quiet, a fourteen-year documented span is substantial. The move onto Substack reflects a wider migration of independent literary publishing toward newsletter platforms that handle subscription, delivery and payment infrastructure for small editors, and it kept the Review in front of readers as reading habits shifted from visiting websites to receiving email. Continuity should not be overstated — the sources consulted do not provide a complete issue archive, a current masthead or a circulation figure, and none is claimed — but the documented endpoints, a January 2012 submission call and an active October 2026 Substack, establish the span on evidence rather than on the magazine's own publicity.

Why the Kalahari Review Matters

The Kalahari Review matters because it changed what a Botswana address could mean in literary publishing. Before titles like it, a writer in Botswana seeking a literary journal looked outward, to South Africa, Britain or the United States. The Review made Botswana a place where a journal is edited and published — weekly, online and open to the whole continent and diaspora — and it did so with explicit reference to the most celebrated literary magazines in the English-speaking world as its standard. Its documented mission, to let Africa speak for herself in her triumphs and faults, beauty and ugliness, and its documented taste for the unique and avant-garde and for new stories from everyday life, gave that address an editorial personality. For Botswana's own writers, a home-based journal with those standards and that openness is an institution, however small its staff: proof, renewed with every issue since 1 April 2012's expected launch, that the stories its founder could not find in Botswana could be published from Botswana instead.