In the pages of Granta, the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina once satirised the stock images of Africa, laying down rules for how not to write about the continent. The next issue of the magazine, No 177, due out on December 1, will be devoted to Nigeria – the first on a single African country – and Granta says it will approach it “from the inside out, featuring a new generation of writers whose work speaks for itself. Nigeria has long been Africa’s demographic colossus: it is home to more than 220 million people and more than 500 living languages shaped by dozens of precolonial polities.This issue takes in the country at large – fiction and poetry; reportage from the Fulani heartlands of the north; dispatches from a Lagos reconfigured by entrepreneurial fervour; and reflections on the new oil frontier, whose corrosive effects on the body politic continue to mark the delta and the nation.”