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August 2023 Issue [Letter from Lagos]

Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease

What’s the cost of rolling the genetic dice?

Illustrations by Katherine Lam

Subomi Mabogunje fell for Nkechi Egonu within hours of meeting her in 2004, in his hometown of Ijebu- Ode, a trading hub in southwest Nigeria. They worked at a state-run broadcast TV station, thrown together by the National Youth Service Corps. He was speechless on the day Nkechi first walked into work. While Subomi was thin and bespectacled, she was petite and zaftig, with her hair in a ballerina bun, and coldly immune to the stares that trailed her across the office. Her swaggering personality was also the opposite of his reserved…

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 is the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project and an editor at The Drift. Her work on this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.


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August 2023

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