Kovave was published by the University of Papua New Guinea between 1969 and 1975, at the cusp of that country's independence. It stands as the primary literary record of the emergence of a modern Papua New Guinean literature in English — a project with direct structural parallels to the emergence of modern Nigerian literature a decade earlier.
The journal published poetry, short fiction, and essays by Papua New Guinean writers finding their literary voices during a colonial transition — among them writers who would go on to shape the country's post-independence literary culture. It also engaged with questions of language, tradition, and modernity that African literary scholarship has long grappled with.
At the University of Benin's linguistics department, these ten issues open a comparative window that is rarely available to researchers working on postcolonial African literatures: a contemporaneous Pacific literary project wrestling with the same questions of language, tradition, and literary form.