ktravula – a travelogue!

Ibadan Jazz Forum and the Riffs of Remembrance

 (Celebrating Black History Month, 2022) 

by Niyi  Osundare

Professor Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre.

Thank you very much for inviting me to keynote the dialogue segment of this year’s edition of your Black History Month activities. As someone who has been with you and has been privileged to participate in some of your activities from the very beginning, I have come to appreciate the dreams which necessitated the inauguration of the Ìbàdàn Jazz Forum, the visionary acumen that has characterized its idealism, and the modes and methods of its operations over the years. For daring to dream in a world in which such an act is constantly sidelined by blatant realism, for standing for the cultivation, defence, and projection of lasting values in a country overwhelmed by cynical materialism and instant gratification; to enter a plea for Culture in an age of philistinism, the Ìbàdàn Jazz Forum (IJF) has succeeded in pointing a way to the future by leading us towards the apprehension of the inevitable connection between the past and the present.

The Black History Month and the Ìbàdàn Jazz Forum are products of the same initiative. On a more specific note, it could be said that the latter grew out of the global ferment of the former. Hence the similarity between their mission: the imperative of Memory, the necessity of Remembrance, and the need to bring both to bear on the present in the much-needed effort to re-shape the future. Primary to both initiatives is the task of repossessing our history by taking control of our own narrative; for, it is a universally acknowledged fact that whoever controls your history will end up controlling your destiny by shaping to their own interest and design not only your memory but the memory of you by others. For many centuries, this was the case with Africa where the enslaver and the colonizer were the ones who wrote the history of their exploits as well as that of the objects of their exploitation.

As Chinua Achebe once observed, the hunter’s story of the hunt will always be different from that of the antelope. So, when we gather here every year for the celebration of Black History Month, what the IJF is asking us to do is to repossess our narrative, tell our own story in our own way and in our own voice, and doing this without forgetting how the Black story connects inextricably with the universal human story, and the mutual seepage between the two. From Olaudah Equiano to Frederick Douglass; from Harriet Jacobs to Sojourner Truth whose powerful “slave narratives” focused human conscience on the inhumanity of slavery and the slave trade, to relatively more contemporary writers such as Achebe, Soyinka, Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a strong un-ignorable articulacy has come to the telling of the Black story. A “race” once spoken for, or on behalf of, or spoken against has reclaimed the I-Paradigm of the Human discourse and the ability to say “I am”. The retrieval of the Black person’s agency is way up on the Black Liberation agenda. But this instance of self-determination, cultural re-affirmation, and epistemological re-configuration has not come without opposition from those who have always been at the commanding heights of the power hierarchy. These are the people for whom an old, by now offenceless terminology called critical race theory has recently become a spine-chilling bogeyman. Long denied, blissfully neglected, cleverly negated truths and ideas whose restoration is considered threatening to an unjust status quo, are currently under assault, especially in the United States where acts of curricular cleansing, shelf-clearing, and book-banning are happening at a pace and with partisan political ferocity that would have done brave credit to the Spanish Inquisition.

But this world, our world, is moving on, undeterred, though at differential speeds by its constituent parts. Central to our concern as we gather for this year’s Black History Month events is the velocity (or lack thereof) of the progress of Africa, our continent, currently in the grip of three debilitating afflictions: the global COVID pandemic, centuries-old poverty, degradation,  and underdevelopment, the resurgent plague of political instability as evident in the current spate of terrorism and military coup de’tat. Humanity’s oldest continent remains the world’s poorest and most miserable, marginalized, despised, and zeroed out. As I have soberly put it in my forthcoming book of essays, it takes an awful lot of courage to own up to being an African today. The last time that sorrowful confession invaded my thoughts, I was hard at work on the sixth movement of Midlife, a volume of poems that marked the attainment of that existential milestone clearly proclaimed by the title of the book. Let me appeal for your patience as I poach a long and sombre excerpt from that book of verse:

                      Midlife

now Africa, beholding you full-length, from shoulders

baked strong by your Black sun;

my hands towards the sky, feet towards the sea,

I ask you these with the urgency of a courier

with a live coal in his running palm:

The skeletal song of Zinjanthropus,

was it a lie?

The awesome ruins of Zimbabwe,

were they fiction?

The bronze marvels of Benin, of Ife

were they a lie?

Is the Nile really a fickle tear

down the cheeks of unmemorable sands?

The geometry of your idioms, the algebra of your proverbs,

were they sad calculations of a pagan mouth?

My question, Africa, is a sickle, seeking

Ripening laughters in your deepening sorrows

                    *

Giving, always giving,

scorched by the Desert, blanched by the Sea

bankrupted by the Sun, indebted by the Moon,

robbed of your tongue, bereft of your name

Giving, always giving

ebony springboard for giants of crimson heights

Giving, always giving

my memory is the thrashing majesty of the Congo

its dark, dark waters fleeced by scarlet fingers

its shoals unfinned, its saddled sands

listening earlessly to the mortgaged murmurs

of ravished ores

giving, always giving

the tall lyric of the forests

the talkative womb of the soil

the mountain’s high-shouldered swagger

pawned, then quartered, by purple cabals.

The elephant’s ivory is a tale of prowling guns,

the crocodile mourns its hide on the feet

of trampling gods

Giving, always giving,

fiery dawns once wore you like a robe, oh Congo,

soft, warm, gracious like the cotton laughter

of Lumumbashi,

the Niger, the Volta, the Benguela

bathe the rippling hem of your luminous garment

the sky was your loom, April’s elephant grass

your needle with a hundred eyes;

your thread was the lofty spool of the eagle,

the chalky string of the egret in the dusty shuttle

of meticulous harmattans

And now noon

With the sun so young in the centre of the sky,

That robe is a den of dripping fragments

awaiting the suturing temper of a new, unfailing Thunder

                      *

My question, Africa, is a sickle, seeking

Ripening laughters in your deepening sorrows

                       *

           Midlife

on a continent so ancient and so infant

crawling, grey, in the scarlet dust of twilight horsemen,

ravished by the gun, crimsoned by ample-robed

natives and their swaggering fangs;

our sun so black with crying hopes,

wounded by the boundless appetite of hyena rulers

Shorter every inch by our tower of dreams,

Their eyes smugly sitting in the blind pit

Of their funeral stomachs;

eunuch between the moons, their claws

gore-deep in assassinated wombs;

they whose fathers, whose fathers’ fathers

emptied whole epochs into slaving galleons

have pledged once more the eulogy of the chain,

their hearts crammed with rums, fickle mirrors,

and other gifts unremittingly Greek.

A knee-eyed sun shouts from the middle                 

of a drifting sky:

     Who will cure Africa’s swollen foot

     Of its Atlantic ulcer?

My question, Africa, is a sickle, seeking

ripening laughters in your deepening sorrows .

                        (from Midlife, 1993)

                    *

Here is a poet-patriot’s quarrel with his continent. A song of pain and anguish, of patriotic anger, of lingering doubts and desperate deliberativeness, as evident in these words from the ‘Foreline’ of the volume:

Past forty now, the riddling kola of life ripening, ripening in my mouth,. . . . Taller too, able to look the giant in the face, able to ask Africa a few sunny questions about her dormant dawn. Able to ask the world how many wasted nights really make up a single day.

These ‘questions’ which engaged my consciousness at midlife are there, still there, now over three decades on, some of the old problems have even surged into more intractable mutations, with Africa frequently dismissed as basket case and the epicenter of global problems. But a “stubborn hope” (Viva Dennis Brutus!) keeps sharpening my machete as I cut a path through Africa’s jungle of problems and promises. Those promises have always been there, but we all know that promises do not a continent make. Needed as a matter of urgency: a new grid of positive values, informed, competent and ethical governance, a sound educational base that puts ignorance to flight and keeps us abreast of the velocity of a fast-moving world and its digital imperative, an end to our dependent, cargo mentality that has turned us into blind, gluttonous consumers of the products of other people’s imagination and labour in our abject posturing as “importers and manufacturer’s representatives”, instead of being “manufacturers” ourselves, a stronger belief in ourselves and our infinite possibilities.  

 These are some of the ideas behind the significance of the Black History Month and Ìbàdàn Jazz Forum, its noble offshoot and local companion. Over these many years, the IJF has shown us the primacy of ideas and their ability to change the world by creating an intellectual and socio-cultural community that prides itself on its ability to think different, feel different,  and act different. Not even the countless debacles of Nigeria, one of the most chaotic and wickedly misgoverned countries in the world, have been able to put a clog in the wheels of their progress. On the contrary, the IJC has ceaselessly highlighted the problems of Nigeria and the Black world, and the ways of turning those problems into possibilities. The overriding purpose of the Black History Month and the Ìbàdàn Jazz Club is to get us to know that we are actually more than we think we are. To come to this awareness, we need to pay more attention to History and its dual cohorts of Memory and Remembrance. The future belongs to those who remember the past and its storehouse of wisdom and folly, and are therefore able to think hard and make informed choices. Like Black History Month, Ìbàdàn Jazz Forum is there to make sure that we do not forget. Like jazz, that music genre from which it derives its name, the riffs are many and unsilenced-able; the wind is its chariot; it is a seed that grows everywhere it touches a good soil. Like that seed, Jazz has taught us the boundless possibilities of the creative spirit, its regenerative transgressivity, its constant striving at doing it differently, doing it new, its unfathomable Soul and sinuous swagger, that proverbial resilience that has enabled its progression from “nigger-noise to state-of-the-art”. What better way to end this piece, then, than the chanting of this brief oríkì  of Jazz and its profoundly complex biography:

                   

JAZZ

(from ‘nigger noise’ to state-of-the-art)

Once

offspring of a tattered trumpet

rescued from a rusty dump

by the restless fingers of toil-

encumbered hands;

animated by a new wind,

powered by a strange metallic thunder

which rocks the eaves of slumbering ears

once

shuffling accent of seedy lanes

and dreams long deferred

in the blue memory of prisoned voices…

Now

horn of well-hoofed stars

lulling purple chambers

with riffs of syncopated silence

saxy splash of running garlands

adulations which surprise the song….

The stone once rejected by the master builder,

is it really now the cornerstone of the glittering house?

Let’s jazz it up then. Let’s jazz it real good. Happy Black History Month!

Ìbàdàn                          

Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre

Feb. 14, 2022

Ibadan Jazz Forum and the Riffs of Remembrance was published on March 2nd, 2022, with the tags , , , under the Guest Post category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Notes on Becoming 40

First off, I don’t know where all the time went.

One day I am twenty-one in Ibadan as a young undergraduate, looking to the future and what it might bring. Then I wake up and it’s already forty. Where did all that time go?

It’s either the earth is moving faster around the sun than I remember, or the days have just been filled with so much adventure than it’s hard to keep track of.

I started this blog in 2009 when I was barely 28. Even that was supposed to be a short experiment. But here I am twelve years later. Even that time has gone by quicker than I can say WordPress, and all the travel books I’d planned to write from my blogs remain in drafts and proposals.

Last week, I completed the manuscript of my third book, a biography of Nigeria’s (and Africa’s) first Nobel Prizewinner in Literature, Wọlé Ṣóyínká. The editor is looking at it. It is one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on, but I’m happy I have completed it before the 40+ years begin.

My second book, a translated collection of poetry titled Ìgbà Èwe was published last July. It’s now available worldwide via Amazon, Amazon UK, eBay and bookstores in Nigeria.

So what does it feel like to have hit the big 4-0? I can’t tell you that it feels different, or that it doesn’t.

One, however, feels a renewed sense of urgency about things one cares about. For instance, I want to write more books, and I want to visit more places. I want to do more things that bring me joy. I want to create great art and literature.

Two weeks ago, I went with family to visit Addis Ababa and Nairobi, the former for the first time. It was great to once again discover how big the continent is, and the tremendous breadth of colour each new experience of humanity brings on one’s own perception of the world and one’s place in it. Both places changed and renewed me.

So here’s to more of such new and varied experiences as the forties begin.

____

Photo taken at Giraffe Manor, Nairobi.

Notes on Becoming 40 was published on September 22nd, 2021, under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Questions on Food: Ingredient, Recipes and Cultures

Guest post by Ọlábísí Abọ́dúnrìn

Like the rapper, Nasir Jones, there are many things I wonder about in life: who made up words? Who made up numbers? What kind of spell is mankind under? Just like  Nasir Jones was curious, and so am I. And of course the origin of French Kiss. I mean, who was the first to go, “yeah, we should do that,” you know. Don’t you ever ponder these things?… Anyway, I digress. Food – that’s my current muse. Practical, artful food, and a million inquiries proceeding from the subject. What constitutes food taste/preference? How is it that two different groups, given the same resources, would likely produce different results? Who first decided that certain things, like mushrooms, for instance, are edible? And how were poisonous items discovered – did someone have to die first?

Well, I know this has been addressed almost everywhere, so let us maybe consider protocols duly observed. Africa is not a single country. That’s it, that’s the tweet! There are 54 sovereign countries and thousands of ethnicities; all set up with individual languages and cultures. In Nigeria, for instance, there are reportedly between 250 and 400 ethnicities. Of these, single out the Yorubas as a case in point and you will find over 30 sub-groups with several regional dialects; some unintelligible to others… So many distinct identities to tap from! Now, imagine if we apply this range of diversity to food… With so many unexplored cuisines there can be a different one every day of the week!

One tourism outfit praised an aspect of Africa’s appeal saying, “… You can meet people whose way of life has not changed in centuries.” Although meant well, such a  notion can promote misguided imaginations of a continent stuck in primitive ways; including her culinary practices. Ironically, the “primitive ways” seem to have been more profitable in terms of health implications. Because it would appear that some African food only became less healthy over time as this article suggests: “West Africans ate far more vegetables and much less meat in the past, today their diet is heavier in meats, salt, and fats.” There is a lot in the African kitchen that is misplaced, given the 21st century dietary standards. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why many indigenous recipes are still considered a mystery beyond their African border. For one, we will have to consider health and dietary guidelines. There is simply insufficient information relating to recipe precision and nutrition value of African dishes. Sure there have been changes in cooking methods from past generations; only perhaps not in the expected direction. 

This presents the question of how to make African food more accessible globally. I cannot, for example, imagine an American eating ẹ̀bà and ẹ̀gúsí with ògúnfe daily; not even for the heaviest meal of the day. But my forefathers ate it for breakfast, and frankly, so do I sometimes! Then, there is the question of where to draw the line in this recipe adoption business. The Italian ambassador to the UK has had to intervene in the international pizza crisis. I wonder what will be his reaction to the Nigerian favourite, plantain pizza. (Hey, I had nothing to do with that recipe; I am not a fan of plantain meals myself.) Look, I do believe recipe swaps and food fusion can be achieved without gross misconduct. We could call it “Modern African”, but I can think of at least 2 groups that may – for separate reasons perhaps – find the phrase offensive; one of which is this writer who is wary of cosmopolitan cuisine. Then, of course, there are the guardians of culture who work tirelessly to keep the borders of African heritage in place. It may be easier to make a case to the former. Note that this would by no means be the first international food programme. Food has always crossed borders. Consider okra, which originated in Africa but is used differently in the American South than among the Ibos of West Africa. No one fries Okra there. Jambalaya too is said to have originated from Africa. Watermelon is everywhere now, but it first came from Africa. The point is, the world can eat what we eat. 

So,  what should be the baseline of food sharing – ingredient, recipe or culture? On the ingredient level, it is how much or less of the ingredient constitutes the meal authenticity; while the recipe level determines how much deviation is permissible. Of course, the chef gets a reasonable tweaking license. On the culture level, however, the stakes are higher as with a winner takes all sort of situation. They eat with their hands; you do the same. They sit on the floor… Get the point? And here comes the question of the moment: when is any of it cultural appropriation? The thing is, if we are to make African food accessible at a scale similar to the Chinese or Italian for instance, concessions must be made. It is give and take. The British seem to know the trick – keep it simple. Fish and chips. (Or steal an entire country’s repertoire. Because Indian food is basically British food.)

The world can take more, and the motherland certainly can give it. With platforms like DishAfrik taking up the cause to herald home-grown recipes, we can take the African kitchen to the World. Perhaps we may also introduce her more intimately to self. Because even within Africa, many know little of cuisines from other regions. Some people have only eaten from their tribe.  You can support the DishAfrik fundraising campaign here. While they may not be able to end the Jollof Wars (not sure anyone can), they sure can facilitate a thriving community for the African culinary experience. 

___

Olabisi Abodunrin does not write for a living. This is how she has so far, avoided the woes and horror of this world. But alas! her best ideas remain unheard.

Questions on Food: Ingredient, Recipes and Cultures was published on September 20th, 2021, with the tags , , , , under the Art, Fun, Guest Post category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

“A Parable from National Urban Reality” – An excerpt from Wole Soyinka’s new novel

Introduction

While the formal fact-finding panels pursue their assignment, and bewildered minds attempt to absorb the turn of events, reflect upon, and engage in informal caucuses on ‘what really happened’ during, and following the authentic #ENDSARS campaign, both in the Lekki arena and in horrifying dimensions across the nation, I believe that it will not be out of place to offer a parable extracted from a forthcoming work of fiction. A parable, yes, but an actuality that has become virtually institutionalized across the nation. It is offered as a public service before the events of the month of October 20/20 congeal in the minds of participants, onlookers and consumers of the Nigerian staple of the now mandatory UFN (Unidentified Flying Narratives).

The forthcoming novel from which it is extracted — CHRONICLES FROM THE LAND OF THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD (BookCraft) – will be published towards the end of the month of November, 2020. – Wọlé Ṣóyínká

Read on:

Excerpt from CHRONICLES

Adjusting to a new culture was his main concern, but not an insurmountable culture shock. Badagry, after all, albeit closely intertwined with Lagos, was still Badagry. Pitan-Payne was on hand, though keeping a frenetic pace to wind up his affairs and proceed to his UN assignment on schedule. The engineer seemed to thrive on interlocking calendars, and in any case, he now had Menka to pick up the loose ends for him in his absence….

  The timing could not have been more thoughtfully ordained. The unexpected and the planned seemed to dovetail neatly, like the finely adjusted sprockets or his mechanical prototypes. And while Lagos/Badagry lacked the excitement of receiving sudden cartloads of human debris from Boko Haram’s latest efforts to out-Allah Allah in their own image, one could count on gratuitous equivalents from multiple directions. Such as the near daily explosion of a petroleum tanker on the expressway or city centre. Or a roofless lorry bulging with cattle and humans tipping over on a bridge and dropping several feet onto an obliging rock outcrop in the midst of the river.  Sometimes, more parsimoniously, a victim of military amour propre – in uniform or mufti, it made no difference. That class seemed to believe in safety in numbers, and all it took was that even a low-ranking sergeant should take offence at another motorist, who perhaps refused to give way to his car, a mere ‘bloody civilian’, never mind that the latter had the right of way. An on-the-spot educational measure was mandated. Guns bristling, his accompanying detail, trained to obey even the command of a mere twitch of the lip, leapt out of their escort vehicle, dragged out the hapless driver, unbuckled their studded belts, whipped him senseless, threw him in the car boot or on the floor of the escort van and took him to their barracks for further instruction. However, the wretch sometimes created a problem by suffocating en route – which left society to develop structures for neutralizing such inconvenience.

The contradicting, ironic sequence occurred to Menka only for the first time – yes, come to think of it, the military hardly ever recorded a fatality – once or twice, maybe even three times in a month — yes, the accident of excess did happen, but mostly such terminal disposal was left to the police, whose favourite execution site was a road block, legal or moonlighting. Perhaps a recalcitrant commuter, or passenger bus driver had refused to collaborate in providing a bribe on demand, or insulted the rank of the demanding officer with a derisive sum.  And it did not have to be the original offender but some too-know grammar spouting public defender who had intervened on behalf of the potential source of extortion. The outcome was predictable – victim or good Samaritan advocate instantly joined the statistics of the fallen from ‘accidental discharge’. The expression was still current, but often it was anything but. Accidents had become infrequent and unfashionable. Oftener to be expected was that the frustrated, froth-lipped police pointed the gun, calmly, deliberately, at the head of the unbelieving statistic and,  pulled the trigger. Again, the inconvenience of body disposal.

But then, the community of victims themselves – what a specialized breed of the species! The roles, it constantly appeared, had become gleefully, compulsively interchangeable. Allowing him only a few days to ‘catch your breath and get your bearings’, Pitan-Payne lost no time in taking Menka to inspect the land designated for the Gumchi Rehabilitation Centre, for victims of Boko Haram, ISWAP and other redeemers – nothing like striking while the iron was hot! On their way, the familiar sight of crowd agitation – how would the day justify itself without some kind of street eruption somewhere, wherever! Trapped in the chug-stop-chug of traffic, the favourite commuter distraction was to attempt to guess what was the cause, and even place bets on propositions. That morning, Menka’s first in nearly a year down south did not disappoint. But for the milling blockage by intervening viewers, they could have claimed the privilege of ringside seats. Compensating for that obstructed viewing however was the sight of men and women trotting gaily, anticipation all over their faces, towards the surrounded spot of attraction. From  every direction they came, some vaulting over car bonnets, squishing their legs against the fenders, squeezing through earlier arrived  bodies or simply scrabbling for discovered vantage viewing points. They climbed on parked vehicles and the raised concrete median. Commuter buses slowed down and stopped, keke napep — the motor-cycle taxis — pulled aside, drivers and passengers alike rubber necking on both sides of, or in the direction of a wide gutter that sank into a culvert. The lights changed to green and Pitan-Payne drove on, their last shared image a pair of muscular arms raised above the bobbing heads, clutching an outsize stone, slamming that object downwards into the gutter. Very likely a snake, Pitan suggested. With the rainy season, quite a few sneaked through the marshes into culverts and slithered their way into parking lots and even offices. 

A police van came racing down the road, against the traffic, strobes flashing and sirens blaring, so Menka looked back, saw the crowd drawing back and drifting reluctantly away from the uniformed spoilsports. This opened an avenue just in time for Menka to obtain the briefest glimpse of an object slumped over the rim of the gutter, once human, but not any longer. Indeed the only human identity left him was his iodine-red tunic and black trousers, still recognizable as the uniform of a LASA officer, an unarmed unit whose function was simply to unplug traffic – stoppered as readily by truculent drivers as by the roadside markets, vendors of all the world commodities who had taken over the streets, haggled, negotiated, delivered change and goods at their own pace. If the activities delayed movement over half a dozen changes from red to green and back again, it did not concern them in the least. 

Later that evening, the television newscast narrated the full story. After futile spurts of preventive measures, Authority had commenced arrests of vendors and seizures of their wares. The LASA team, their van parked in a side street, had pursued several such malfeasants.  In a desperate attempt  to escape capture however,  one ran straight into the snout of a speeding vehicle, was tossed up, landed with an ominous thud on the sidewalk and remained there, unmoving. In a trice, a mob had gathered. They set the parked LASA vehicle on fire and worked up further appetite for vengeance. The unarmed officers had already fled. A hunt party pursued and eventually brought down a scapegoat, quite some distance from the actual scene of crime. They proceeded to the ritual battering of their catch. He broke free, ran into the gutter, tried crawling into the culvert for safety. They dragged him out by his feet, trunk and head smeared and reeking from the accumulated sludge of the blocked tunnel. Passers-by, totally ignorant of the beginning or mid-act of the mayhem, refused to be left out. They grabbed the nearest assault weapon to hand and joined in the gratification of the thrill for the day, a newbreed citizen phenomenon. The massive stone, raised above a throng of heads, quivered lightly against a Lagosian skyline of ultra-modern skyscrapers before its descent onto bone and brain. It took on an iconic dimension that stuck instantly to Menka’s surgical album of retentions, a rampant insignia of the transfiguration of a collective psyche. 

“I envy you” Menka remarked the following morning, as they confronted the print media coverage, their scalding coffee no match for the nausea aroused by the photograph sensationally smeared across the front page.  “You are going away for a while. You’ll be spared such sights.”

“I feel guilty”. confessed Duyole. “Guilty, but yes, that is one spectacle I shall not miss.”

“Careful!” Menka quickly cautioned. They have their equivalents over there. Ask the black population.”

“No. Not like this. Occasionally yes, there does erupt a Rodney King scenario. Or a fascistic spree of ‘I can’t breathe’. America is a product of slave culture, prosperity as the reward of racist cruelty. This is different. This – let me confess – reaches into – a word I would rather avoid but can’t – soul. It challenges the collective notion of soul. Something is broken. Beyond race. Outside colour or history. Something has cracked. Can’t be put back together.”  And then Pitan-Payne gasped, paused, folded over the pages and passed the newspaper to Menka. “Take a look at this. Not that it changes anything but – here, read it yourself.” 

There was a chastening coda. It altered nothing. The fleeing vendor, whom no one had even thought to help, was very much alive. He had picked himself up, salvaged most of his scattered goods, and found his way home despite a sprained ankle and some bruises. Most of the earlier spectators had retreated to a safe distance. They continued what they had been doing earlier – filming the action with their phone cameras. The police did however capture the Goliath with the terminating stone who had administered the coup de grace. He remained on the spot, to all appearance, admiring the evidence of his work. 

He vehemently protested the injustice of his arrest: “I thought he was an armed robber.” 

The END.

“A Parable from National Urban Reality” – An excerpt from Wole Soyinka’s new novel was published on October 31st, 2020, with the tags , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

“Identity Thieves on the Rampage” – a Statement by Wole Soyinka

Undoubtedly in order to promote the video clip of an ethnic revanchist calling on Igbo to leave Yorùbá land, this same lunatic fringe has exhumed, and embarked on circulating an ancient fabrication – several years mouldering in the grave – once attributed to me and vigorously denounced. 

That statement impudently expounds, as my utterance, what the Hausa want, what the Yorùbá want, and what the Igbo want.  Such an attribution – let me once again reiterate – is the work of sick, cowardly minds that are ashamed, or lack the courage, as the saying goes, “to answer their fathers’ names.”  At least the current ethnic rabble-rouser has the courage of his convictions, not so the sick brigade of identity thieves. 

Normally, one should totally ignore the social dregs. However, in the present atmosphere where FAKE NEWS is so easily swallowed and acted upon without reflection, I feel once again obliged to denounce this recurrent obscenity. As for our brother and sister Igbo, I hope they have learnt to ignore the toxic bilge under which some Nigerian imbeciles seek to drown the nation.

It is time also, I believe, to also enter the following admonition: one cannot continue to monitor and respond to the concoctions of these addicts of falsehood, and their assiduous promoters who have yet to learn to wipe the filth off their tablets. The patrons of social platforms should develop the art of discrimination.  Some attributions are simply so gross that, to grant them even a moment’s latitude of probability diminishes the civic intelligence of the recipient. 

Wọlé ṢÓYÍNKÁ

October 24,  2020

“Identity Thieves on the Rampage” – a Statement by Wole Soyinka was published on October 24th, 2020, with the tags , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.