ktravula – a travelogue!

For Jahman at 50

Jahman Anikulapo was 50 on January 16, 2013. This period also coincides with his exiting a long, stellar career at Guardian newspaper group as the Sunday Editor. In the last two decades or so, Jahman has pressed his talent, position and material means to service in aid of the development of the cultural sector in Nigeria.

It is in light of the foregoing that the friends of Jahman Anikulapo, under the aegis of Committee of the Friends Of Jahman @50, have planned a month-long programme of events to celebrate this cultural agent. The Committee has now released the timetable for the celebrations, with the overall theme: ‘3D-Jahman: The Three Dimensions of a Cultural Change Agent – Artist, Activist and Art Journalist.’

Full Details of Events and Activities:

January 13, 2013: Arthouse Forum
Arthouse Forum For Jahman Anikulapo At 50: A panel conversation around how the Interplay between Art Advocacy, Art Journalism and Art Practice has shaped the evolution of cultural propagation in the last 25 years. This will be followed by two other events later that evening:
– Tributes and Readings For Jahman Anikulapo
– An evening of songs, theatre skits and performances

Time: From 4.pm.
Venues: Kongi’s Harvest Gallery (Second Floor), Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos.
RSVP: Ayodele Arigbabu (08033000499).

FRIDAY, 18th of January, 2013, 7PM
iREPRESENT INTERNATIONAL FILM DOCUMENTARY ( Friends of CORA) celebrates Jahman Anikulapo. Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos

RSVP: Sam Osaze 08036554119

January 20, 2013: Invitational Dinner
Jahman’s colleagues in the Guardian group of newspapers host him to an evening of dining and tributes.

RSVP: Andrew Iro Okungbowa (08023152195)

January 25, 2013: Stripped Bare: Jahman Anikulapo, Warts and All
The celebrant in an intimate conversation with a whistleblower about childhood, upbringing, between area-boyism and ajebotterhood, the promise of youth, the gap between expectations and middle age reality, hooliganism, the secrets of journalistic success, the challenges of advocacy, the hopes of culture advocacy, a peek into life after the Guardian.

Time: From 5pm.
Venue: Quintessence Book and Artshop, Falomo Shopping Centre
RSVP: Sam Osaze (08036554119).

It should be recalled that on December 30, 2012, Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) of which Jahman is Programme Chairman held a celebration for him at its annual year-end party in Festac Town, Lagos, at which there was a symbolic cutting of cake and a pouring of libation superintended by Mr. Benson Idonije, patriarch of Nigerian art critics.

Also, the artists Nkechi Nwosu-Igbo and Toni Kan have already launched call for submission into a poetry collection to be published in honour of Jahman Anikulapo, just as we understand that the call for contribution of papers into a festschrift for a similar purpose will be made in the next few days.

We look forward to your active participation in this season of celebrations.

Thank you.

Yours,

Deji Toye

Re: Translating Twitter

I have been told that a backlog of more popularly requested languages will make it harder to get Yoruba to the top of the line in the Twitter Translation Lab as fast as I’d earlier thought.

Anyone still interested in translating the social media platform should make requests directly to the Translation Lab here: http://t.co/DL7VvVrM.

Will Yoruba Survive?

To @MrBankole, who asked:

I’d like a brief comment, if you don’t mind… (on) your thoughts about the future of (Yoruba’s?) cultural legacies and how they interact with evolving mediums of expression. Do you think they’ll erode…or will they be preserved? Living, breathing, or digital fossils.

I’ve heard many versions of this question before, but this one is about whether the new means of communication (with their inherent tendency for language imperialism) will (or not) send Yoruba, or perhaps any other language with such limited use off the map completely.

I believe, of course, that they will survive. The question however (always) is “in which form?”

The Yoruba language lives today in Candomblé, a religion in Brazil, and in Cuba as Santería. Some of the cultures of the old Gold Coast have remained in Jamaica and some other parts of the Caribbean in sometimes recognizable bits, or sometimes in totally evolved forms. This is the inevitable fall-out of language and cultural transposition. As dead as Latin is, it still lives on in science and in the Catholic Church. The point is that even in the worst case scenario, there will still be a recognizable part of the language left.

So, if in a couple of hundred years, Yoruba survives only in this (electronic) medium through the use by those who remember particular registers from their own childhood and nothing more, we may be left only with that: a Yoruba customized for a medium and a particular kind of audience. An e-diolect, if you will. Over time, as it happened in Brazil and Cuba, the chasm will increase and the distance between the original Yoruba from root and the e-volved Yoruba that lives on in the medium will increase to perhaps an unbridgeable length, with few exceptions.

Or not. (We never really know. Language is dynamic and their survival/destruction is often subject to other issues than just mere technological advancements. Maybe a war will take place and destroy all Yorubas in Nigeria, and the only surviving bits of the language will be those spliced with English and all the other acquired languages we’ve imbibed.) But these are hypotheticals.

I don’t believe that the original Yoruba from the motherland/hinterlands will ever completely disappear from the earth (just like English never will as well). But I believe that all things being equal, they will evolve, differently in speed – of course, depending on their medium of transmission (and the types/number of people that use one kind over the other).

Thank you for the interaction, Lord Banks.

PS: The Speak Yoruba Day on Twitter is still March 1, 2013. It is a chance to showcase the facility of the mother tongue and its relevance to the 21st century.

Ibadan Memories

In advance of a live twitter interview with the folks at @thinkoyo on my memories and opinion of Ibadan at 8pm (Lagos Time) this evening, let me list a few things I remember from growing up:

A serene quasi-communal neighbourhood in Akobo. A sprawling house in the middle of a bustling neighbourhood, we lived with everyone in the area in mutual respect and love for family. We played ball on the dust fields, played ping-pong at evenings, and did all normal young people did during idle, hot, afternoons. I remember crafting a Christmas firework at some point out of the cap of a motor plug, a small nail, and a piece of wood. You added crumbs of fire powder from the tip of a match, hit it against a wall, and heard the loudest sound you can ever make.

A pretty moderate traffic situation on the city’s many roads. Today, there are more roads (due to increase in population) but the traffic situation on major roads have got far worse. I went back to Akobo a few months ago, and I was shocked at how many people now live there. The distance from IDC to Anifalaje used to disappear in minutes under the small steps of my rubber sandals. Now it looks farther than I remember, and the last time I walked it (just a few months ago), I returned home panting for air. And yet, I may have got a better deal than the people who remained on the road, in their cars – to slightly exaggerate the congestion that the place now faces because of traffic.

Things that have not changed: rickety buses. Many of them are now more beautifully painted in the colours of the state, but the terrible state of the automobiles that provide commercial transport services is heartbreaking. (And maybe that would explain the reason for more private cars). More things that haven’t changed: Orita Bashorun. Slightly changed in outward appearance for reason of season, the basic layout remains the same. The radio/tv complex (where I once worked as a teenage broadcaster) still lay sprawled across the centre, while a tiny shopping “mall” flanks it on the right, and then a few more blocks until we get to the main Bashorun Market itself. None of it seems to have changed. St. Patrick’s church and school are on the other side of the road. At Christmastime, all the premises of the broadcasting corporation becomes a large trade fair grotto for holiday fun lovers.

A few names I remember: Dele Tomori (who eventually went to Osogbo as a radio presenter), Bade Ojuade, Sade Ogedegbe (my producer), Folusho Taiwo, Femi Daniels Obong, or FDO as he used to be called then (now a Lagos sports broadcaster), Sola Kayode, Prof (from a popular tv soap shot at BCOS), Folake Ladiipo, Papa Demmy, DeeJay Big El, DeeJay Freeze, Dapo Aderogba (who died), Dapo Adelugba (from the University), Kola Olawuyi (at Radio Nigeria, before he moved to Lagos), Larinde Akinleye (at the University, and his house in Sango), Lawuyi Ogunniran (a constant presence around the house), Yinka Ayefele (a lanky figure before his first hit album), Subuola Gandhi, Bamiji Ojo (and his crew on that Ombudsman show on Sundays), Yemi Ogunyemi, and a number of others whose names and faces have now become a blur. If I ever get to write a book about what I remember, I must title it Name Droppings.

UPDATE: The interview, storified, is here.

From French to English

As a speaker of French as a first language, how has writing in English affected your writing? And how difficult was it to render this book purely in English?

388098_10151137537299085_1297897237_n I find English a much simpler language for writing. French can become quite convoluted. My goal with African Expectations was not to write beautiful or intricate language but to convey ideas in the most direct and forceful manner as possible. I found the English language most suited to this requirement. Overall it was fairly easy to render the book purely in English but certain passages in the book, I have had to translate in my head from French to English. At this point, I mostly think and dream in English but sometimes I am unable to convey certain subtleties of thought directly in English. In those instances, I have had to think in French and translate to English. The translation part of the process has been a challenge because I have had to do research to make sure that what I wrote in English actually had the same meaning as the original thought.

From my interview with Mafoya D ossoumon, the author of African Expectations (a new book of essays, available on Amazon) in the new issue of the NigeriansTalk LitMag.

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