Akinwumi Isola.
Akinwumi Isola (1939-2018).
One of the greatest.
The only Honest Man
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ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY 1981 (Part Five)
Obaseki, looked cornered. He certainly was not anticipating an encounter with me at the restaurant. His shrunken face looked collapsed with fatigue. The anxiety that he was feeling was palpable. His face began to twitch. It was bad enough when he saw me entering the restaurant. But the moment I informed him that Rufus was on his way to join us, his system could no longer handle the tension. He stood up. He patted his pockets.
“What is the matter?” I asked him. “Is everything fine?”
“Oh, I was-was-just checking my—my—my pocket. For my-my-my-house keys.”
“And is it in your pocket?”
ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-Eight)
ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twenty-Eight) “Moyo,” Steve said, “it’s Obaseki.” “Obaseki?” It took me…
THE ROCKET
I met a young woman living in Nigeria online more than ten years ago.
We became friends and exchanged lots of chats.
She had just graduated with a degree in engineering.
She couldn’t get a job.
I watched her struggle for many years.
A really gorgeous woman transformed into a shell of herself.
Her mother fell ill.
She began to live with her married sister.
She fell ill.
“Two husbands are better than one”
“Two husbands are better than one;
So also vice-versa,” this sixty-something year old woman informed me in Ile Ife.
In indigenous Yoruba systems, I still grew up to witness polygamy–when a man had several women, and when a woman engaged several men.
THE PARABLE OF THE TOO BIG TO FALL
When young women went to the river to fetch water, they would disappear.
The king’s royal beads even went missing.
People were worried. One of the wise men said, “Let’s approach Ọlọ́run to give us a police boss.”
But who could they trust? One of them must be the thief.
They decided unanimously that the only trustworthy person in the entire community was Ijapa.
Ijapa gave them only one condition: “Nobody should visit my house without letting me know in advance that they were coming.”
ÀÌKÚ
When I was a kid between the ages of three to ten, my friends and I were fond of watching Lọ́baníkà, an egúngún masquerade that performed regularly once a year in my neighborhood at Iremo in Ile Ife. Lobanika’s annual act was the highlight of the entire community, and we always waited with joy for the week when Lobanika performed to the delight of all and sundry
