MAKING AFRICA
Yes, tomorrow I will give a gallery talk in the MAKING AFRICA exhibition at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin.
I will title the talk, “I am Africa.”
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Yes, tomorrow I will give a gallery talk in the MAKING AFRICA exhibition at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin.
I will title the talk, “I am Africa.”
TIME FOR CHANGE The women’s era is here. Can we have a woman president in Nigeria, please? I’m sick of these non-performing men who for more than fifty years have been doing their best to destroy Nigeria.
I have been home for a month now.
And I’m learning to live with the opportunities of living at home.
Here are some of these opportunities:
1. The fèrègèdè seller. Do you see her picture here?
The last time I ate fèrègèdè was when I was in the primary school, and a feregede seller came to our school during lunch time. Fèrègèdè is a special type of dark beans. You cook it for hours, and the fèrègèdè seller must start cooking in the evening and leave the beans on the wooden stove
The Rain and Olodumare
I just returned to Austin, Texas, from Ghana where it has been raining all summer.
The landscape in Ghana is lush and green.
The farm products are in abundance. It rained on my last day in Accra and I enjoyed the sweet scents of the soil stimulated by the falling drizzles.
My friend called me that they scammed her of $750 last Monday.
After listening to the story of how they scammed her, I realized it was the same syndicate that scammed me in 2019 that scammed her last Monday.
As a Nigerian, I consider it a disgrace to be scammed—after all, I belong to a country that is notorious for always winning the Olympic gold medal in the 419 game.
If you got up early enough, you would catch Anti Toyosi bathing at the back of the Face-Me-I-Face-You building in which I grew up in Ile Ife. Her husband, a sign-writer, would still be fast asleep.
But Anti Toyosi always got up early to prepare rice that she sold to school students as breakfast before they went to school.
As I think about my new granddaughter, my daughter and what they know about me, about Africa, and about their tradition, a tormenting thought ran through my mind:
We, members of my generation, stand between the light and the void. And we are the last stand holding up the ancestral heritage. We must mine what is available and keep them in a culture bank, or too much will perish.