It was very cold last Saturday when we celebrated our annual Egungun Festival. But the òtútù did not deter us from celebrating our ancestral heritage.
Next year we will still be here to celebrate again.
Thanks to my friend, Sheila Patterson, who also came out in the cold and commemorated the event.
The stuff in my office needs organizing. One day I’ll get to it. One of these days when I have nothing to do.
When I arrived in the United States thirty years ago, I couldn’t call the US a new land.
It might be new to me, but it was not new to those who were born there.
But if the history of the United States were written by me, I would call the United States, “new land.”
That has been the experience of peoples in Africa.
I arrived the United States in September 1992. When I stepped on US soil at the JFK airport I had exactly $98 in my pocket. Yet by February 1995, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation at one of the best universities in the United States. I never enjoyed a penny of scholarship money. I was not entitled to, nor did I receive student loan. I worked my way through college.
About 50 villages, mostly located in Ogun States, have been abandoned by Yoruba farmers and their families, but now occupied by Fulani invaders who drove out these villagers.
This morning I saw videos of the officers of the Nigerian Customs and Excises raiding the shops of poor market women, removing items that these women bought for sale to their customers.
This is a two-prong attack: the villagers driven out of their villages are unable to farm and provide food supplies for the people in towns and cities.
Independence Day
Mother, why birth me black
in a white caul
with a white umbilical chord
feeding me off a tube
connected to your navel
from my prosimian body?
In the United States, the Zoom classroom is becoming the norm in an abnormal world.
It’s unbelievable that the death toll in the United States is nearing the 250,000 number.
That sort of figure is beyond imagination—one-quarter of a million people dead.
How does one wrap one’s mind around that sort of number, in terms of fallen heroes in a single war that has not yet even lasted one year?.
Whereas in Africa, hardly anyone is dying.
When last week the press reported the fall of Jerry Rawlings to the pandemic, it was so shocking, because in Nigeria, everybody is wining, dining, partying, and marketing as if nothing is going on, and everything is honky-dory.