At the coffee shop.
Guys checking out my friend, like “What’s that?”
We are the people of the 22nd century.
There is none like us.
And one by one they will find out who we are, and what we mean to the survival of this planet that they try so hard to destroy with this thing they call “progress,” and “science.”
In Gambia now.
This is what I saw.
What do you see?
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.”
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
When the civil war officially ended in Nigeria in 1970, a different type of civil war began.
It is what you may describe as the asymmetrical civil war: the war by the desperate and poor against all others in the country.
In 2016, I looked into the middle of the Opon Ifa and what did I see?
I saw women, simple, rural, agrarian women carrying automatic weapons on their way to their farmlands.
Some of them were pregnant, some carrying loads on their heads, some with their children, some walking alone, some hiking in groups, all moving from one point to another.
I sat up abruptly. What was this I was seeing?
Àkòdì Òrìṣà at sunset, Ile Ife, Nigeria.
This is the location of the Àkòdì Òrìṣà, the home of the ancestral orisa in Yoruba country.
The curator of the Àkòdì Òrìṣà sent me this picture to inform me of the treat that awaits me when I return to Ile Ife. I’ll be there soon. Soon.
The most central building on our school campus was also the building that gave me claustrophobia. It was the school chapel.
Right in front of the building was a stone monument. Within the monument was a plaque, with the inscription, “STUDY TO SHEW THYSELF APPROVED UNTO GOD. 2 Timothy, 2:15”
That, certainly, was not good English, I concluded. Even at age eleven, I felt they needed a copyeditor.