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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?”
Sell your possessions
Sell your possessions, give everything to the poor, hop on the okada bike and ride your life away to paradise.
My dear friends, there is no more pleasurable way to die than on the okada bike. I just discovered what I had been missing!
Now, please watch this one-minute clip after reading my short note.
Now, please watch this one-minute clip after reading my short note.
This morning I went to my usual coffee shop, not too far from my house in Austin, Texas.
It was my favorite hangout before the outbreak of the Covid.
But now, it has become only a drive-in shop, and I sat in my Jeep, waiting for the young woman to take my order.
“Tall coffee and a banana nut bread warmed,” I told her.
“Sure,” she said. “That will be five dollars and seventy cents.”
ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981, (PART TWO)
Rufus was in a murderous mood. Steve, the one who Obaseki pummeled, became worried when Rufus went into his room. “What’s he gone to do in his room?” I asked Steve, whose only interest at that moment was diving into the fried rice we just brought for him.
Steve said, “He’s gone to change into his shorts. Looks like he’s really upset. He is changing into loose clothes to take out that guy who attacked me.”
“Na shakara,” I told Steve.
“What?” Steve asked.
POLICE CHECKPOINT, BENIN CITY
It was in 1980, in Nigeria, when this police encounter occurred.
I will start by swearing
in the name of Ogun
that this event, strange
as it sounds, actually happened
in the middle of the night.
They say when you want an African to tell the truth, make the African swear to an indigenous divinity—not to the Bible or the Quran. Those two books are just books. The real book that they believe and consider real is not written. It is oral, and tied to the indigenous divinities.
Ọ̀SẸ́ ÒTURÁ: THE ROLE OF WOMEN
“Baba Oyo,” I said one afternoon when I was alone with him, “you are very soft, too gentle, with Iya Oyo. You are not like all the other Baba I know.”
Baba Oyo laughed. “What does too gentle mean?”
“I really don’t know how to say it,” I said. “But you don’t…. When you talk with her…. You don’t argue or order her to do things. You speak softly. It’s as if you have to persuade her kind of. That’s not very manly. That’s not how the other Baba talk to their wives. Is it because you are a pastor?”
