Foluso
Akodi Orisa resident artist, Foluso.
painting, architecture, textiles, terracotta, performance.
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Akodi Orisa resident artist, Foluso.
painting, architecture, textiles, terracotta, performance.
We are the last of the broke Africans.
Believe it or not: by the end of this century, every fourth person in the world will be an African. It means that one out of every four humans will be an African.
HOW MUCH? Èrò Ni Ọkọ Dídó
Check the naira amount in your pocket or the bottom line in your bank account.
Has that transfer gone through?
But what does a fellow do with money that rapidly gets useless?
What do you do when a piece of paper loses its promisedvalue?
It still says One thousand Naira, but it only buys One hundred Naira worth of garri.
In the year 2019 when I left Nigeria, I brought with me some naira currency notes, stacked in one-thousand denominations.
The Hausa did not name us Yorùbá.
The Hausa cannot even pronounce Yorùbá.
They say they pejoratively called us Yarubawa and we creatively changed it to Yorùbá. Rárá o. It’s the other way round.
We call ourselves Yorùbá and they pejoratively call us Yarubawa.
To be able to pronounce Yorùba correctly, you must understand the nuances of our triptych intonation.
My mumu is too much.
Hear my story o.
They just fixed the electricity at my place in Nigeria.
To get it fixed, I bought four poles, and hundreds of yards of cable.
I contributed hundreds of thousands of naira to get the transformer.
I bought the meter.
And paid to have the entire thing installed.
But I understand that none of these things that I bought belongs to me.
They all belong to the government.
I woke up during the night and went to the bathroom.
There was no water to wash my hands.
No hot water. No cold water.
What was going on?
I went downstairs.
No running water.
A silent demolition is going on.
When I was about 8 years old, I walked from Akarabata Line 2 to Iremo in Ile Ife, a distance of about three miles, every morning, at dawn. I was attending a private coaching class that started at 6 am, two hours before formal classes began at 8 am.