When a sheep keeps the company of the dog, it learns to eat feces.
Western Nigeria was not like this when we were growing up.
How did western Nigeria deteriorate from being the first in Africa to own a television station, to a place where this image became normalized?
This young journalist called Sowore.
He reminds me of another journalist called Dele Giwa.
And another journalist called Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Do you know what happens to journalists like them?
John McArthur, the internationally renowned evangelist, is quoted as observing that “It is confusing to watch people demand justice by violating the law.”
What is even more confusing is to watch the law perpetuate injustice.
And infinitely most perplexing is to watch the officers of the law flout legal procedures and violate human rights with impunity.
This is why SARS provoked such hostile reception from the Nigerian community that it was meant to serve.
It is most confusing to watch Nigerian politicians loot the funds meant for the entire nation.
It is confusing to see the police refuse to prosecute them.
My first day of classes today.
I am teaching “Africana Women’s Art.”
The class is remote with about fifty students in it.
Madam Ngu finally cornered me in the buka.
If I had any inkling she was coming to that buka that fateful day, I would rather have starved than be found dead there. She had been looking for me for weeks. And I had been evading her. I was trying to break free of her influence and she was trying her very best to ensure that she stamped herself into my art, my being, my style of creating, and my idioms of expression. She had studied at the Royal College in London and was trying to make me a master draughtsman who painted in the European fashion. And I was a radical looking for a way to break out of the western mold of painting.
Another painting that I just extracted from my garage is this dark work.
There is an interesting story behind it.
In the year 2000 or 2001, the British Museum invited me to give a lecture as part of the ceremonies held in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and also to mark the completion of the Great Court built as an extension of the main museum building. They wanted me to address the body as my topic.
Today, exactly thirty years ago, I arrived the United States.
Also, it is exactly thirty years ago I was in a plane crash.
It was the Nigeria Airways. Thirty odd years ago, and the memory is so vivid it feels like it happened yesterday.
A plane crash is not like a car crash. I’ve survived a couple of car crashes. A Car crash feels like a slow-motion movie.
A plane crash is different.