Born in the Kòró era,
my granddaughter knows only two faces:
her mother and her father.
These kids born in the United States
only know two faces.
Given the beautiful face of her mother
and the gentle face of her father,
If my granddaughter sees
my untrimmed Koro face
she is going to scream
and run like Usain Bolt.
HOW TO DEVELOP A MUMUCRACY
My friend in Nigeria said she is starting poultry.
She said she would just buy a couple of hens, feed them, and daily she would collect eggs from them and eat them.
“Impossible,” I said. “The hens would attack you and poke out your eyes.”
“Two husbands are better than one;
So also vice-versa,” this sixty-something year old woman informed me in Ile Ife.
In indigenous Yoruba systems, I still grew up to witness polygamy–when a man had several women, and when a woman engaged several men.
RIWO-RIWO-YO-O YO-O
Did you watch those videos!
Seriously, something consequential is transpiring as we speak.
I saw a couple of videos today, and I asked myself, “Doesn’t it look like Yorubaland is under confrontation condition? Hasn’t the west lit it up again?”
CAN’T KANT COUNT?
My Egungun is dancing as we speak in an exhibition at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as part of an installation titled “Whirling Return of the Ancestors.”
If you got up early enough, you would catch Anti Toyosi bathing at the back of the Face-Me-I-Face-You building in which I grew up in Ile Ife. Her husband, a sign-writer, would still be fast asleep.
But Anti Toyosi always got up early to prepare rice that she sold to school students as breakfast before they went to school.
OSUMARE: RAINBOW GALLERY
At the Akodi Orisa Sanctuary, Ile Ife, we have just completed the Rainbow (Osumare) Gallery.
The Rainbow is the mixture of fire and water blazing with luminous intensity across the middle belt of the sky, affirming the unity of all colors, all peoples, all races, all tongues, all hands and heads, committed to the principle of creativity.