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Why I love Nigeria? Why I love Africa?
Tell me, where else in the whole wide world can you make a khaki cocktail with big stout and emu funfun?
I love Nigeria I nor go lie.
ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Nine)
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.
I remember
I remember when I was a curator at the Denver Art Museum from 1999-2008.
One of the highlights of my days in Denver was the opening of the African art gallery designed by Daniel Libeskind, (aka Best Architect in the World).
Disappointments can be a blessing.
Disappointments can be a blessing.
If Nigeria had not disappointed me, I would not be in Ghana now.
But because the political situation in Nigeria has dampened my spirit with the killing of thousands of people, the daily abduction of ordinary citizens, the lawlessness and lack of judicial repercussion for those who plunder the coffer of the country, I have started shifting my gaze away from Nigeria, and started looking at other African countries for a place to vacation, invest and create.
ÌWÀ
ÌWÀ
“Olódùmarè has several wives,” my father said. “Do you know that?”
We were strolling back home from his writing workshop that evening, and I was seventeen. I always accompanied him to his writing workshops where he taught playwriting
Ọwọ́ as Hand and Eye
Ọwọ́ as Hand and Eye
I showed Iya Oyo the drawing of her portrait I made one day. She said, “Ọ̣wọ́ rẹ gún,” (Your hands are straight), as she admired the portrait.
Baba Oyo responded with, “Ojú rẹ̀ gún” (His eyes are straight).
I was baffled. “What is straight, my eye or my hand?” I asked them.