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The Trial of the Snail and the Tortoise
Artist: Moyo Okediji
Title: The Trial of the Snail and the Tortoise
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Date: 2018
THE CHILD BREAKS THE SHELL OF A SNAIL, NOT THAT OF A TORTOISE.
“Two husbands are better than one”
“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.
Are Africans “shithole” as President Donald Trump has allegedly pontificated?
I arrived the United States in September 1992. When I stepped on US soil at the JFK airport I had exactly $98 in my pocket. Yet by February 1995, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation at one of the best universities in the United States. I never enjoyed a penny of scholarship money. I was not entitled to, nor did I receive student loan. I worked my way through college.
THE PARABLE OF THE TOO BIG TO FALL
When young women went to the river to fetch water, they would disappear.
The king’s royal beads even went missing.
People were worried. One of the wise men said, “Let’s approach Ọlọ́run to give us a police boss.”
But who could they trust? One of them must be the thief.
They decided unanimously that the only trustworthy person in the entire community was Ijapa.
Ijapa gave them only one condition: “Nobody should visit my house without letting me know in advance that they were coming.”
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I was arrested for the first time at age 62. For building an Orisa house, in Ile Ife.
I made the statement to a bunch of police officers most of them young enough to be my children.
It was an act of humiliation at the least.
THE RETURN (Part one)
His ordeal began with a brief phone call.
“Hallo? Hallo? Honorable! Are you there? Your mother. She was stolen from her house.”
A sharp pain pinched him in the middle of the chest and traveled slowly down to the bottom of his stomach.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” he thought.
For the past week he had been nursing an ominous feeling that something beyond his control was going to happen. Somehow his mind kept going to his mother.
He was thinking of driving to the village this weekend to visit her.
“Hallo? Hallo? Are you still there?” the voice asked again.