Happy Valentine’s Day
Happy Valentine’s Day, my friends. I love you all minus none.
Me, here, painting away on a beautiful Valentine’s Day, seven years ago.
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ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY, 1981 (Part Twelve)
Iya Ngu stopped eating. She had not touched most of the food in front of her, and did not eat the two pieces of goat meat left in her plate after Professor Wangboje helped himself to the first one. She began to wash her hands.
“Madam,” I asked, “you are not eating the meat? It’s delicious goat meat.”
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.
19 years
I was 19 years old in 1975 and an undergraduate studying painting at the University of Ife when my friend, Augusta Akusu-Ossai, took this picture of me.
The attire I’m wearing in the picture is typical of what I always wore in those days: a long adire (batik) top that I designed and sewed myself, and the baggy pants of that era.
Sold!
I’m pleased to inform my friends that this historic painting which I completed in 1992 is now going to a home that will care for it, love it and protect it from damage and misfortunes. As the single parent of this painting, I feel a sense of loss that she is leaving me.
SIMPLE QUESTIONS?
When I arrived in the United States thirty years ago, I couldn’t call the US a new land.
It might be new to me, but it was not new to those who were born there.
But if the history of the United States were written by me, I would call the United States, “new land.”
That has been the experience of peoples in Africa.
ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY: (Part Thirty-Three).
Madam Ngu looked at my most recent painting and from the expression on her face, I could see that she did not like it.
She sat on the big chair in the center of my studio in the Ekenwan campus. I had arranged my paintings around the wall as she requested, ready for her critique.
“Muyo,” she said, “you need more life drawing classes.”
“Yes, madam,” I responded.