Foluso
Akodi Orisa resident artist, Foluso.
painting, architecture, textiles, terracotta, performance.
Interested in some of my published works?
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Akodi Orisa resident artist, Foluso.
painting, architecture, textiles, terracotta, performance.
Rufus could tell something was wrong when he opened the door and saw me. All he needed to do was to take one look into my eyes and he could read me like a book. First, I had been gone all day. All I went do was to drop off Josephine and Gina. He expected that I would be back within an hour, maybe two maximum. The hospital was not that far, maybe fifteen minutes. I left before 8 am, and it was 6 pm when I came back.
My granddaughter fine sha!
Those of you who don’t have granddaughters, Olodumare will pese o.
But your granddaughter still won’t be as fine as mine o: just so you know. Kẹ́lẹ́gbẹ́ mẹgbẹ́.
She already eats amala and okra like a professional at seven months.
When we visit Nigeria after the Koro, she will take a tour of all the major Amala joints in Ibadan, starting from Inanstrate at Mokola.
Moyo: When I was 6 years old, I started attending the free primary school that the Western Nigerian government offered.
My teachers were supposed to teach me simple facts: how did additions and subtractions work? What happens when you mix oxygen and carbon dioxide? How do you speak English without committing grammatical blunders? And so on, and so forth.
YORUBA HISTORIOGRAPHY: FROM YORUBA RONU TO YORUBA DIDE
Hubert Ogunde did the opera “Yoruba Ronu” fifty years ago.
It means Yoruba, use your sense.
We are now beyond the stage of Yoruba Ronu.
We are now in the phase of Yoruba Dide.
Yoruba dide means Yoruba, stand up.
Let us begin with Yoruba historiography.
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.”
When Steve offered us a cigarette, I took one out of the pack he extended.
It was from one of the packs he brought from Britain a couple of months earlier.
I was not good with cigarettes. But I was also not good at saying no to cigarette offers. All my friends smoked. And I loved to hold a stick of cigarette stylishly and watch the smoke rise from the tip of the ashes.
We sat there in the dark, watching the moon, smoking, silent. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning crashed across the sky, followed by a ripping sound of thunder. Instantly, the moon and the stars disappeared, and the sky was an endless black canvas coughing out intermittent flashes of jagged lights filled with throbs of thunder.