This cold weather is here again.
This cold weather is here again.
How many layers do I wear just to go and get a cup of coffee from Starbucks?
Six layers.
This cold weather is here again.
How many layers do I wear just to go and get a cup of coffee from Starbucks?
Six layers.
Ọ̀rẹ́: Friendship
“He is my ọ̀rẹ́ (friend),” I told Iya Oyo, after Kola left.
Iya Oyo did not look too pleased.
She didn’t ask me for any explanation about Kola, but the way she eyeballed me after he left compelled me to offer some information about Kola.
How to train an apprentice artist?
Get her to work with you on your own art.
Get her to go through the process that you go through.
Get her to understand that it is a lot of work.
But there is no amount of talking that can convey that fact to her.
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.”
We Never Die
“Òkú is not dead,” said Iya Oyo. “In our [Yoruba] culture, we do not die.”
“How is that possible?” I asked her, astonished.
“We already defeated Ikú (Death),” Iya Oyo announced. “The defeat of Ikú is what the Odù Ifá called Ọ̀yẹ̀kú focuses on. Olójòǹgbòdú, the wife of Ikú is the great woman who accomplished the defeat of Ikú, and since then we no longer die.”
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
When the civil war officially ended in Nigeria in 1970, a different type of civil war began.
It is what you may describe as the asymmetrical civil war: the war by the desperate and poor against all others in the country.
“Baba Oyo,” I said one afternoon when I was alone with him, “you are very soft, too gentle, with Iya Oyo. You are not like all the other Baba I know.”
Baba Oyo laughed. “What does too gentle mean?”
“I really don’t know how to say it,” I said. “But you don’t…. When you talk with her…. You don’t argue or order her to do things. You speak softly. It’s as if you have to persuade her kind of. That’s not very manly. That’s not how the other Baba talk to their wives. Is it because you are a pastor?”