When I arrived the United States in 1992 to start a doctorate at UW, Madison, I had only $98 in my pocket.
My professor, Henry Drewal, quickly came to my assistance. He immediately paid my school fees for the first semester, and gave me $1,000 in cash to start me off. Then he provided me with free accommodation in the posh part of town for the first year of my studies, while I found my feet.
The things we take for granted.
I wanted to plant some flowers. Ordinarily I would simply jump up, grab the seeds, and plant the flowers.
But things are now different.
Without a serviceable leg, I had to think carefully of the strategy that would enable me to plant the flowers.
My friend—for whom I was chasing the snake when I fell yakata off the ladder—just made…
It is not an okada o.
It’s a long tori.
It started with a green snake.
It entered the house and crawled into bed with my friend.
I was in the other house, painting, when my friend came running in. “A snake! A snake. Quick!” She said, breathless. “Come, quickly. Please! Come and kill it!”
We are the last of the broke Africans.
Believe it or not: by the end of this century, every fourth person in the world will be an African. It means that one out of every four humans will be an African.
Yahoo boys hide in the most unlikely locations.
So, we went to this village that is blessed with very fast network facility, because at home we hardly hit one bar on our cellphone bandwidth service. You can always trust to hit four bandwidths in this village. We saw a really posh hotel in this village and decided to check it out, buy some drinks and use their fast network services.
Me: Which organization is yours?
We have been stopped and checked by at least four different organizations, with different uniforms, since we left home and started our trip to Ondo some 30 minutes ago. But your uniform is different from those worn by the other organizations that stopped us.
“There’s nobody who will see this place and not be afraid,” the two men on the bike said this morning as they stopped and kept looking at our newest installation at the Àkòdì Òrìṣà.
Bí ìwọ́ bá ṣe rere, ara kì yíò ha yá ọ? I wonder where I got that quote from. Is it a Yoruba proverb?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was from the Bible.
The community protested and shut down the noises of the Christian church that has been harassing us for the past one month, keeping us up all night long, making it impossible for us to catch a moment of sleep.
Sell your possessions, give everything to the poor, hop on the okada bike and ride your life away to paradise.
My dear friends, there is no more pleasurable way to die than on the okada bike. I just discovered what I had been missing!
I have been home for a month now.
And I’m learning to live with the opportunities of living at home.
Here are some of these opportunities:
1. The fèrègèdè seller. Do you see her picture here?
The last time I ate fèrègèdè was when I was in the primary school, and a feregede seller came to our school during lunch time. Fèrègèdè is a special type of dark beans. You cook it for hours, and the fèrègèdè seller must start cooking in the evening and leave the beans on the wooden stove
MAY 28