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The Beginning
As a child, one of my favorite adults was Mummy Tolu. While growing up, she was a neighbor and what you could refer to as a ‘second mummy’. She asked all the important questions like “Is your mum back?” when my mum traveled and “have you eaten?’ when the answer was no. When I got into the boarding house as a student in Junior Secondary School 1, it became a thing that Mummy Tolu would give me rolls of milk, milo, and some detergents at the beginning of every term up until my last year in secondary school. If it didn’t happen, then resumption was incomplete. It always happened. I…
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Notes from IdeaCon Enugu
I absolutely enjoyed Enugu, and my 3 day stint in the city…but I almost didn’t go. IdeaCon is short for Idea Conference, our community of thinkers and talkers, that gives us a platform to engage young people and their ideas, question old truths, examine new ones, and build human capacity in a way that uplifts not only the individual, but also adds up to national development. It was an idea that was birthed through a Facebook question in 2016. Now, IdeaCon has held physical conferences in Abuja, Lagos and Enugu. Next month – September – the IdeaCon train will move along to Kaduna State and later in November, it will…
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The Sword Knows No Face
“He was such a smart boy. He promised to always look after me and make my life better. He was too good for this world.” – Anne-Marie Uwimana, Rwandan Genocide Survivor, speaking of her son who was one of the 800,000 souls lost in the genocide of 1994. This woman, Anne-Marie, lost four children and her husband during the genocide. Even now, typing this, I can see her face in that BBC interview; the redness of her eyes and the brokenness that can be seen in it. I can see the many tales of time that the skin of her hands have to tell – tales of a pain so…
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Men, I hope you allow yourself be human.
Today, the 19th of November, is International Men’s Day. For some reason, a particular memory comes to mind while writing this. I was in JSS1, and I had gone to put a call through to my dad in what was the school’s call center. On ending that call, a swarm of seniors surrounded me and went on with; “Oh, you have a boyfriend and you’re just in JSS1,” “Can you imagine this small girl?” It took me a second but the web of confusion cleared and I realized it was because of the tone of my conversation and the fact that I said “I love you” at the end of…
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What Do We Do With Different
The Armenian Genocide began in 1915, during World War 1, when the Armenians were murdered and displaced from their cities. At the final lap of this atrocity in 1922, it was reported that between 700,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were murdered. In the space of over a decade from 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, over 6 million Jews and 6 million non-Jews – Blacks, Roma, Slavic groups – were killed during the holocaust. And barely 24 years ago, the world bore witness to the Rwandan Genocide, which took place between April and July of 1994. The death toll is put at between 500,000 to 1 million…
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To all my Ladies.
Today, October 11, is the International Day of the Girl. Today, I look back on the time that I have lived, and while a lot of things still irk me as it relates to society’s perception and relation with the girl child, I am excited about the lines we have erased and the dents we’ve made on the ceiling. A lot of people who know me will describe me as confident and self-assured, but I can assure you, I didn’t wake up like this. It took years of deliberate conditioning – of my mind, my outlook on life and how I fit into this equation. My father has been a…
The Isle of Jade
