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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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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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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…
The Isle of Jade
