It was mentioned almost in passing in our last Wednesday class by one of the American students that whenever I mentioned Yorubaland, as I always inevitably did while telling them about that part of Nigeria (and Benin Republic), it always sounded to their ears and imagination as some sort of a fairytale kingdom. “Like Disneyland?” I asked, and they all shouted, “Yeah”.
Seriously.
“Do you still have kings there?” Another one asked.
“Yea,” I replied, but their function is mostly ceremonial, like that of the British monarchy.”
“Do they have rituals of coming-of-age, like public circumcision dance and festivals, like we’ve seen in some movies?” A different student asked.
“Well,” I replied, thinking, “there are some cultures in Africa that has those festivals for boys when they get to a particular age. But not the Yorubas. They cut their male children’s foreskins immediately after birth, and don’t wait at all.”
They seemed to be very impressed, but I was sure that they still retained some exotic ideas about the famed “Yorubaland” or “Yoruba Kingdom” that reminded them either of a Disney Movie or an animated flick, so I dimmed the lights in class, put on the projector, and logged onto YouTube to look at some Yoruba movies and clips. Luckily, there was Baba Wande and a few other actors there who I could point to as archetypes of Yoruba men and women in dressing and mannerism. I typed in “Lagos” and one of the first results there was a documentary about the Megacity project in which Wole Soyinka and a few others were interviewed for the camera. In the end, I felt I’d given a balanced view of life in Western Nigeria. They saw what a typical Yoruba house and street look like. They saw cars and people going about their daily lives, and I wondered if I’m able to help them reconcile that general city look with the many eccentricities that some of our cultural practices present as evidence of another kind of social life that is not seen on the streets.
For future classes, I have promised them a session of reading short stories of the tortoise from Nigeria. Luckily, I have brought along with me from Nigeria a book of many folk stories that captured our imagination as kids growing up in places in Yorubaland. And from the twinkle in their eyes, I see excitement, and I’m equally thrilled by the prospects of being the storyteller in a class of young students in the Western hemisphere, travelling back into a magical kingdom of animals, and folk wisdom from the Yoruba elders. This too will be an experience of a lifetime.
Yesterday, we had class practices of oral conversations. The students were paired with each other and they took turns to display their knowledge of conversation techniques by dramatizing the scenario of a chance meeting by two previously unfamiliar strangers meeting on the streets of Osogbo or any other Yoruba town.
ight FLTA Conference. It is not a totally unexpected news, but coming today, it is a pleasant beacon of warm hope waiting for me in the city of the Capitol.
There are no Eid holidays in the United States for obvious reasons: it is regarded more as a Christian state when it’s not being seen as secular. The actual reason is that there are too many holidays every year in the country, and none of them have to do with religion. That’s what I think at least, because Christmas is all about the festival, the movies and Santa Claus, and less of the birth of Jesus Christ. No one knew when Jesus was born precisely anyway. The December 25 date was only arbitrarily picked by one dead pope to signify a day of the year for followers to remember. Neither is Thanksgiving any more than a celebration of life, health and family. The formerly large purpose of gathering to praise God for a bountiful harvest must have been overtaken by the fact of growing skepticism in religion and belief in God, and the decline of subsistence or commercial farming based solely on the variables of nature. Science has ultimately come to the rescue, and I have a feeling that the God of thanksgiving may not be as large a guest at the dinner table as he used to be.
In today’s case however, it was none of the above reason. I was working on a translation task that took much of my time. I slept at twelve, woke up at two and slept again at five thirty. By the next time I woke up, I was thirty minutes late for my teaching class. I have never rode by bike as fast as I did today, and I got to campus panting like a deer. And silly me, I was still expecting to find the students waiting for me in class. I met only one of them the lobby, and I hurried up into the class to find an empty set of seats. Perfect. Back to the lobby, there was Bre reading, and waiting for her next class.
