ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

My California

Here’s to folks in (according to number of hits) San Bernadino, Monterey, Los Angeles, Antioch, Mountain View, Davies, San Francisco, San Jose, Goleta, Hesperia, Brentwood, San Marcos, Alameda, Milpitas, Thousand Oaks, Palo Alto, San Mateo, Marina Del Rey, Downey, Beaumont, Emeryville, and Lynwood in the state of California. Hi to you 🙂

I don’t have to say that if I leave the United States without showing up in that state, I would feel incomplete indeed. I heard it’s hot there in the southern part of the state. How true is that? Do you have winters? What about snow? What are the beaches like? Is it true that you have nude beaches? Are everyone allowed in there? Are those allowed in there allowed to wear dark shades (to protect their eyes from the sun, of course)? How often do you run into Hollywood stars when you walk down the street? How often do you see movie cameras around? Can you go out one day without seeing a movie being shot? Is the state all it’s touted to be, the most liberal place in the country?

Well, my regards to Governor Schwartzenegger, the actor with a long name and a big chest, and to you as well for being there. It’s not like you can help that anyway 😉

Pete-Pete

It was inevitable that I would eventually blog about (my love for) this song. As at the last count on my iTunes, I have listened to it for a total 293 number of times in less than three days, after songs by Chris de burgh, Fela Kuti and Michael Jackson. That is no mean feat. I usually begin playing it in the morning, and keep it on reply throughout my work on the laptop till evening when I sleep, and then leave it on to lull me to sleep as well. This is only surprising if you take into account that I did not like the song at all the first time I heard it. I thought it was too slow. In hindsight, I now think that I it was who was too slow.

The song by two unique Nigerian singers 9ice and Asa is a classic. It is a solemn lamentation of the state of things. But where the song derives its greatness is not even in its political preoccupation but in its artistic triumph. Poetry of words and the rhythm of proverbs in the Yoruba culture is already a given. But merging it with the art of rhyming, which I believe is a fairly Western art concept, and coming out with a tune which is both melodious and deep is a great endeavour indeed. I will not even try to play this in class to my students because the poetry it contains is above them. (Heck, it’s above many of the people I know.) The real beauty of the track however is in the words, the message, the proverbs, and not in the perhaps equally moving rhythm of the instruments. For non-Yoruba speakers, I give you only the music. 🙂 Enjoy.

NOTE: The title pete-pete is taken from a Yoruba proverb that says that “As soon as pete-pete (a muddy water/liquid dirt) is beaten deliberately with a rod, you can never control whose clothes it soils.”

Adventures in (Dis)honesty

There’s no reason why I should be impressed, really. This is how things should be in a normal society. But I guess that the event has sufficiently moved me to write about it only because a few months ago, an even far less careless slip had cost me so much more. What happened then was that I had gone to Six Flags for the first time, with friends, and at some point decided that I would join some of them in swimming. Now my small point-and-shoot Canon camera has always had a spot in its pouch around my waist. My belt always held it firm, and it was easier to bring out at the slightest notice of any memorable sight. Then I had to remove my jeans in public since none of us wanted to go into the locker rooms. We were all outside, beside a tall tree full of leaves. The process must have been: remove shoes, remove socks, unbuckle belt, unbuckle jeans, remove jeans, take everything off the ground and proceed to the pool. Approximately thirty seconds later, when I must havhollye taken not more than twenty steps from that spot, it struck me that my camera was missing, and there was only one place where it could have been: that spot outside the locker room. I went back there and it was missing, for good. I made a report, asked around, hoped and prayed, even searched Craigslist for lost items, but I didn’t get it back. It wasn’t so much for the camera but for the photos in it. In any case, there was no reason for me to have hoped that such a crowded public place like Six Flags would have been a safe place to leave a camera for that long, even for less than a minute. It kind of reminded me of some places in Lagos.

That could be why I may have been impressed when I arrived in class on Wednesday and found that my iPod earphones were still on the front table, exactly where I had forgotten to take it off from after the class on Monday. I have tried to rationalize it this way: the table is used mostly by Professors when they stand in front of the class, and it is not likely that any Professor would fancy a used $30 Apple earphone that doesn’t belong to them. I made a similar rationalization for the many students who had used the class between 3pm on Monday and 1.30pm on Wednesday, yet I did not doubt that a few of them must have noticed it lying there idly seemingly belonging to no one, and just ignored it. I should really not have been impressed. Nothing extraordinary has happened, right? Wrong. Right. I have no idea, but I am not taking up the challenge of my now mischievous self to make an experiment with my iPod classic. Place it carelessly in a public spot and come back after two days to see if it’s still there. That stuff cost me $250!

One of the very first things Papa Rudy told me the first day he gave me his bike to take home was this: “Never ever forget to lock the bicycle up whenever you’re outside, cos they’re gonna steal it. That’s why I’ve given you a lock with it.” He spoke in earnest and I did not doubt his conviction for a second that the bike would be stolen if I ever left it outside the house without fastening it properly with a solid lock. The second time I heard this kind of talk was from Holly Ruff, my friend the artist. It was Halloween night. According to her, all the times her bicycles had been stolen, it has always been on Halloween nights, and not always because she didn’t lock them properly. People always seemed bolder on that prank night that they get away, it seems, with anything. For that, she had warned me sternly to not think about coming out of the house with my bicycle – lock or no luck – for that one night. Last week when Mafoya and I went to the swimming pool with Ben, I went with a lock in my bag. But when we were putting our stuff in the available lockers in the gymnasium locker room, Ben looked at me calmly and said, “You don’t have to worry about that. Nobody’ll mess with your shit,” and I sighed, then smiled. My “shit” included a passport, an iPod, my wallet and cards, my camera and some cash, so I shrugged and locked it firmly away anyway. It felt better to be safe than sorry, but we both came back to find our things still intact. I remember having lost my bike helmet on campus more than two times since August. I always found it at the same spot where I left it, untouched. It might be safe to say that this campus environment is generally a safe one for personal items.

The last time it snowed here, I had gone out for a walk behind my apartment when I noticed a mobile phone in the snow around a series of small footsteps that went out towards the parking lot. Nobody else in sight, and the phone wasting away in the snow, I picked it up and took it into my apartment. Later in the evening, I told Mafoya about it, and we both waited for the owner to show up. He did about seven days later while I was out, and was very grateful that someone had kept his mobile phone for him even though he had no idea where he had lost it. He was a teenager or so. Now, I wonder whether, like me at the sight of my earphones lying there on the table, he was impressed that nobody had taken the item and made it theirs. Perhaps he was relieved, and grateful, that it didn’t take him too long to locate his property after countless calls to the number and no one answering. (I’d left it in the living room and I always missed the calls, not deliberately.) Or perhaps he took it for granted as a contented citizen, believer in the power of good: “Nobody needs another person’s phone anyway. This is America. Everyone has their own mobile phones…”

I would never know, because I never met him.

Today in Nigerian History

Today, forty-four years ago in Nigeria, a few army majors took steps towards what they felt was the right direction in righting the wrongs of a new nation. It was the first major step towards our division, and the many other troubles of the nation. On this anniversary of that extraordinary event in the life of my country, after a civil war, several military coups, and amidst the many effort in pursuit of a lasting solution to the many problems as a nation, let us remember the sacrifices of these men, and the very best of their aspirations.

(Image source: google analytics)

So Where Are We From Then?

The most famous story about the origin of the Yoruba people is that we all descended from one man called Oduduwa. It is also the most misleading of stories because the man called Oduduwa who was said to have come from a place called Mecca (or, as historians have agreed, somewhere in the Middle East) most possibly found some indigenous people already living in the area now called Yorubaland when he landed with his travelling party from Mecca, and could not have been the sole progenitor of the now over thirty million people. In any case, he was said to have had only one son, who later had seven. So, for all intent and purposes, it was a conquest, kind of like the Founding Fathers arriving on the American continent from Europe, or Christopher Columbus “discovering” America after a long ride on the ocean, or Mungo Park “discovering” the Niger river. If that is the case, then when as citizens we use the now famous self reference “Omo Oduduwa” to refer to ourselves, we engage in a kind of deceit, or self-disservice, or at least a subservient acceptance of the prehistoric conquest. The verifiable children of the man Oduduwa were the original seven kings who descended from his son Okanbi, and their own living descendants who now occupy the kingship thrones in Oyo, Benin, Popo, Sabe, Ife and two other Yoruba towns. That said, we are all Yorubas, just like the occupants of Britain are now all Brits, not Normans, or Romans, or Celts just because they were once occupied by those forces.

But where did we come from, the Yorubas? Going by the Oduduwa story, we (at least those Yoruba citizens that have “royal” blood) are all descendants of Oduduwa, who in turn is a descendant of Lamurudu. Lamurudu interestingly is the Yoruba’s corruption of the name Nimrod from the bible, according to the Reverend Johnson in his book The History of the Yoruba. So there it is! We’re confirmed descendants of the Jews. Yet history does not rule out the possibility that Lamurudu/Nimrod was not even the immediate ancestor of the man Oduduwa, or that Oduduwa himself was not the immediate ancestor of Okanbi, so it is fair to take liberties with the fact. It is possible, almost certain by these accounts, that we were descendants of Nimrod the son of Cush, grandson of Ham, great-grandson of Noah. Now, even to me, that’s far removed. Why? Because Nimrod’s personality has never been fully established, and every once powerful civilization from Egypt to Greece to Jewish cultures have their own written perception of him that are not always complimentary.

So where did we come from then? A literal mecca? Quite possibly. The islamic civilization has it recorded that many years before/after Mohammed the prophet, many so called idolators were expelled from the city into the world outside. The man Oduduwa and his entourage who later settled South West of the Niger river were believed to have arrived there not only with magic and graven images (which were markers of idolatory for which they were said to have been expelled from the religious middle eastern city in the first place), they also came with peculiar forms of dressing, communication and way of life that marks them as from that part of the world. They worshipped man-made gods, they made sacrifices to them through priests, they wore long robes, greeted each other in a particular way, and their women covered their heads as part of their cultural identity. The staff of Oranmiyan in Ile-Ife today still has the words “Oranmiyan” engraved on it in Jewish letters, and it was erected before the coming of the Europeans to that side of the world. Have you ever wondered why the Yorubas name their children on the eighth day of the birth of the child? I have. Could it be, as suggested to my surprise by an American student in my Yoruba class on Wednesday, that we are following the tradition of the old Hebrews who always circumcised their children on the eight day after birth, as ordained by their God? I don’t know, but I won’t bet against it. There is so much that I don’t know, that I wish I knew. There is so much more we need to know about ourselves.

The real wonder for me is where we are from, we Yorubas who are not descendants of kings or the patriarch Oduduwa. Any takers?

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