Photos taken at the food and products exhibition of the above name taking place at the weekend at the Missouri Botanical Garden on Shaw Blvd, St. Louis. Missouri.
Those who have read my rants in the past few days about the Nigerian election cycle would have noticed my preference for the incumbent as the best person to win the ticket and the election for 2011 in Nigeria. I made this choice because of his image as a uniter and someone whose ethnic background doesn’t becloud his judgement of his position as a responsible leader in a time of difficulty. For one, he is also a better and (to my opinion) more politically savvy person than the rest of the contestants. All that changed a few minutes ago.
I’ve spent this whole day at a public exhibition. You can call it “stuff white people like” if it makes more sense to you. It is an exhibition of food, wine, artworks, upholsteries, and other pastries at the Missouri Botanical Garden to last all weekend. It involves food tastings, wine sampling and a few other past times one could do while in a public park. The Botanical Garden itself was an ideal location and I was privileged to visit its amazing Climatron for the first time. It’s is an indoor garden with a tropical feel hosting hundreds of vegetation, many of which are already endangered in many parts of the world. One more peculiar thing about the market was that all the food, wine, upholsteries, artworks etc in the fair were all produced in the state of Missouri.
I have now just returned, only to read on the news that the President of Nigeria (Goodluck Jonathan) had, in a speech to ECOWAS yesterday come to the defense of MEND, the group who had yesterday claimed responsibility for the bomb blasts in the capital Abuja a few blocks from the independent anniversary celebrations – a blast that claimed the lives of about 8 people and wounded about half a dozen more. The president claimed that MEND who had already publicly claimed responsibility was not the real perpetrators, but was a stooge of some faceless enemy. “WTF”, I first thought, then “What a shame,” and it was all over. Ethnicity, greed and nativity has taken over again, and the silver lining wiped out, all in an instance. Just yesterday while watching the independence parade on NTA, I was filled with some sense of solidarity with the president standing alone while his “brothers” from the oil-rich delta took the country to ransom and lose all previously-held goodwill. It would have been a source of political capital for such a president to be decisive, and to do what was necessary at the moment in time to show the perpetrators that killing innocents was not a way to show grievances. But now, he has relapsed into good old denial and it is all over. I have wiped my eyes from all drowsiness and confirmed that the wine has nothing to do with what I’m reading in the news. This is actually not the man we can trust with our votes for providing security for the nation.
I am now shopping for a new candidate.
It’s been long since I last laughed at myself on this blog. I should remedy that, I thought this evening. Should I tell you the story of my one of many first encounters with a duvet (often also called the “comforter”), or how I finally became friends with Boo the cat while his owners were far away out of the country? How about my recent reunion with winterboots from last year in very unexpected circumstances, or about how I had been unpleasantly surprised about the absence of roadside cobblers in the US to fix my sandals when the buckles gave way? I also felt I’d talk about my surprise in finding my blog listed yesterday on the BBC website featuring a few Nigerian blogs talking about the nation’s independent anniversary celebration. But I felt that that won’t be funny enough.
Then I thought I could tell you about how I lost my keys last week in town and had the police call my mobile phone just to return it to me. They had obviously traced it with a special number coded on the keys. But that wasn’t funny at all becuase a new set of keys would have cost me a lot of money that I don’t have. Then I resolved to tell you about the private pranks I’ve been playing on the GPS machine these days. I would put in a particular destination in the machine, and deliberately go to a different place through a different route and watching the machine run mad with instructions: “Please turn right in .5 miles… Please make a legal U-turn as soon as possible… Re-calculating route…” etc. As you would see, I’ve been very busy. In another world a long time ago, I’d call two different people with a hidden number, connect them in a conference call and listen to them fall in love after a few false starts and them eventually believing that the lines jammed into each other by some random error in the system and the gods actually want them together. That used to be much fun, just like calling the fire service station while we were young, and telling them that there’s a fire somewhere and watch them laugh at our fake attempts at seriousness, then threaten to tell our parents. Oh the days.
Then I felt that by the time I told you all of this, you’d have at least let out a smile, and I’d be forgiven for not having blogged for as much last month, and for the fact that I would blog less and less as school progresses and my life gets more interesting.
To October 1st, 2010
Clapping on the green hill with one withering hand, a loner
dances in the dust with trumpets blarring around his head.
A cake on the side, and black drying welts half a century old
around his back, he swirls with the new colours of the wind.
It’s dawning around a river of sweat, and a cool breeze blows.
The earth is wet with shining slivers of light, and tongues,
and mixed memories of glee, and a past of bilious giggles,
and smiles, and fond thoughts of what might have been.
But the bright day returns, as slowly as it must, within beats
of a thousand heart drums on a global stage. An orchestra
of sounds that must heal or yet renew the promises of dawn.
An old baton into new hands of hope within hope. A gamble.
For here is another gathering of tribes and a dance to promises.
(c) 2010 ktravula.com