Millennial Priestess Rejuvenates Orisha Tradition

(By Wana Udobang) - Why you should care 

Because ancient practices should be understood, not left in the shadows.

Omitonade Ifawemimo presents as a modern-day sage, with gleaming eyes, a petite frame — and wisdom to spare. She is in fact a 20-something Orisha priestess, with an easy smile and tightly knotted hair. And she has made it her mission to teach and preserve the Orisha and Ifa spiritual practices, which are indigenous to the Yoruba people of Nigeria and adjoining parts of Togo and Benin.

“When you see her in person, she is this tiny presence,” says journalist and culture historian Molara Wood. “She is not this image of an intimidating traditional-religion adherent that a lot of Nigerians have.” 

Ifawemimo’s journey started at the age of 5 when she was initiated into the Orisha traditions by her parents, and by 15 she found herself dining with elders and mastering the art and science of divination, chanting and rituals. At 20, through a combination of study, practice and heeding the spiritual call, she earned her place as a priestess.

Of ‘Oniyangi’ and ‘Elepo’

(From Segun Adeniyi) - Let me state from the outset that I am not the writer of this story as it is one  of those interesting offerings being circulated on WhatsApp. Since I found the message rather instructive, I am posting it with minor editing because, in a way, it fits into Mark Twain’s warning that we should never argue with “stupid people” who could easily “drag you to their level and then beat you with experience”.

It is a story of two men: One, called ‘Elepo’ because of the nature of his merchandise, which was palm oil; and the other, ‘Oniyangi’ also because of the nature of his own merchandise, which was sharp sand. One day, a long, long time ago which no one living can actually define, Elepo and Oniyangi set out from opposite directions to market their merchandise. After travelling many days by foot, which was the only means of transportation in those days, they met at a narrow intersection. It was such a narrow path that only one person could go through at a time. Elepo insisted on the right of way. Oniyangi would have none of it.

Both argued until other travellers met them at the spot and a large crowd soon gathered. Having failed to pacify both men, some wise travellers suggested a way out – they should slug it out; and that whoever won the contest should have the right of way. Quickly, each man set down his merchandise by the roadside and they squared up one to the other. The battle was ferocious and long; in the end, Elepo had the better of Oniyangi, lifted him off his feet and landed him on the floor. The crowd roared!

The Gospel According to Nwa Otu

Unku SP

The Achievement of Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe at his house in Enugu, Nigeria, 1959

(By Kwame Anthony Appiah) - 

The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis. If we could explain it fully, we could reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an achievement that starts with the fact that Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of the novels in his “African trilogy” defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them—Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City (1954), to name but two also written by Nigerians—remain eminently worth reading. But place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing something magnificent and new was going on.

One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural—transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.

Saving Agu's Wife

(By Chika Unigwe) - So Yaradua goes to Israel on an official trip. He gets sick there and dies. His entourage is told, ‘Well, you’ve got two options. Your president was a Muslim and so must be buried quickly. We can bury him here at no cost to you since he was our guest or you can take his corpse home but that would cost a lot. Thousands and thousands of dollars.’ Yaradua’s men beg for a few hours to think about it. Five hours later they come back to the Israelis. ‘Well?’ The Israeli president asks. The head of the entourage clears his throat and says, ‘Your offer is very generous but we’ll turn it down. Thing is we all know the story of the famous someone, the son of a carpenter, who was buried here and who rose after three days. We don’t want to take that risk!’

The laughter bursts in to the kitchen and Prosperous shakes more salt than she intends to into the simmering pot. It must be John telling jokes again. A raised voice says over the laughter, this is an old joke. Yaradua’s been dead two years already. In any case, you’re not right. Muslims are not buried. They are cremated. For their sins, they are burnt. You’ve not told that story well.

Someone – perhaps the one who told the joke – shouts the voice down: You’re the one who is wrong! Cremation is forbidden in Islam. Another voice shouts something she does not clearly hear. She cannot tell who is speaking. All the men sound alike. That’s what this place has done to them – homogenized their voices. It is almost as if they were clones of each other. Their stories are not that different. They have all escaped something – religious riots, poverty, dead end lives – and are hoping to resurrect here.

This Sex Which Is Not One

"'She' is definitely other in herself. This is why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible,
agitated, capricious ... not to mention her language, in which 'she' sets off in all directions leaving 'him' unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. ...
        It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already elsewhere in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. They have returned to themselves. Which must not be understood in the same way as within yourself. They do not have the interiority that you have, the one you perhaps suppose they have. Within themselves means within intimacy of that silent, multiple, diffuse touch. And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.
        Thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything. Always something more and something else besides that one--sexual organ, for example--that you give them, attribute to them. Their desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse ..."

Luce Irigaray, 1985: 29-30

This Sex Which Is Not One