Tunde Odesola

If charisma was a commodity, Pope John Paul II would have been the producer of its purest form. It wasn’t for nothing that the Pope survived an assassination attempt in 1981 and forgave his assailant, Mehmet Ali Agca, an escaped Turkish prisoner.

In his time, Pope John Paul II was the global ambassador of Christ. When he spoke, the world listened. He was the leader of 1.345 billion Catholics worldwide. He was also the first non-Italian Pope in 455 years. The Pope, a Pole, once said, “Stupidity is a gift from God, but one mustn’t misuse it.”

But I disagree.

In boxing, the epigram of Pope John Paul is akin to the cross jab, a combination of a straight left jab, followed by a straight right-hand punch – if you’re orthodox, a boxing term for the right-handed – different from the left-handed alias southpaw.

In respect for Catholicism, I won’t catcall the Pope’s straight left jab on stupidity but I’ll root for his straight right-hand punch that warns against misusing stupidity.

In his view on stupidity, Juju music superstar, King Sunny Ade, riddles stupidity as a fellow sent to buy the head of a viper for nine pence. On getting to the market, the fellow approaches the Elewe Omo herb seller, who fetches seven bead-like objects called itun, seven alligator peppers called atare and seven fruits called abere. Before handing the items to the fellow, the herbal(ist) seller pours all three items into a mortal, grinds them with a black soap and hands the product to the chap. Tell me, who buys the head of a viper for ‘nain’ pittance with all the three potent ingredients but ‘Padi Odensin’, the fool?

Untying the knots in KSA’s àdìtù, culture aficionado, Chief Sulaimon Ayilara, popularly known as Ajobiewe, who said the combination of the ingredients Padi Odensin was sent to get is a powerful African medicine used for cursing and binding, explained the meanings of itun and abere to me. He located the potency of the ingredients Padi Odensin was sent to fetch, in the deadliness of the viper, saying, “Ase mónámóná ni n be lenu oka,” an assertion of the viper’s swift poison.

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No parents give their child a bad name. But when a child gives himself a bad name, what can the parents do? This is the riddle of the White Lion. Wildlife researchers believe white lions are a rare colour mutation of the African lion. Though they’re not albino, white lions are leucistic, meaning they lack dark pigmentation. Their rare genetic mutation (leucism) causes their fur to be white. Thesaurus defines ‘mutation’ as alteration, anomaly, or variation. Did Oduduwa, the leader of the Yoruba, have ‘mutation’ in mind when he described the fake as ‘àmúlùmálà’?

Suppose the white lion in the wild had a choice to maintain its natural tawny yellow colour, it won’t hesitate because the mutation in its life is causing him to be easily spotted by poachers and his prey, making survival near hopeless. But colour complex blinded Padi Odensin of Kogi State, who adopted the name White Lion, thinking whiteness was synonymous with supremacy, holiness and godliness. Wasn’t it this fleeing White Lion who roared fiercely in the Den of Immunity just some months ago? The White Lion is no different from hordes of black African women who bleach their skins blotchy white to fan their inferiority complex.

Mr Olanipekun Olukoyede is the fifth Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Nigeria’s foremost anti-graft agency hunting financial fifth columnists. Olukoyede may be wondering why Nigerians aren’t applauding the orchestra of his agency’s financial recoveries. It’s because Nigerians are amazed at the billions of naira (re)looted under the nose of APC’s anti-corruption god, Muhammadu Buhari, and they look at everyone in President Bola Tinubu’s government as an EFCC suspect waiting to unravel. Nigerians also snigger behind your back, Ogbeni Olukoyede EFCC; they say, “Eni a le mu la nle’di mo,” pointing at the fat files of Betta Edu dripping with the oil of corruption.

Shortly, I shall return to the terrified White Lion. Now, I head up to confront the roaring Lion of Dunamis. Remember, I’m the Hunter with a whistle and a calling, I fear no evil for the lord is my shepherd.

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I call Pastor Paul Enenche a lion because of the way he roared in his over 100,000-capacity church in Abuja, on Sunday. Enenche won’t frown if I call him the son of the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Enenche is the son of God. Or, maybe I should call him a lionet, yes, a lionet – the pikin of a lion because the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ, won’t throw worshipper Veronica Nnenna Anyim into the lake of condemnation.

Anyim had attained a milestone nobody in her lineage ever reached; she had got a law degree from the National Open University of Nigeria, Abuja. She wasn’t going to be discouraged by her poor English and obscure background, she was ready to show the world what the Lord had done.

On the day of her testimony, Anyim must have been led by the spirit. She got a yellow attire, the same colour as the suit her father in the Lord, Enenche, wore; the same as the colour of the lion. She must have done many rehearsals at home with her family, fancying herself on the church’s big stage and the thoughts of her testimony going viral – for good. Though Anyim is a policewoman, the thought of climbing the stage and facing the capacity crowd would’ve made her struggle with sleep till daybreak.

On stage, Anyim was shaking with joy and fear, she felt like fleeing the stage, like bolting to where her father in the lord was sitting, grabbing his feet and crying and saying, “Daddy, I brought home the degree!” Anyin wanted her tears to soak the shiny shoes of her daddy, ready to polish them with her dress, like Mary Magdalene. If Daddy Paul listened well enough, he could have heard the joyous melody of her heart. Anyim had hoped for a handshake at the end of her testimony, with Pastor Paul congratulating her, saying, “Well done, the good labourer,” but a roar shattered her dreams, inflicting her with heartache.

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I congratulate Pastor Paul Enenche because Anyim didn’t commit suicide on the night of her resounding disgrace. If she did, Dunamis would have been under fire and unbelievers would have rolled out the drums, singing, “Many are called but few are chosen.”

It was all over Anyim, fear. Every word was uttered with a quake. She trembled, yet the Man of God filled with the Holy Spirit didn’t see it. How did the medical doctor cum Man of God, who opened his church to worshippers while COVID ravaged in 2020, despite the Federal Government’s counter warning, not see that Anyim was telling the truth?

When she fluffed her lines, the church interpreter showed kindness and understanding, helping Anyim rephrase her testimony. And Anyim must have been shocked when Papa came after her, booming, “Give her the phone!!” “What Law!?” “What’s the name of the degree called, Medicine is MBBS?”

Anyim panicked further and said, “BSc in Law.” Papa roared, “It’s a lie!! BSc Law! Is that how lawyers speak English?” Hoping to be given a second chance, Anyim recovered a little and said, “LLB Law, sir” but Papa was done with her, Anyim was already on her way to the lake. I wonder how Anyim made it till daybreak.

Me, I went to school and I got an LLB in English Language and Literature o. Sorry, jare, I meant a B.A degree. Writing fatigue is setting in. I’ll round off shortly, please.

As an English Language and Literature student, I was involved in many drama productions. The accomplished literary giant, Professor Udenta O. Udenta, taught me drama. To situate the Anyim saga in perspective, I called my friend and one-year senior during my undergraduate days, Azubuike Erinugha. I asked Erinugha, who now has a doctorate, the name of his classmate, who fled to backstage during a drama presentation, thinking he had severed his manhood. Zooby, that’s the alias of Erinugha, recalled the name of our co-actor. I can still see Ralph, grabbing his crotch with his left hand as he ran backstage with a knife in his right hand. “I thought I had cut it…” Ralph said at the backstage. Zooby, a filmmaker based in Germany and Belgium, teaches participatory filmmaking for community development.

Ralph came back on stage later, the audience didn’t know what was amiss. They laughed when he fled, thinking it was all part of the comedy. But, like the tale of Anyim, Ralph’s stage fright wasn’t a laughing matter.

Do you remember a top Nigerian musician who performed at the Nelson Mandela concert in London around 2008? When he got on stage, he opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Stage fright is not NICE. Please, let’s give a clap offering for Anyim for tumbling through her lines. E no easy.

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By Suyi Ayodele

The tiger approaches the dog for a game. It offers its tail to the dog to touch and play with. The innocent dog, thinking that it has a new buddy, wags its own tail in amusement. Every elder around watches the dangerous offer with bated breath. They asked rhetorically: what manner of play can the dog possibly engage in with the tiger (eré kí ni ajá únbá ekùn se)? Every seeming conviviality between the two four-legged creatures always ends up bloody for the dog. That has been the case from time immemorial. In the wild, while other carnivorous animals leave the leftovers of the prey for lesser ones to feed on, the tiger is not blessed with such generosity. Like the python, the tiger leaves no leftovers. That is why it is saluted as Ekùn a je eran, je egungun (the tiger which eats both flesh and bones). So, you may wish to wonder what benefits the dog will derive from any relationship with the tiger? The tiger is pathologically belligerent; you don’t blame it for that. It is its nature . It needs no friends and makes none.

Wisdom is never in short supply in Yorubaland. No! It has never been! Elders too abound to teach moral lessons from their past experiences. The problem with the South- nature West at the moment is the greed of its political class. Those with crass ambition are the ones calling the shots in the region at the moment. They are the gang of the end-justifies-the means, who can do anything to achieve their set goals- goals which ultimately are self-serving. Nothing is too big for these dregs of humanity to sacrifice as long as they get whatever they desire. The entire Yoruba race can go into slavery for all they care. What matters to them is their ambition. Why people are not seeing this or pretend not to see it, baffles me.

The next round of general election will be held in 2027, which is some three years and a few months away. However, the battle for the soul of Nigeria has begun in earnest. There is no pretence about the fact that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is desperate for 2027. Only the Almighty God stands between him and his second term; nothing else, at least within the power of mortals. Tinubu will do anything to get his second term. He will sell where he needs to sell, buy what he needs to buy. Nothing will be too precious for him to trade off. He will be mean where meanness is required and meek where meekness is desired. The battle for 2027 is not for the weak. It is like a forest where only the strong-hearted (odaju) can foray. To achieve the aim, a lot of things will be sacrificed. People will equally be sacrificed. Old ties will be broken, and new ones knotted. Ex-foes will become friends, and old friends will be dispensed with. That is the way of ambition. The end will always justify the means. There will be nothing permanent; there will be nothing indispensable; Yoruba race inclusive. A man like Tinubu does not dwell on past achievements. He is like the sound of the proverbial dane gun. Ò kù ni ìbon úndún (there is something else is the sound the gun gives). Winning the 2023 presidential election is just a launching pad to him. When a child sets his mind at ascending his father’s throne, every item on his way becomes a transactional instrument to achieve his aim. In one of the essays submitted to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), one of the candidates has this to say of ambition: “Humans are greedy creatures. Nothing will be enough for them….” The beat has started. Like the fox that he is in the Nigerian political space, Tinubu has started to test the waters. He is doing this indirectly and directly. He was in Ibadan last Saturday, April 20, 2024. No, Tinubu was not in Ibadan in flesh and blood. His men were there to set the stage. He was adequately represented by his blood too, the first product of his loins; Mrs. Folashade Tinubu-Ojo, the Iyaloja General of Nigeria.

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Ibadan is crucial to the Yoruba race. Whatever is sealed and delivered in the city of Iba Oluyole is sure to be delivered in every nook and cranny of Yorubaland. That was why a group of people, operating under the auspices of Commodities Farmers’ Organisation in the South-West, gathered to sign an ‘agreement’ with the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN), on peaceful co-existence between Yoruba farmers and the itinerant Fulani herdsmen, otherwise known as herdsmen. The leader of the Commodities Farmers Organisation, one Olusegun Dasaolu, speaking at the event, which was held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, said: “We have signed the peace pact to put a stop to farmers/herders’ clashes. The first step we are going to take is to identify who are genuine herders in the South-West. We have also agreed together to collect or collate data in that regard.” He added that the ‘agreement’ would ensure “that the South-West farmers return to the farm, and also to promote food security in the country….” By that statement, Dasaolu and his promoters recognised that South-West farmers were off their farms because of the issue of incessant clashes with herdsmen. So, in Dasaolu’s reckoning, for the Yoruba farmers to return to their farms in their ancestral land, there must be an agreement with the herdsmen. He talked about “collecting or collating” data of the herders to identify “genuine herders”. Yet, this sudden commodities farmer never realised that the first step that the late Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu (SAN), the former governor of Ondo State took was to ask herders in the state’s forests to come out and be registered. It was when that call was not heeded that Akeredolu mobilised his fellow South-West governors, with the exception of Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State -who for obvious reason was not committed to the idea- to form the Amotekun Corps, which has been doing a yeoman’s job in the entire Yorubaland. The question is, how come that suddenly, the Miyetti Allah group that would not obey a state governor was now dancing Fuji ropopo in Ibadan because of a Dasaolu? I will not be tempted here to ask: “who bankrolled” the Ibadan peace ’agreement’?

He who forgets history is bound to repeat it. When history repeats itself, it does so in a more devastating form and format. History is about to repeat itself in the entire Yorubaland. Unless something is done before it is hatched, the entire Kaaro Oojire (Yoruba Race) will lose its existence to the Fulani expansionist movement. That is what the Dasaolu ‘agreement’ with his new friends in MACBAN led by the group’s National President, Othman Ngelzarma, is all about. The impending calamities embedded in the ‘agreement’ will happen to the Yoruba race all because President Tinubu wants a second term, and nothing more! Anyone can dispute this assertion. Time will tell. Pity! What Uthman Dan Fodio and his expansionist army could not achieve on the back of horses with deadly arrows and swords is what Tinubu and Dasaolu are giving to the descendants of Fodio before our very eyes!

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The agreement last Saturday between the Commodities Farmers’ Organisation and Miyetti Allah is a dangerous agreement. It is an agreement that will bring no peace because the other party does not understand the language of peace. Whoever midwifed the misadventure; whoever piloted the bad episode, must either be ignorant (which I doubt), or mischievous (which is most likely), but certainly greedy and unfeeling. The bad ‘agreement’ is like a loaded gun. Elders of my place say kò sí omo rere nínú ìbon (a loaded gun gives birth to no good offspring). Check history very well. The Fulani stock has no history of fidelity to agreements. The entire Hausa land which allowed them any leverage in the past, are living in servitude today. Yoruba lost Ilorin to the descendants of Dan Fodio because Afonja signed an agreement with Alimi. When the time came for his ‘friend’ to eliminate him, Afonja’s body was pierced with so many poisonous arrows such that he died standing as the arrows maintained equilibrium for him! When he was found to be dead, his corpse was burnt by the Fulani soldiers who acted under the supervision of Alimi! Dasaolu should take some time off his ‘farm’ and read a bit of our history. He will learn that it is foolish for a man to use his two hands to locate the head of a cobra in the burrow.

The Yoruba, at the moment, have a bigger challenge at hand. The penultimate Saturday’s unsuccessful invasion of the Oyo State Secretariat by miscreants who plied the name of Yoruba Nation agitators is enough wahala. The task before the six states of the South-West, and their brothers in Kwara and Kogi States is to identify every operational cell of these dregs of humanity and flush them out. They cannot afford to add a covert RUGA engagement to that. There is no need to look for a pseudonym to describe the ‘agreement’ with Miyetti Allah; it is pure RUGA. If Mrs. Folasade Tinubu-Ojo, who supervised the ‘agreement’ for her father pretended not to know, the rest of us should let her realise that we know what it is. It is slavery dressed in the garb of peace. What kind of peace does a man need such that he offers his father’s shrine to a stranger to defecate? What is the content of the ‘agreement’? Is it in line with the counsel given by Femi Adesina during the administration of Muhammadu Buhari that for us to live, we should give up our ancestral land to herdsmen? By this new ‘agreement’, does it mean that herders will have free access to our farmlands? Are we ready to give up anything so that our son can have a second term? Is that the new ill-wind blowing our way?

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Let us get it right. Yoruba are not that naive. Our forebears handed us an egalitarian society. They were not cowards. They sacrificed a lot to ensure that the boast of dipping the Quran into the Atlantic did not materialise in their time. What Buhari tried unsuccessfully to achieve in eight years is what some greedy elements are offering their Fulani lords on a platter of gold. They have forgotten the caution of our elders to wit: ohun tí ehín tè tí ò ké, owó èékáná ò ka (whatever the teeth press and does not moan is not an assignment for the fingernails). Those who signed the Ibadan ‘agreement’ with Miyetti Allah are no farmers. I doubt if they can even stalk cassava stems correctly. What is propelling them is greed. They are all Mr. Giwas (traders). They represent nobody; at least not the farmers in my home state of Ekiti. What is the size of Dasaolu’s plantation, if any? What is the population of his Commodities Farmers’ Organisation? Who does he speak for and on whom is the ‘agreement’ binding?

President Tinubu has a maximum of eight years to rule, if he wins his second term in 2027. He cannot afford to sell an entire race into slavery in the name of an asinine ‘agreement’ with a truculent group like the Miyetti Allah. What this agreement portends is peace of the graveyard. It should, and must be resisted by all men of good conscience. Those who want herdsmen to have free access to their homestead can do so without dragging the entire clan into such an imprudent venture. The labour of our heroes’ past should not be in vain. Imagine that the late Akeredolu has not even completed his registration among the Saints in heaven and this is already happening to the good fight he dedicated the latter part of his life to fighting! It is indeed true that a home is settled only when the illegitimate child has not come of age.

We shall go beyond asking the Alálè Yoruba to visit those behind this plot to enslave the Yoruba race in the 21st century with their fiercest ire. We must equally resist them, vehemently, I dare say! This is not a call to arms; it is one of our minimum obligations under a democratic setting. May the spirits of those who have gone before us fight those who want to hand over our children as slaves to those who never conquered our forebears. Standing on the authority of Alaafin Aole, we declare to those behind trading our land off on the field of politics that: when they walk on Yoruba land, may they hear the sounds of the footsteps of the invisible; when they eat, may they never be filled; when they drink water, may they remain thirsty! May Oduduwa Atewonro, and Agboniregun join forces to turn their days to night! Ase waa!

By Lasisi Olagunju

“When you reach home, tell my mother,
Say it was a boa that his son transformed into
And never returned home.”
The actor comes on the stage singing and dancing, his troupe festive around him. He invokes his powers and turns into this and that. Everything he fancies, he becomes.
Then he goes back to man.
The world applauds him.
The man becomes a roof-climbing, banana-eating monkey.
The applaud gets louder.
He turns to a woman – like Bobrisky- complete with all the charm of the seductress; he beckons on men who could dare but none comes forward. He gets no suitor. Then, his drummers warn him: Ilè nsú / T’óbá burú tan/ Ìwo nìkan ní ó kù (it is getting dark; you will be alone if things get bad).

If you are warned, listen to what the world is saying. In his ‘The Poetry of the Yoruba Masque Theatre’, Professor J.A. Adedeji (1978) says better what the bata drums say: “Don’t be careless, evening is approaching/ Aiyelabola; If the worst comes/ You will be left alone to your devices.” The tragedy of man, of all of us, is that we always deny the advent of dusk. The masked one hears the beats and ignores the beats. He takes one more step and turns to a boa – and darkness descends on his performance.

The boa-man struggles with himself. He tries every trick in his bag of charms. He chants every incantation in his pouch; he bellows every shout. He draws blank; nothing works again for the influencer. The world has hacked into the actor’s act; life’s principal coders have changed his password. The boa cannot shed the snake skin and adorn the human costume he came with. Aiyelabola will die a boa.

His troupe sings his dirge; his audience his elegy: “Aiyelabola d’ere, o b’ere lo.”

Defeated, Adedeji writes, the boa sings:

“When you reach home, tell my mother,

Say it was a boa that his son transformed into

And never returned home.”

Tell the world, Aiyelabola d’ere, o ti b’ere lo.

When the ‘world’ is involved in someone’s case, what is customarily ignored attracts global opprobrium; even the ordinarily routine becomes problematic, song becomes abuse, and the key that used to open doors stops working. One day, we will know why the young man called Bobrisky was suddenly taken too seriously by drama-loving Nigeria.

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The pioneer of Yoruba waka music, Batile Alake, invokes chants in her evergreen songs. In a particular album, she sings about entering the farm through the furrow and escaping the whips of the farm owner by not stepping on his (yam) heaps – poro ni mo gbà/ kí olóko má nà mí/ mo ti dá ebeè kojá. In another song, Batile sings about the unusual and the attention which bigness attracts: “B’érin bá w’ojà á j’ogún àpéjowò omo aráyé (when ponderous elephant saunters into the market square, he inherits the world as his audience).” It is possible that Bobrisky, the actor, got that sense from the quaint world of the spirit of money and fame. On social media and in the social sphere, he was/is news – bad and good news – many times not exactly good. But he enjoyed it and sought to live it in defiance of whatever his world thought. He saw the world as a festival of sort and dressed himself up for it in coarse cottons of disgusting shock. Listening to strange beats, the man danced his way into the moral marketplace as a woman and stepped on the toes of his world.

For breaking a pot of water, the child who repeatedly spilt drums of palm oil without consequences was docked in a court in Lagos some days ago. Bobrisky is in jail for doing what Duro Ladipo calls “ritual theatre”, that which many do impulsively as a cultural practice – spraying money at social parties. In the times of our fathers, ‘spraying’ was not the word; money meant for the forehead never touched the ground. If it did, it was a taboo broken. But, today, àkàrà has become bones in the mouth of the toothless. Money-miss road nouveau riche dudes dance on a canvass of cash to proclaim their success. What autumn does to leafy trees is what they do with the naira. They carpet the ground with careless currency notes, plod rough-shod and record their misbehaviour for us to sorrow about. They incite the poor to query the poverty in their destiny.

I read a piece on “Ritual Killing, 419, and Fast Wealth in Southeastern Nigeria” published in the ‘American Ethnologist’ of November 2001. The author, Daniel Jordan Smith, marvels at what we do here with paper money on foreheads at social parties. He explores the drama of our doing it, how we do it and why we do it: “The act of spraying itself has become a performance, and those who do the spraying are often drawing public attention to themselves as much as to those they are supporting. In the act of spraying, the dance of the sprayer is watched and admired, but most importantly, the quantity and denomination of the bills pasted to the foreheads of the sprayee is closely monitored. People who spray large sums of money are roundly applauded by the crowd…” The paradox (and the lesson) here is what Smith admits: “such ostentation is resented even as it is admired.”

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Singer Portable’s ‘brother’ who claims ‘sisterhood’ is a goat immolated to make other goats stop misbehaving. Won pa iji han iji. But, he is just an actor, a masquerader monetizing his mime of our unserious world. And we are really unserious. Of all the inmates in our house of sin; of all the sicknesses in our sick body, Bobrisky is what takes our precious time and judgment. Locking him up is our loss.

A perfect Aristotelian tragic protagonist, he will be in solitary misery for six months at our expense. Everyone thinks he deserves to be where he is. Even those of us who accept that he is just an alárìnjó (itinerant, walk-and-dance masquerade) insist that his choice of style is dirty. But there is neither disgust nor ugliness in drama. It is either a tragedy or a comedy or the concoction in the middle. Everything is about costuming and packaging and marketing. If my good old literature teacher, Professor Oyin Ogunba (God bless his soul), were around and he watched this spectacle, he would describe the man as drama. Read Ogunba in Oyekan Owomoyela’s ‘Give me Drama Or…’ I did. “A masked figure at a festival,” Ogunba argues, “whether he dances or speaks or does neither, has, by his mere appearance, created a situation of potential dramatic value.” The jailed young man has the mask; he has the chant; he has the gait, the dance. He has the drama and an excitable audience. His face and costume are just life-mimicry gone awry. He shouldn’t have suffered an overkill.

In the grove of life’s principals, there are many masks of varying potency. It appears that Bobrisky entered the grove without paying his dues. It is ìbà that saves goat from being tied down as sacrificial lamb. He didn’t do that and lost control of his panel. There is no system the world cannot hack into; the principalities of this plane are code-crackers. They reduced the cross-dresser to a helpless influencer who could not influence the winds from blowing him into jail. It happened to Aiyelabola, the powerful masque-actor who turned himself into a boa for effect but could not go back to the human he was.

The world overtook Bobrisky and locked him up. He thought he could recreate himself to a woman and be crowned queen of the covens. He didn’t learn from Aiyelabola who moved from man to boa and slithered off forever as boa. May we not step on the eye of the earth.

Bobrisky is a metaphor for the hypocrisy of this society of masked men and specialists. He is also a metaphor for self-violation. In court, he disowned his feminine costume and pronounced himself man. He is, in significant ways, a metaphor for a politician called Yahaya Bello. What happened to the cross-dresser is exactly what is happening to the former Kogi State governor. He is being asked by his troupe mates – the igneous caste of his cast – to come out and account for his years in power. There is a big lesson here: An Egungun that is conscious of life out of the mask will behave well, will limit his performance to dance and songs; will carry no whips, and will whip not the helpless.

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Andu is the name of one Egúngún (eégún) in a Yoruba town which enjoys the throne with the king. Ulli Beier in his ‘The Egungun Cult Among the Yoruba’ (Presence Africaine, 1958: 34) says “Andu enjoys great power and privileges. He may, for example, sit on the king’s throne when the king is not present.” What do you think would happen if this Egungun extends his privileges and starts contesting the stool with the king, the Timi of Ede? The storm and the drama that we saw around Bello last week were what normally happens to temporary men who think themselves permanent. When ‘big’ men eat food meant for the gods and step on sacred toes and the world takes note, they are condemned to run kitikiti katakata as Bello did last week. The consequence he suffers is the fate of the bird called agbe: his feathers got dyed in indigo. The aluko bird was not created henna, his colour was made so by an angry world. When the world felt offended enough by the egret’s unacceptable ways, it dipped the bird in a pot of snow-white chalk. The world is sufficiently angry with the actor called Yahaya Bello; it is cooking a pot of bile for him to feast on.

One Muslim cleric waxed a record in the 1970s with a line that made a lot of sense. I can’t remember the cleric’s name but I can’t forget that he sings about the powerful who think themselves faster than life. But, he says, the world is not that cheap; it storms their sail and sinks their ship. “Won ro pe won le aye won ba/ Aye o je bee/aye da won nu.” The Titanic, its competent crew and its arrogant builders come to mind here.

My people would look at Yahaya Bello and see the opposite of careful chameleon who walks gingerly through life. Chameleon is asked why his feet rarely touch the ground. He says it is in deference to the earth; he says the ground must not cave in under his weight. “This world (aye) is a dangerous and difficult place; it is full of negative forces that hinder, even destroy, one’s life.” Benjamin C. Ray was of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States, when in 1993 he wrote the above quote in a research article on ‘Aladura Christianity: A Yoruba Religion’. The quote, peeled from Ray’s 27-page piece on ‘aye’ and its forces, summarizes what I am saying here about moderation, about doing right and stepping away from wrong even if you have the grit of a lion. Ray is not alone. Professor Karin Barber’s scholarship is on Yoruba’s ways and means. Her mental visage on man and precarious power, published in a journal called ‘Africa’ in 1981, sees the solitary worldly ‘man’ who is “picking his way …between a variety of forces, some benign, some hostile, many ambivalent.”

Did Shakespeare not say justice whirls in equal measure? Today’s eegun, our ensemble of powers and principalities, can also learn from the fate of Bello, a whitened lion in flight. Their own festival of immunity will end one day, and the children of the grove will no longer have free balls of bean cakes. Listen. The antidote to darkness is light. If you don’t want to die a boa, don’t live a boa. What is happening to Bello tells even deities that they are not immune from (and to) the ravages of an incensed world. When the forces of life face and fight a rogue masquerade, they tear off his mask and call women to come and watch. And, of course, an Egungun dies the day he is paraded naked before a coven of weird beings who piss from behind.