Agreed that the least we can do is show up consistently. When I don't have time to read much, you're the first one I read, Ope. You're the person I'm learning the most from.
One small question, you say Abiola's widow. But you say his wife was assassinated while he's rotting in a jail cell.
I've been chatting with a young man named Ordany who works at my local plant store. He's from the Congo, which I didn't realize is different than the DRC. We've been talking about the CFA franc and he's been explaining the French imposed politician ruling his country. On the insanity of that we're in full agreement.
He's said that one thing they have in his country is faith, faith in god to change it. There we don't agree but that's hard to voice when hope seems the last thing left.
You caught a real thing. Kudirat was assassinated in June 1996 while Abiola was still in prison: she was his wife, not yet his widow in the technical sense. But here's the thing: in Nigerian political memory and in the press, we retroactively collapse the two tragedies into one. Abiola imprisoned. Kudirat killed. Both martyred in the same democracy struggle. So "Abiola's widow" became a symbolic label, not a marital status, the kind of shorthand that happens when grief and public memory fuse two deaths into a single political icon. You're right to flag it. I'll correct it in the essay. But your instinct about why it slipped through is also correct, it's a very Nigerian way of speaking about that story. I checked myself writing it and let it go anyway. Shouldn't have.
Your conversation with Ordany matters a lot. The Republic of Congo and the DRC are two different countries with two different colonial wounds, two different CFA arrangements, two different French-managed political architectures. That fact alone tells you something about how deliberately flattened the African story has been kept. That he's explaining it to you in a plant store in the US is a form of quiet resistance. The kind that doesn't make headlines.
The faith question is the hard one. I won't pretend it's simple. When a system is this total, when the gatekeeper outlasts seven governments, when the courts sell expungements, when the NSA serves alongside the man he once hunted, hope built on institutional logic looks like a bad investment. I understand why faith fills that gap for many Africans but similarly i also fault many for escaping and using as a form of hopium. I would prefer the faith is accompanied by accurate maps of what we're up against. One can't fight what one can't name.
You show up, you read, you correct, you push, you bring Ordany into the conversation. That's the work. We're collaborators. That hasn't changed.
Agreed that the least we can do is show up consistently. When I don't have time to read much, you're the first one I read, Ope. You're the person I'm learning the most from.
One small question, you say Abiola's widow. But you say his wife was assassinated while he's rotting in a jail cell.
I've been chatting with a young man named Ordany who works at my local plant store. He's from the Congo, which I didn't realize is different than the DRC. We've been talking about the CFA franc and he's been explaining the French imposed politician ruling his country. On the insanity of that we're in full agreement.
He's said that one thing they have in his country is faith, faith in god to change it. There we don't agree but that's hard to voice when hope seems the last thing left.
You caught a real thing. Kudirat was assassinated in June 1996 while Abiola was still in prison: she was his wife, not yet his widow in the technical sense. But here's the thing: in Nigerian political memory and in the press, we retroactively collapse the two tragedies into one. Abiola imprisoned. Kudirat killed. Both martyred in the same democracy struggle. So "Abiola's widow" became a symbolic label, not a marital status, the kind of shorthand that happens when grief and public memory fuse two deaths into a single political icon. You're right to flag it. I'll correct it in the essay. But your instinct about why it slipped through is also correct, it's a very Nigerian way of speaking about that story. I checked myself writing it and let it go anyway. Shouldn't have.
Your conversation with Ordany matters a lot. The Republic of Congo and the DRC are two different countries with two different colonial wounds, two different CFA arrangements, two different French-managed political architectures. That fact alone tells you something about how deliberately flattened the African story has been kept. That he's explaining it to you in a plant store in the US is a form of quiet resistance. The kind that doesn't make headlines.
The faith question is the hard one. I won't pretend it's simple. When a system is this total, when the gatekeeper outlasts seven governments, when the courts sell expungements, when the NSA serves alongside the man he once hunted, hope built on institutional logic looks like a bad investment. I understand why faith fills that gap for many Africans but similarly i also fault many for escaping and using as a form of hopium. I would prefer the faith is accompanied by accurate maps of what we're up against. One can't fight what one can't name.
You show up, you read, you correct, you push, you bring Ordany into the conversation. That's the work. We're collaborators. That hasn't changed.