I Get Place to Borrow

This morning, I heard Collabo somewhere and I realised that I had forgotten my erstwhile favourite Nigerian song, since then I have played it back to back twenty-four times, it’s playing now as I type. It’s a song I can listen to for a whole a day without getting tired – I’ve done it several times before.

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Heart Gone Rogue.

She had often been accused of lacking a heart. While her haters and detractors had never gone as far calling her heartless, even they had to agree that she was kind and a little selfless but they agreed that she was incapable of being straightforward in the affairs of the heart. It puzzled her that they all said the same thing of her, they didn’t even know each other, the fuckers.

Nothing Do you.

You suspected she was a stranger to Lagos the second you bent to enter the keke marwa and saw her already seated, waiting for other passengers to complete the required number of passengers. Each of you sits at either side by the entrance to the keke, she chose the cooler end while your butt slowly roasts from the heat the seat had absorbed earlier. There was something about the angle she tied her scarf that reminded you of the girls you had seen in Abeokuta and Ibadan and Iseyin, on your travels. This one just come Lagos, your mind which never shuts up, quips.

It Did Not Kill Me.

In the year of our lord 2000AD, while I was on holiday from boarding school, I did something that made my father very afraid. My mother had travelled and it was just Daddy and us and we had just returned from church, it was Sunday morning.

Friday Fiction- It will not Kill you

My neighbour’s girlfriend is pounding yam again, the echo of the thud of the pestle on the yam slices against the mortar seeps through the concrete decking into my room, the vibrations make my windows rattle. She pounds every day, rattling my window in the mid-morning when I try to catch the second wave of sleep after losing the first round in the hours after I return from my night shift at the factory. Her pounding always delays that second round of sleep but I smile when it starts, it means I would eat baby-face smooth pounded yam in a few hours.

Fela, My Fela

I hated Fela’s music as a child, maybe hate isn’t the right word. I think it was annoyance and irritation, a strong irritation at how long the instrumental bit ran before I could hear my Fela’s voice. You see, I loved Fela.

Marley’s Ghost.

May 11, 1995.

The girl was bouncing on her grandmother’s four-poster bed as she listened to the radio, she loved jumping on the bed and having the bed throw her further in the air than with the other boring beds everywhere else. The radio was on, Bob Marley’s songs were on rotation and she bounced in rhythm to them even though she wished it were Lucky Dube instead. She preferred Lucky Dube’s songs to Bob Marley’s because at her mother’s birthday party when she was four, Lucky Dube’s music was the backdrop and that was one of the most exciting moments of her young life.