The Arts-Muse Fair

    The early harmattan breeze blew through the hairs on my skin as the sun was rising, I caught a glimpse of the city through the words calligraphically displayed at the entrance gate to the city. It reads the name of an ancient city, " Welcome to Gombe ". A city where I found jewels in the Savannah. I found myself enjoying the serenity of the environment. The city was a full moon in the dark night, filled with radiant brightness of calmness. The culture and hospitality of the people are unique. The first day in a city you have never been to will make you eager to see around the city and catch what it looks like. I arrived at the city early, when light had already approached darkness. It was a new place as this was my first visit to the city despite the proximity of my state with it. Cars and motorcycle screamed along the beautifully tarred roads in the city. I got the address to my accommodation after alighting from the car that drove us from Bauchi and landed us in

  Although I have been to Ghana by air several times in the past, the last time I travelled to the country by road was in 1975 when I went to the country as a member of the University of Ife Hockey Team (now Obafemi Awolowo University) Ile Ife, Nigeria to participate in the West African University Games. While the details of what transpired during the approximately 12- hour trip from Ile Ife to Accra are now foggy in my memory, what was crystal clear was that it was an enjoyable trip. As students are wont to be, we were a merry lot in our ‘Luxurious’ Mercedes Benz bus filled to the brim with our clothes, jerseys, hockey sticks, boots, stockings and of course, some foodstuffs. We had been warned about the dicey economic state in Ghana at that time and so the need to go with some gari, yams and plantain with which to supplement any likely gaps in our culinary needs. I also recall vividly that the final Hockey match between the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi and the Ife

Ijegba Forest We are on our way into the forest Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka calls home. And we are 85 finalists for the WSICE essay competition (85 is Prof’s age this year), a few teachers, the WSICE organizers and reporters. We are all here for the competition and series of programs called Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange (WSICE), held annually to mark the Laureate’s birthday. This is year, it is holding in three states: Lagos, Ogun and Ondo. We are leaving for Ondo today after the meeting with Soyinka. The result of the essay we wrote yesterday at the Cultural Centre would be announced in the presence of Prof. We are all aglow in brand new orange T-shirts. The Ogun sun has just risen but the July clouds makes her look sleepy as they wander in the sky, reaching for each other. We drive deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine Abeokuta rocks and green hills, and bushes until finally: TRESPASSING VEHICLES WILL BE SHOT AND EATEN  TRESPASSING COWS WILL

You see, that Friday morning, I was on a road trip to Lagos alongside eleven professional colleagues, in an Eighteen-seater bus branded "Department of Sports and Human Kinetics, Kwara State University, Malete", on the Ilorin-Ogbomoso Federal Highway. I like to take back seats when I am almost sure I would sleep during the trip. For some funny reasons I am confident aren't unconnected with the national shame that are our roads, I get worked up nights before road trips, especially if long, ruminating about how much headache I would have to deal with, wishing I did not have to go, and ultimately praying for some magic to get the to-fro trip over with, even before it begins, so that eventually, I would hardly get any sleep. Only I was on the last row of seats in this bus of discuss, snoozing off and coming back on at intervals. As we had miles to cover, our driver was quite out to beat time- expectedly so, because there's an annoying thing with group trips;

AUGUST 2019 Dedicated to, Sule, Paul, Abraham, and all the sailors of humanity. The interest of the local media gave us also the opportunity to be guests at the TV program “Good Morning Niger State,” where we talked about the subversive power of poetry, and at a radio program at Radio Prestige, in an interview with the chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Banma Baba Suleiman. These and the following days were filled with a lot of meetings and celebration of poetry and friendship. As a way to describe more precisely the tone and the messages fostered in the event, I propose an excerpts from Dr. Emman Shehu’s  keynote speech  entitled “Literature as a Bridge between Humanity:”  The big question though is can literature enable the unity of humanity? Our world remains crisis torn at many levels and as writers we reflect these situations in our story-world regardless of the genre. Yet as writers, literature enables us to engage and reflect through one

AUGUST 2019 Dedicated to, Sule, Paul, Abraham, and all the sailors of humanity. THE ARRIVAL   My journey to Nigeria began on a particularly cold Monday on the 4th of February 2019 at the airport of Hannover in Germany, surrounded by a thrilling feeling of happiness and a paralyzing excitement, which rendered the time and its passing a slowly paced torture. As a result of a long reflection on my journey, I have concluded that the best way of experiencing Nigeria was to come in contact with as less prejudices and prepackaged concepts about the country and its people as possible, and thus gain my own perspective and opinion about the surrounding reality. Thus, not surprisingly, the first time I have realized that Nigeria was preparing for a presidential election was when I saw the gigantic posters depicting the face of President Muhammadu Buhari at the airport in Abuja, the president in charge of the Nigerian government, nowadays and then, who at the time was running f