Olaudah Equiano® Profile picture
Sep 24, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read Read on X
“She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal. In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale:
-she's seven years old! She will be a good mare! Image
She was felt, naked, by many hands.
At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.
She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some messages from the Bible, and she also had to swear that the poems she had written were not plagiarized. From a chair, she gave her long examination, until the court accepted her:
She was a woman, she was black, she was a slave, but she was a poet. "
Phillis Wheatley., was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.
#BlackHistory
#TransAtlanticSlavery
#BlackLivesMatter
#History

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More from @RealOlaudah

Apr 6
Protest Against Marginalization of the South East in the CBN
@cenbank

A thread
We, the umbrella body of South East Socio-cultural Associations in the diaspora, express deep concern and disappointment over the recent directorship appointments at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). A particular publication by Rufai Oseni, a respected columnist and TV personality, has brought to light serious allegations of lopsided and exclusionary appointments within the CBN. The article, which can be found here veonewsng.com/index.php/2025…  provides a detailed and well-researched analysis of these appointments.
Of utmost concern is the marginalization of South Easterners in the CBN under the leadership of Governor Olayemi Cardoso (@olayemicardoso1). As highlighted in the publication, the South East currently has only one director in the entire CBN—an outright injustice.
Read 12 tweets
Apr 5
The Tinubu-Wike alliance is not a political partnership; it is an unholy merger of ambition and ruthless pragmatism. Together, they have reduced Nigerian politics to a zero-sum, winner-takes-all game – a dangerous, short-sighted strategy that threatens democracy, economic stability, and national cohesion.

But while Wike plays the game for relevance, Tinubu is operating at an entirely different level. His moves are not reactionary; they are premeditated and calculated. Unlike his political allies and opponents, Tinubu does not play for survival – he plays for absolute control.
What is his endgame? How does he intend to manipulate 2027? What will be the consequences for Nigeria?

This is not just a battle for power; it is a battle for the soul of Nigeria. And if history has taught us anything, it is that unchecked ambition often leads to self-destruction.
The Tinubu Strategy: A Blueprint for Domination

Tinubu’s tactics are not about governance; they are about control. His strategic blueprint is built on economic subjugation, institutional capture, and political infiltration:
Read 13 tweets
Apr 3
Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

🧵
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.
Read 10 tweets
Mar 26
Chief Tony Anenih Memoirs.

Abiola Invited Abacha To Overthrow Shonekan And Handover To Him After. - SDP Party Chairman.

🧵 Image
“I was returning from one of such trips to a prominent Emir one afternoon when I heard from my car radio Chief Abiola calling on General Abacha to come and ease Chief Shonekan as he eased out Babangida, I was shocked.

I called Chief Abiola and asked for an explanation of what I had just heard.

His reply was, “Mr. Chairman, I am very happy to have worked for you. You are a strong-willed man, but you see, if you want to go to Kano by road and you later decide to go to Kano by air, as long as you get to Kano, there is nothing wrong with that”.

At this time, the party did not know and I did not know Chief Abiola was having discussions with General Abacha who had promised him that if Chief Abiola supported, and if he, General Abacha, took over from Chief Shonekan today, he would hand-over the reins of Government to Chief Abiola the next day, and Chief Abiola bought the idea.

We later got to know that there were series of meetings in Ikeja where names of those who would serve in Abacha government were discussed and forwarded. When we found out that things were not moving well and that the interim government was a lame duck, I went to have a meeting with the then Secretary for Agriculture, Alhaji Isa Muhammed, and I expressed my disgust at the way the government was being run.
On two occasions, I addressed the Federal Executive Council under Chief Shonekan when the two Chairmen were invited.

On the first occasion, I told Chief Ernest Shonekan that the relationship between the governors and the interim government left much to be desired as there was no discipline. Chief Shonekan picked up a copy of the constitution and said, “Chairman of SDP, I will go by this document. I have to obey this constitution. If any governor has misbehaved report him to the police”.

The second time we were called on an issue in the chambers when the Federal Executive Council was meeting, again I raised the alarm and I again told Chief Shonekan that one day, the military boys will come and drive him out of his seat.

Chief Adelusi Adeluyi (Juli Pharmacy) who was the Secretary for Health got up and told his colleagues that the Chairman of SDP had twice given warning signals and no one seemed to be taking the warnings seriously.

We again left and allowed the Federal Executive Council to continue its meeting. On this very day, I went to the Secretary for Agriculture, Isa Mohammed, and had discussions on the unsatisfactory state of affairs. He was a personal friend and he promised to see Chief Shonekan that evening with a promise to get back to me, no matter how late.
Read 11 tweets
Mar 25
Nigeria's Triangle Of Incest

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session."
- Gideon J. Tucker

🧵
A Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos would not vacate his seat for anyone appointed illegally from Abuja - or from anywhere. If the heavens wanted to fall, he would ask them to fall. He would not go hide somewhere in his wife's handbag, and from the safety of his ghetto be issuing gutless press releases. If Abuja insisted on his suspension, he would mobilise the law and lawyers for eruptions of seismic proportions. He would ask the Supreme Court to determine whether the president could sack or suspend elected governors, appoint caretaker governors and take over the role of state Houses of Assembly. He would ask the apex court to reconcile this case with its earlier verdict which outlawed caretaker governments for one of our tiers of government. He would put everything he had into the mix; he would count the teeth of the tiger in Abuja. But Rivers is not Lagos, and Siminalayi Fubara is not Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The difference between both is the difference between courage and cowardice.
Until Saturday when he spoke on the Rivers State problem, ex-President Goodluck Jonathan walked the terrace of power with utmost carefulness. He avoided speaking truth to power the way the barefooted avoids walking a floor of broken glass. But on Saturday, he came out of his zone of reticence, and dared the dark, dangerous sherds of impunity. Jonathan spoke following President Bola Tinubu's deployment of a Supreme Court judgment to meddle with and seize control of the nuts and bolts of our federation. In a fit of daring, calculative move for political advantage, Tinubu suspended democracy on a floor of the structure. And days after the act, without a whim of resistance, he got legislative approval for the mess. He left no one in doubt that all the powers and principalities of this realm are with him and that they work for him.
Read 19 tweets
Mar 4
There is a royal family in Lagos called Oniru. In the earliest times when there was no Lagos and Eko knew its boundaries, that family owned all lands that house today’s Awolowo Road, the prime area called Falomo, Tafawa Balewa Square, the Independence Building, Island Club, Yoruba Tennis Club, et cetera, et cetera. Add Oyinkan Abayomi to that list, and, in addition to those places, input 18 other villages – all in pricey Lagos Island.
The family that owned all those is the family that produced the new and contentious speaker of Lagos State House of Assembly, Mrs Mojisola Lasbat Meranda. Do not mind her surname; she is an Oniru. Her brother is the reigning Oba of their Iruland. She is a princess but being a princess is not enough for her to join the big league of Lagos. Her election as speaker by almost all her colleagues, means little or nothing. In the pantheon of Lagos politics, there is always one god whose one vote trumps a million ballots. In some places, you do not have to enter the grove before you become an elder; grey hair is enough. Not in Lagos. In Lagos, the godfather is the igbó’rò, the sacred grove that confers age, that vests authority in and breathes life into all figurines.
The search for that breath is what is making Meranda and her backers panting. And, she has just started. Breaking into the power vault of Lagos uninvited is akin to sitting on a million needles. She did that and must, therefore, writhe from the needle effect. Fortunately for her, she is a woman with a lot of fluid in her tear gland, and she has been generous with shedding princely tears since her colleagues invested her with the authority to be speaker of the president’s state. Last week, the sacked speaker, Mudashiru Obasa, borrowed some lines from Black Scorpion’s Third Marine Commando. Obasa landed at the House complex at dawn and sensationally announced his comeback. As cover, he had guns and boots of various shapes and sizes behind him.
Read 14 tweets

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