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

Jan 13
On 22 August 2024, Olukayode Ariwoola, the penultimate Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) retired from the bench and transitioned into a published author. At a well-attended event in the Abuja, the former CJN beamed at the public presentation of his autobiography. Published under the title Judging with Justice, the book was ghost written by Olanrewaju Akinsola (the author better known as Onigegewura).
Laid out in 13 chapters and 496 pages, the author tells his story in the first 250 pages. The remainder of the book is dedicated to testimonials on the author from colleagues in the judiciary, lawyers, friends, peers, and family members.
The story reveals the son of a doting and committed dad who appears to take family and his faith seriously. Judging with Justice is a deeply personal story of a judicial figure whose rise to the highest office in his country’s judicial grease pole was as improbable as his route was unusual. The author is quite open in his disclosures about his health, including open heart surgery in London in 2016.
Read 16 tweets
Jan 12
ORIGIN OF BRITISH PROJECT OF DE-IGBONIZATION OF RIVERS IGBO AND
THE ROOT CAUSES OF IDENTITY DENIAL IN IKWERRE, OGBA AND MOST IGBO TRIBES IN RIVERS STATE

🧵
1. The British project of De-Igbonization of Riverein Igbo/Plot of War against the Igbo has basis in Resources Control and started actively after the Iva Valley/Enugu Coalmime Massacre of 1949. The British, after World War II, had a policy of using resources from the Colony to rebuild war devastated Britain. Coal, mined at Enugu and shipped to Britain was part of the grand plan. The 'rebellious' Igbo had other thoughts. The British were plundering the Igbo coal and paying pittance to the Igbo Coalminers. The miners protested and the British massacred. The immortal Osadebe song "Onuigbo" memorialises the massacre. The Enugu massacre didn't end at Enugu. It led to a general strike, led by Michael Imoudu, in Nigeria. It reverbrated across the British empire, particularly, Africa and speed up the independence campaigns. The British marked out the Igbo for destruction, including war. This is the origin of the plot for the Biafra War, which was originally scheduled to take place before or by 1958. Sir Robert Stapledon, Governor of Eastern Nigeria pressed Britain to defer the War.
2. At the time, Britain already knew that some much bigger resource than coal existed in Eastern Nigeria...Petroleum. They moved fast to insulate it from Igbo control and influence. Independence, as decreed by the United Nations after World War II, was unrushing and Britain moved fast. They sought to create Rivers Region as outlined below and failed. They moved HQ of Shell Petroleum from Owerrri to Port-Harcourt. They set out to, ferociously, deigbonise the Reverein Igbo, recruiting Local Hyenas to their cause. They used the pretext of the Biafra War they plotted and executed to destroy the Igbo and Igbo culture in their 'Rivers Region' as outlined below.
Read 11 tweets
Jan 12
The door of life is binary; it opens either ways, inwards or outwards. So goes an age-long wisdom. When the ThisDay newspaper, on 1 January announced President Bola Tinubu as its Man of the Year pick, emotions of Nigerians ran riot. Was that decision a product of editorial science or newspaper shamanism? Nigerians asked. To many, the newspaper’s editors must have meandered into some kind of trance, communed with with some unseen spirits and emerged therefrom with their odd pick. To others, ThisDay hit the bull’s eye. Suffering Nigerians were even ready to, in the lingo of the millenials, cut the ThisDay some slacks. So, they reason: could the newspaper have been seized by some inexplicable emotion of sympathy for the president on account of unprecedented attacks against his government? Did it merely want to decorate him to charm his vanity? So, like Lord Henry said in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, did the newspaper just go “bankrupt through an over-expenditure of (their) sympathy (for Tinubu)”?
For a journalism profession which thumps own chest as “the rough draft of history,” the idea of the newspaper media choosing persons as ‘Man of the Year’ began in 1928, five years after the founding of the Time magazine on 3 March, 1923. The “Man of the Year” cover reflects individuals selected for their contributions for that particular calendar year. American aviator. Charles Lindberg, became the first person to grace the magazine’s “Man of the Year” cover that 1928. The choice of Lindberg, according to Time, which has coasted home with the coveted trophy of the world’s largest and first weekly news magazine, was based on his daring audacity of being the first solo aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. He had flown from New York to Paris. With the decision to have Lindberg adorn its front page cover, which the editors said was a mere happenstance, the magazine began an annual ritual that has lasted almost a century.
In 1938, as ThisDay editors picked Tinubu as their Man of the Year, the editors of Time picked Adolph Hitler as theirs, too. Hitler was the dictator of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 during which he was believed to have committed suicide. Based on his ancient view that the Jews were the enemies of the German people, Hitler was reported to have executed about six million of them. As leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler believed Germans were superior to all other races. He thus became obsessed with the notion of the racial purity of his Aryan race by which he meant a pure German race or Herrenvolk. His Aryan race, in his thinking, was vested the control the world.
Read 18 tweets
Dec 22, 2024
Innovate or die!

As we cross into 2025, be aware that changes in the world will happen in the near future, beginning from 2025; here are some possibilities:

Innovate or die! Petrol stations will disappear just like video stores went moribund.

A futuristic thread 🧵
1. Car repair shops, lubricants, and radiators will disappear

2. Petrol/diesel engines consist of 20.000 pieces. While the electric car engines have 20 pieces, sold with a lifetime warranty, they are repaired at the dealer centres. They only take 10 minutes to unlock and replace.

3. Broken electric vehicle engines will be repaired in regional offices, e.g., robot repair workshops.

4. When your electric motor breaks down, you will head to a station; like a car wash station, you will pull your car in with your coffee, and you will come out with a new electric motor!

5. Gasoline pumps will be gone.
6. You will have electricity distribution meters with electric charging stations on the streets (it has started with advanced countries).

7. The biggest smart car companies have allocated money to start building plants that produce only electric cars, especially with the era of smart cars, who do not need human drivers.

8. The coal industries will disappear. The gas/oil companies will stop getting huge patronage; as drilling and mining of oil will be stopped.

9. Houses will be produced that will store electricity during the day for use their use, and the unused will sold to the grid. The grid will store energy and distribute it to industries with high electricity consumption. Has anyone here seen TESLA roof top?

10. A child today will see current cars in museums. The future is approaching faster than we can possibly imagine.
Read 9 tweets
Dec 17, 2024
Dear Aare Afe Babalola SAN, I hope this meets you in the right condition because even though God has granted you grace of wealth and health, you are on a delicate level and must be managed.

🧵
You are highly blessed to have chosen a profession that made you such a great person. With over 6 decades of practice, 37 of it as a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the Guinness Books must create a record for longevity of professional calling with distinction. It is not only long but positively eventful. You have made lawyers and senior advocates, judges and Justices and attorneys- general including the present Attorney- General of the Federation.
Such is the beauty of your practice that I spent a good part of 2003 running from Victoria Island to your office at Iddo, Lagos where I got to know Mr. Gboyega Oyewole (now SAN and former Attorney General of Ekiti State by your grace). It was as serious as I was advised to come to Ibadan. When I met you, you were exhausted and you gave me an appointment for another day and ‘T-fare’ as the new generation call it. The day happened to be the eve of Ikorodu Oga Day where I was the chief organiser as Secretary of Ikorodu Oga Development Association then. I still came. And after waiting until around 7:30, I was ushered in and reminding you of the appointment, you simply told me to go to ‘Gboyega’ to start work and I was thankful like a jackpot-winner. But between your office and Adamasingba stadium, something in me told me ‘you don’t need the job; I will bless you on your own lane’. It was a hard knock. I did not go to Oyewole (with all respect to him) although I am still waiting for the promise from the God who has no wrist watch. But He must have His reason(s) for wasting my energy before telling me that.
Read 9 tweets
Dec 15, 2024
Contrary to assertions by some so-called experts who have been prattling all week that Dele Farotimi wrote what he could not logically substantiate in his book Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System, this was a pre-meditated confrontation. Having depleted the legal means to get justice, he wrote to re-litigate the case in the court of public opinion. He seems calculatedly driven by the Yoruba proverb that says no one dies at the same spot they uttered blasphemy. In the time between your speaking and being punished, much can happen to change social dynamics. From the potpourri of events in the past week, Farotimi got what he wanted. One cannot say the same for Afe Babalola who, by now, would have realised that giving a traducer what they want is not the most prudent battle move. My reading is that Farotimi knew Babalola’s peculiar weakness and worked it to advantage. I will get to that momentarily.

🧵
The blowback from this case is another instance that hopefully teaches our elites to rein in their tendency to exploit the warped Nigerian justice system that allows criminal defamation as a legal recourse. Criminal defamation might be legal, but it is unjust. It is a law that exists to regulate the differentials of power and access, one of the many ways rich people further privatise public resources. Since lawmakers are too compromised to expunge the law and law enforcers incapable of the reflexivity that will enlighten them on the stupidity of using state resources to fight an individual over another’s integrity, the best we can do for now is pressure the entitled “big man” not to take that path. In a criminal case, the prosecutor investigates to convict. The Nigerian police, perennially short of resources, spares no expense when sent to prosecute criminal defamation on behalf of another narcissist. Why should the state do that on behalf of an ordinary individual? Babalola, especially, is a man of ample resources, who can afford to fight for his reputation on his own dime.
So, on Friday, Babalola’s legal team held a press conference in Ado Ekiti. Among several things, the lead lawyer Owoseni Ajayi said was: “Those pushing Farotimi are not his friends. By the time they led him to the dungeon, he would realise they were deceiving him. Let me advise his family members to apologise to Aare. Aare Babalola is a builder, not interested in destroying Farotimi.” I was intrigued by what he said it takes for them to call off the police hounds. If someone injured your reputation and that reputation is truly worth the price you placed on it, why would you not be interested in watching them destroyed? Why would Ajayi, so sure of their victory that he boldly asserted that the only possible conclusion to the case is the dungeon, want to settle for the cheap spectacle of Farotimi’s family members with their clasped hands rolling on the floor and begging?
Read 9 tweets

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