By Lasisi Olagunju | Chief S. L. Akintola, post-independence Premier of the Western Region, knew that when money entered politics, trust could develop wings. There is a story of how he once sent two trusted associates to some people in…
By Lasisi Olagunju | I cooked this piece’s title from Alice Urquhart Fewell’s ‘Soups for the Sick’ published in 1920. I went for it after I found William Bascom’s ‘Yoruba Cooking’ (1951) very inadequate for my lessons on what has…
By Lasisi Olagunju | This week, dust will go to dust. The very first time we met, it was to bail a common friend out of police trouble. That was in Ede in 2006, twenty years ago. We worked shoulder…
By Lasisi Olagunju | There is an old Nigerian joke about Noah and the Ark; author unknown. God warned Noah that a flood was coming and gave him six months to build an ark. But this Noah was a Nigerian.…
By Lasisi Olagunju | “Come, Lasisi. Come and see this.” I turned towards the voice. It was a female corps member beckoning to me in the newsroom. I looked at the young lady and, gesturing with my right palm, asked…
By Lasisi Olagunju | APC leaders are falling over one another to own Ademola Adeleke’s victory — the same people who, barely 24 hours earlier, fired missiles to bring down his plane. They now say he had all along been…
By Lasisi Olagunju | Starting a week with the joke of a joke can be very distressing. The ‘architect of modern Ekiti State’, Mr Ayodele Fayose, started his job as chairman of the Rural Electrification Agency board with a farce.…
By Lasisi Olagunju | A grandson of Uganda’s former military ruler, Idi Amin Dada, is Aziz Abdul, better known as “Ringo.” Like his grandfather, the young Ugandan is a super-heavyweight boxer who competed at the Commonwealth Games, which ended yesterday,…
By Lasisi Olagunju | In 1528, the sixteenth-century Italian writer Baldassare Castiglione published his classic, The Book of the Courtier (Il Libro del Cortegiano). One of the memorable words in that work is sprezzatura—his description of the art of making…
By Lasisi Olagunju | Somewhere in present-day Osun State, about a hundred years ago, an oba ordered a manhunt for a troublesome strongman in his domain. The man, Kátákatà, was captured one night, killed and beheaded. His severed head was…
