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 The kingdom of the wild, birds found by the roadside a corpse with wings and, believing the deceased was one of their own, they went close to identify the body only to find the corpse with teeth and furs like the rodents’, particularly like the rats’. The birds then sent word to the rats to come pick the dead body of one of their own. When the rats arrived, they found that though the deceased had teeth and furs like theirs, the corpse had wings, unlike the rodents. The rats then returned a message to the feathered clan to come claim the body of a member of their folk. And so the corpse of the bat remained unclaimed for the reason of its indeterminate identity. This Bette-Bendi tale explains the lot of the US President, Donald Trump. On June 1st or so of this year, and in the heat of the world-wide anti-racism protests that greeted the gruesome murder of the African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis, President Trump, in consonance with his unenviable credentials as an unap

This literary work of art is a play written by a playwright and the 1986 winner of the Nobel prize for Literature, Professor Wole Soyinka. The play is said to be first performed in 1959 and published in 1963. It has been recommended and studied as a literary text by students of literature in secondary and tertiary institutions. It is a play that exposes the reality of the clashes that exist between the traditional culture and the effect of Westernization in the African race, most especially in an environment that is populated with formally educated people, culturally-inclined learned people and the ‘illiterates’. The choice of Soyinka to make use of symbolism, flashback, metaphoric elements and humour to narrate the contest between Baroka, a village head and Lakunle, a school teacher over the love they both have for a village belle, which they have chosen to express differently based on their exposure makes the work of art a perfect description of a reality check. The title of

Popular author, Chimamanda Adichie has mourned her father who died after a brief illness on June 10. Taking to Facebook on Saturday, she lamented that she can’t come into the country following the closures of the nation’s airports. In her tributes, Adichie noted with pains that her heart is broken; stressing that she can’t belive writing about her beloved father in the past tense. According to the novelist, the loss of her dad has profoundly changed her life, adding that “grief is a cruel kind of education”. Chimamanda described her beloved father, James Adichie, as “Nigeria’s first professor of Statistics” who “studied Mathematics at Ibadan and got his PhD in Statistics from Berkeley, returning to Nigeria shortly before the Biafran War.” Continuing she said: “I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe that I am writing about my father in the past tense. My heart is broken. “Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can

Celebrated Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Adichie, has revealed how she fell into depression after writing her book, ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’. The 42-year-old writer revealed this in a recent interview with  Sahara TV , published on YouTube. “I sank into one of the deepest and darkest depressions that I have ever experienced,” she revealed. Ms Adichie said the book, which tells the story of the Biafran war, was based on the experiences of her family during the war that claimed her grandfathers’ lives. She narrated how she struggled while writing the book due to the traumatic events that took place in Biafra that she had to describe in her book. “Because this novel was so much about my family, what my parents went through, what that generation went through. During research, I will read about a refugee camp and I will just stop and cry because it could be very well, where my grandfather died because my grandfathers died in different refugee camps in Biafra. “So, looking at pic

Metaphor can easily be defined as the literary device that presents unreal perception through writing. By this reference, metaphor becomes the expression that describes one thing in terms of another. We have the simple forms of such expressions in our daily conversations, though they are overused. A good example of such simple metaphor is,  "He is a lion" .  It thus foregrounds the image of a lion in the perceptive faculty, even when it is not real. We all know that the lion referred here  is not real; instead it connotes similitude of actions (habitual or not), behaviour or mannerisms which are attributes of lions. Simple metaphorical expressions apart, there are  others as complex metaphor, dead metaphor, diminishing metaphor, stale metaphor and finally, grammatical metaphor. We perceive 'destroying' as a (whole lot of) process, which will involve an agent (the destroyer) and the thing destroyed (the sufferer) as well as the action (the proc

My dad’s mom, Lillian Gates, was lucky to have survived the 1918 influenza pandemic. Unlike COVID-19, which is hitting older people the hardest, the influenza pandemic caused the highest mortality among people in their twenties. The most vulnerable of all were pregnant women. In 1918, my grandmother was 27 and pregnant with my dad’s older sister. She was living in Bremerton, WA, which  suffered big losses  from influenza because it had a big Navy shipyard and sailors coming from all over the world. Then as now people isolated themselves at home, streets were empty, and industry shut down. Doctors and nurses were incredibly heroic, putting their own lives at risk and working themselves to the bone. The best parts of human nature were frequently on display—but so were acts of ignorance, greed, and fear of the “other.” To refresh my memory about the realities and lessons of that devastating pandemic, I recently reread  The Great Influenza  (2004), by John M. Barry. He does a great j

Most of my conversations and meetings these days are about COVID-19 and how we can stem the tide. But I’m also often asked about what I am reading and watching—either because people want to learn more about pandemics, or because they are looking for a distraction. I’m always happy to talk about great books and TV shows (and to hear what other people are doing, since I’m usually in the market for recommendations). So, in addition to the five new book reviews I always write for my summer book list, I included a number of other recommendations. I hope you find something that catches your interest. My 2020 summer book recommendations The Choice ,  by Dr. Edith Eva Eger . This book is partly a memoir and partly a guide to processing trauma. Eger was only sixteen years old when she and her family got sent to Auschwitz. After surviving unbelievable horrors, she moved to the United States and became a therapist. Her unique background gives her amazing insight, and I think many peo

Name:  The death of the sex scene. Age:  A few weeks, tops. Appearance:  A sad consequence of the coronavirus outbreak. But why?  Because of new draft recommendations by the British Film Commission. According to a  leaked version , it states that from now on, actors should spend “limited” time together on screen. So just a quickie, then?  Not so fast. The draft plan goes on to state: “They should work back to back or shoulder to shoulder, rather than face to face.” OK, give me a minute here.  Are you attempting to think of a sexual position that can be performed back to back or shoulder to shoulder? Yes.  Don’t bother, I’ve already tried. The restrictions will have an impact on all television, but for the most part they will be easily navigated with reduced crews and clever editing – you can film either side of a conversation in different rooms on different days if you need to. This means shows such as  Peaky Blinders and Line of Duty could resume production  relatively q

The head of  NASA  confirmed Tuesday that the space agency is working with actor Tom Cruise to make a movie on the International Space Station. A NASA spokesperson also confirmed to CNN Business that Cruise will launch into space and stay aboard the station, a multibillion-dollar laboratory that orbits about 250 miles above Earth. Rotating crews of astronauts have lived aboard the ISS continuously since 2000, and a few high-paying tourists have stopped by the station over the years. At one point, pop star   Lance Bass, of 'NSYNC boyband fame, planned a visit in the early 2000s, though that trip  did not pan out . A few films have been shot on board the space station, including a 2002 IMAX documentary that Cruise narrated. 2012's "Apogee of Fear," a science fiction film, was also filmed in space by entrepreneur and space tourist Richard Garriott, the son of an astronaut. But Cruise could be the first actor to endure extraterrestrial travel. "We ne