Nigeria Content Online

I come from a land
that has streets with no names. Our people did not name the streets of
our village because they saw the coming of smartphones, Google, e-mail
and Facebook. Well, the little path that goes from my father’s village
to my mother’s village is called the little path. Was. The little path
is no more. My father’s father was buried by the path halfway to my
mother’s people. He is no longer buried there. A government thief built
an ugly mansion over my grandpa’s bones. In the land of my ancestors,
people don’t venture far from the earth. There are no mortuaries; when
they die, they practically fall into their graves themselves.

I have ventured
far, very far from home. When I left home many decades ago, no
Blackberry chats charted my way out of Customs and Immigration into
America’s issues. My parents put me inside the capsule to somewhere and
hoped that someday I would be back. I am still here in America. I am
not going back soon. Today, I stare at the remains of winter in
America; earth is frosting on chocolate cake. After all these moons,
alien images and clichés stick to me, like white on rice.

Nothing stays the
same. Not even in America. The changes make me dizzy and I obsess
nonstop about the way things used to be. Here in my part of America,
our drugstore no longer has human cashiers. The owners remodeled the
store, and replaced humans with machines that talk to you. You simply
walk up to the machines, scan your goods, pay and leave. It is very
disconcerting; I keep looking for the humans to return, I actually miss
them. I know now that I love people and I cannot shake this cold
unfeeling nothingness I get from interacting with a machine that proves
its indifference with faux warmth.

Don’t get me
wrong, I am high on the possibilities and the opportunities riding on
the strong backs of these new and emerging technologies, but I do
wonder now if there are downsides to all of this. The world is becoming
more and more shaped by a few powerful cognitive elite. We are
struggling to deal with and adapt to the awesome force of these new
technologies and the new billionaire dictators that built them.

Life is war. We
were all born into a war that we did not ask for. And people write
about life, sometimes it is mostly gory. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, they
belonged to a certain era when one had no choice but to concentrate all
of one’s creative passions on one medium of expression – the book. I
read a lot of books, mostly about the condition we find ourselves in as
people of colour in a white man’s world. However, I am first and
foremost a writer of creative stuff, whatever that means. Lately
though, I am known more as a book reviewer than anything else, which I
find interesting. I think that a critic’s work in itself is creative
work. We may not like it, but it is what it is. The critic clearly has
a role to play and I would say we are in dire need of honest,
courageous, tell-it-like-it-is book reviewers.

Some people should
really not be writing and they should be told that. Some writers are
also full of it and they should be told that. Some works are fun to
read and they should be celebrated. It is a shame that we are talking
about books because in my clan, we are steeped in the oral tradition.
Some of the world’s greatest “books” have been “read” to us in song by
our ancestors. My mother is one of the world’s greatest living poets;
she has not written a lick. She would be great on YouTube. She would at
least help to preserve one of our dying languages.

On Facebook, walls
are colorful wrappers wound tightly around the new municipalities of
ME. Facebook is falling leaves, hearts fluttering, forlorn, and drying
on yesterday’s clothes lines. People are waving hasty goodbyes out the
windows of indifferent relationships. It is complicated. Life goes on.
There are no nations as we remember them. We have fled lands ravaged by
thieves preaching democracy. Soon a generation will come and in their
history books they will learn about something called a cheque and the
gallant art of balancing a cheque-book.

Facebook. The new
frontier has edged into our consciousness. America. Deep in the windy
beauty of this land, the majesty of Nigeria, the land of my birth goes
howling. We fled our gods, mean angry bloody gods foaming blood in
their bloodthirsty mouths wielding blood-drenched cutlasses between
steely teeth. Here in Babylon, alien gods kill us with the kindness of
indifference. We retaliate by turning their plates on their heads,
these patronising, condescending gods. Africa. We fled her bloody
windows for Facebook Nation. Everyday children reject what passes for
African culture today. They are not all mad. What is going on? Let’s
talk about these things.