Book Launch and The Chibok Girls

My Book Launch on YouTube

You can watch the book launch of Breaking Kola: An Inside View of African Customs.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy watching the breaking kola ceremony described and enacted by Chukwudi Dikko and Paulus Odigbo, with my husband.

Feel free to watch a few minutes or all, and share with your friends! Let me know what you think.

And don’t forget to buy the book and write a review!

Remembering the Chibok Girls

The Chibok girls have not been forgotten. True, there are fewer demonstrators in Abuja than there were in past years. About 100 girls are still in the hands of Boko Haram or otherwise unaccounted for. Boko Haram is still active in the north and has spread to neighboring countries.

But the girls are not forgotten. My college friend and classmate Judy sent me a link to a project in which her son-in-law is involved. It’s in Washington DC in May. This is a “searing work of testimonial theater about the abduction of 276 girls from their school in the Nigerian town of Chibok by the Boko Haram in 2014, and the enduring reverberations of their story,” their website says.

Nigeria’s Nobel Prize winning author and playwright Wole Soyinka will present his new work, A Humanist Ode for Chibok, Leah, in tandem with the play.

If you’re in the area, you may want to go. I’d like to attend; I’ll see if I can swing a trip!

Soyinka was one year behind my husband at University College Ibadan and at Leeds. But with different interests, they were not well acquainted or friends.

Chibok Girls in Pennsylvania

Another friend, Tondalaya, sent me an article about four Chibok girls who are at a private college in Pennsylvania. The writer is Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob who is Visiting International Scholar in International Studies & Political Science, Dickinson College. In his bio I found that he is also an alum of Leeds!

He teaches a college prep class “that focuses on critical and analytical thinking skills,” he says. “They also take math, English, science, social studies and GED preparatory classes.”

The young women came to Dickinson at the invitation of its president Margee Ensign, who had served as president of the American University of Nigeria, where Jacob had also taught.

He writes, “The work of preparing students with refugee backgrounds for college is far from easy. Aside from adjusting to a new culture and environment, sometimes a new language and a different method of learning, displaced persons struggle to find new meanings in their displacement. When education becomes their main pursuit, it must necessarily provide those new meanings.”

But they are succeeding despite the obstacles. One woman, Patience, finally passed the GED math test on her third try. She has now also passed the GED science. She was the first and she inspires others.

Jacob had his students watch a video by Mary Maker “on the power of education for women from crises societies.” In her essay about the talk, Patience wrote that she hopes to be as powerful as Maker and “to speak for women who cannot speak for themselves.”

He says, “It is an outcome that their captors in Boko Haram – a terrorist group whose name means “Western education is forbidden” – never wanted to imagine.”

Henry Louis Gates and Reconstruction

The first of the two-part series, “Reconstruction, America After the Civil War,” is on public television right now. I’m trying to listen while I write.

I did pay attention fully for a few minutes and will watch it all when I get the chance.

It reminds me of the book about Alexander Hamilton that I’m listening to.

Both relate monumental events that have determined so much of our history and current life.

Did you watch the first part?