I yelled at my husband last night. Not pick-up-your-socks yell. Not how-could-you-ignore-that-red-light yell. This was real yelling. This was 30 minutes of from-the-gut yelling. Triggered by a small, thoughtless, dismissive, annoyed, patronizing comment. Really small. A micro-wave that triggered a hurricane. I blew. Hard and fast. And it terrified me. I’m still terrified by what I felt and what I said. I am almost 70 years old. I am a grandmother. Yet in that roiling moment, screaming at my husband as if he represented every clueless male on the planet (and I every angry woman of 2018), I announced that…

There is this twin concept of danran and gbafe in the rich oral tradition of Oyo monarchy that is told to successive kings, right from the days of the Old Oyo Empire. They are two very complex phenomena famous in the Old Oyo Empire and which undergirded its governance and administration. The concepts were the cement that moulded the success of the famous separation of powers between the Alaafin and the Oyomesi (7 hereditary kingmakers). As you are well aware, Oyo Empire was Africa’s reply to Eurocentric analysts who claim that democracy as a system of government was a white…

By the question of debate, I do not just mean the televised event where one man stands against his opponent and both make a pitch for the vote of the audience. The debate between the Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and the All Progressives Congress candidate and incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari, that I refer to is one about the power of impression to counter reality. The popular myth is that Atiku embodies corruption, but that Buhari is pure because of some specious morality that demands his luxuriating in poverty. Going by the frenzied manner Buhari’s media agents are yelling…

Scientific knowledge and technological innovation, as Yuval Noah Harari emphasizes in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, are among the key drivers of economic progress. Yet there is remarkably little reflection taking place about the state of science today, despite significant challenges, rooted in globalization, the digitization of knowledge, and the growing number of scientists. At first glance, all of these seem to be positive trends. Globalization connects scientists worldwide, enabling them to avoid duplication and facilitating the development of universal standards and best practices. The creation of digital databases allows for systematic mining of scientific output and…