yoruba-people

"she led protests against taxation and price control, issues she strongly believed would negatively impact the livelihood of women."

"She rose to more prominence in 1910 when she became a titled chief by the order and conferment of the Oba of Lagos, Eshugbayi Eleko"

"She also strongly protested a market price control plan, named the Pullen scheme popularly after a British officer, Captain A.P. Pullen, who initiated and directed it"

"Alimotu initiated that market women reduce the prices of goods sold in the markets to support the striking workers"

"I am she who is called Pelewura…. . I will not starve in the country I was born in."

"An award is a landmark for any writer, because it shows that it is a measure of a standard that you have improved in your writing."

"Where am I even going? It’s already wet, outside is wet. Just sit down and rest, another day, you can always pick it up."

"I am not so sure that’s what God has called you for, but we’ll put it in prayers. I’ll keep praying and when I return, we’ll revisit it."

"Everybody letting you be yourself. There wasn’t any air around us and not that we had everything we wanted, but we were contented. We never lacked anything when we were growing up. It was all very peaceful and there was no cause for complaints from the parents’ side."

"But with my mum, I got everything I needed. I got the father’s love, the mother’s love and the sister’s love. I remember my younger days, when it rains, my mum will say, "what are you people doing in school? Just sit down/""

"It is the rulers who write story - It is the hunters who compose the story of the hunt - It is the revellers, not the slaughtered cows, who record the fable of the feast."

"Some words are such that when we hear them, all the light inside us dies at once, and our smiling daylight turns into the bleakness of night."

"I lit the torch so I will not have to grope my way to the camp where I shall be married to my enemy, that handsome butcher of our people."

"Insanity is the drug of misery."

"The gods! Which gods! Do you still trust any of them after this? Or have you quickly forgotten what they told us about Anlugbua just now? No, women, there is no shelter anywhere but in ourselves! Each of us has become our own god."

"Happiness is a fake. The gods employ it as a mask to trick us each time they are about to plunge us into grief."

"Don't speak like that, my child. Death is sweet, we think. But it is easier to talk of it, than to welcome it. We do not know what is on the other side, whether it is better or worse than here. Whereas even at its most bitter, life offers hope at least, which death does not."

"Even in misfortune, which levels everyone, the potions are unequal: we dare not tell you what we believe will becoming to us. ["

"My daughter, you won't like to hear this but my advice is- do like the reed in the bush. Stand and strut in good weather. But when it storms, learn also to bend."

"When you have lost a war, you have lost, and there's nothing you can do about it but accept the consequences."

"It was my son your wife bewitched and led us to this calamity"

"Anger and desire are twin sisters in this drama we call love, two kernels in the same nut!"

"Anyone can kill. But it is not everybody who can forgive, or who can be just, as I know you are."

"An artist has only his dreams. He has no power."

"When Mother Goat nods at the sonorous sound of the drum, she is not dancing! It is because each time it sounds, she recognizes the wailing of the leather!"

"[T]he skin that graces the king's shoulders, the leopard knows who supplied it. When mother Goat nods at the sonorous sound of the drum, she is not dancing! It is because, each time it sounds, she recognizes the wailing of the leather!"

"It is the fate of the conquered to toil for the strong! That is the logic of war, the logic of defeat!"

"Beauty makes all women vulnerable to the greed of men"

"War never ends, but only moves to another place?"

"How can you claim to be strong, when your minds are so feeble."

"Let no one count herself lucky till she finds herself on her death bed."

"Home is where every traveller returns after a journey, however long. When night falls, the visitor must take his leave of his hosts."

"No swimmer, however good, can swim beyond the rim of the world."

"A father can only chew for a child; he cannot swallow for her."

"Then the deer must train themselves to seize the gun from their hunters! The cows to take over the narration of their own story."

"I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes."

"I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.”"

"Hey, hey young guy, why trouble yourself? They'll take your money anyway, and they'll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren't you more interested in getting your passport than trying to prove a point?"

"I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”"

"Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the consulate asks for a bribe or tip, please, have a discreet word with the Consul General"

"Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand bribe"

"thousands of cars over the course of a day would pay toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors"

"the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators"

"the moment there is a power cut"

"Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”"

"Church has become one of the biggest businesses in Nigeria… these Christians are militants, preaching a potent combination of a fear of hellfire and a love of financial prosperity…"

"Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, rises out of the Sahel like a modernist apparition. The avenues are clean and broad and the government buildings are imposing, with that soulless, vaguely fascistic air common to all capitals cities of the world…"

"while the buildings and roads of the capital city suggest a rational, orderly society, the reality is the opposite"

"And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city."

"And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster."