Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Monday, July 20, 2026
MOWAA Drum Fellowship 2026-27
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Friday, July 10, 2026
Webinar: Topic: Africa’s Innovation Paradox: From Strategy to Systems (July 28, 2026)
Description: The Africa Innovation Council, in partnership with Princeton University’s Africa World Initiative (AWI), launches its flagship webinar series with a timely discussion on one of the continent’s most consequential questions: Why has Africa, despite decades of innovation policies, scientific advancement, and entrepreneurial growth, not yet transformed knowledge into industry at scale?
Speakers
H.E. Prof. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni
Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in Charge of Digital Transition and Administrative Reform, Kingdom of Morocco
H.E. Prof. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni is Morocco’s Minister Delegate for Digital Transition and Administrative Reform and an internationally recognized expert in artificial intelligence. A former Distinguished Professor at Sorbonne University and former Executive President of Morocco’s International Center for Artificial Intelligence (AI Movement), she is a leading authority in distributed AI and multi-agent systems. Prof. El Fallah Seghrouchni has published more than 200 scientific works and has played a prominent role in advancing AI research, digital transformation, and innovation policy across Africa and globally.
Jean-Philbert Nsengimana
Chairman, Africa Digital Health Networks
Jean-Philbert Nsengimana is Chief Digital Health Advisor at Africa CDC, where he leads efforts to advance digital transformation and innovation across African health systems. Previously Rwanda's Minister of Youth and ICT, he spearheaded the Smart Africa Alliance and YouthConnekt Africa, two influential pan-African initiatives focused on digital transformation and youth empowerment. A recognized leader in technology, public policy, and digital inclusion, he has devoted his career to harnessing digital innovation to improve health outcomes and economic opportunity across the continent.
Prof. Brando Okolo
Head of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI), African Union Development Agency–NEPAD (AUDA-NEPAD)
Prof. Brando Okolo is Head of Science, Technology and Innovation at AUDA-NEPAD, where he oversees the implementation of continental science, technology, and innovation policies and programs. With more than two decades of experience spanning academia, research, and industry, he has worked extensively in advanced manufacturing, materials science, and industrial innovation. A leading advocate for innovation-driven development, Prof. Okolo works with governments, universities, and industry partners to strengthen Africa’s capacity for technological advancement and industrial transformation.
Prof. Chika Okeke-Agulu
Director, Africa World Initiative; Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University; Chair, Africa Innovation Council
Prof. Chika Okeke-Agulu is a distinguished Nigerian art historian, curator, critic, and scholar specializing in African and African diaspora art history. He serves as Director of Princeton University’s Africa World Initiative and is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies. A Fellow of the British Academy and an internationally recognized intellectual leader, he has authored numerous influential books and curated major exhibitions around the world. As Chair of the Africa Innovation Council, he champions interdisciplinary collaboration connecting research, culture, innovation, entrepreneurship, and public policy across Africa and its global partners
Moderator
Sheena Raikundalia
Chief Growth Officer, Kuza One
Board Member, Kenya National Innovation Agency
Sheena Raikundalia is a recognized leader in African innovation ecosystems, entrepreneurship, and impact investing. Formerly head of the UK–Kenya Tech Hub, she works to connect capital, policy, and markets to support entrepreneurship, technology adoption, and inclusive economic growth across Africa.
Additional Information on the Africa Innovation Council:
Friday, May 15, 2026
Should museums return artifacts? The debates.
Two weeks ago, I took the stage again, along with my powerful co-debater Leila Amineddoleh to argue that Museums should repatriate cultural artifacts, while our opponents were Mario Trabucco della Torretta and Dominic Selwood. The debate was moderated by John Donvan for Open to Debate. Watch the Debate:
Meanwhile, four years ago, I debated Dominic at the legendary Oxford Union (the world's oldest, and arguably most distinguished debate platform). As the report below notes, my side (which included Stephen Fry, and Steph Sholten) roundly beat Dominic and his team, which included Gary Vikram and Nadia-Angela Bekhti). Though, unlike unlike at Oxford, no votes were taken following the recent debate, I think we won!
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"Stephen Fry convinces: Oxford Union votes to repatriate contested artefacts"
By Meg Lintern
13th May 2022
The Oxford Union voted in favour of the motion “This House Would repatriate contested artefacts”, with 250 ayes to just 52 noes. The debate took place amid a packed chamber, with members being turned away at the door due to high demand.
Speakers in favour of the motion included Chika Okeke-Agulu, Director of African Studies at Princeton University, Steph Scholten, director of the Hunterian Museum and previous Director of Heritage Collections at the University of Amsterdam, and Sandhya Das Thuraisingham, a PPE student at Queen’s College. The proposition speaker that had attracted the crowds, however, was Stephen Fry, who was described by a member of the opposition as “nothing short of a national artefact – I mean treasure”.
The motion was opposed by Gary Vikan, Former Director of Walters Art Museum, Dominic Selwood, a historian, author, journalist, and barrister, Nadia-Angela Bekhti, a biologist at Hertford College, and Matthew Dick, a history student at Magdalen.
Union President Michael-Akolade Ayodeji opened, after which Sandhya Das Thuraisingham took the floor, introducing the speakers and reminding the audience of a very similar debate that took place nearly forty years ago when Boris Johnson (then President of the Oxford Union) argued that the British government should see the Parthenon marbles returned to Greece.
In response, Nadia-Angela Bekhti argued that “repatriation causes a revisionist history”. To truly redress the wounds of the past, she contended, we need to move past questions of acquisition and address the issue of education. With owners of artefacts like the British Museum offering free entry, outreach and educational programmes, she claimed that it is “not a case of where these artefacts belong but where they can be of benefit to most people”.
In an argument that raised commotion from the audience, Bekhti suggested that individuals have no inalienable right to possess items that they do not own directly. Comparing the claim of the Nigerians to the Benin Bronzes to the claims of Statford-upon-Avon residents to Shakespeare’s manuscripts, she suggested that the repatriation of artefacts may not even be in the interests of those to whom they are repatriated. She said of the brutal seizure of colonial artefacts, “these wrongs cannot be made right, there are no owners when it comes to our shared history”.
Steph Scholten began his argument by rephrasing the title of the debate, suggesting that we should not be asking if artefacts should be repatriated but when. Claiming that the process of repatriation has been going on for decades, Scholten argued that the UK’s involvement in multiple international conventions, declarations, and agreements means that they are already part of this movement. Describing the injustice of holding non-western objects, particularly sacred and ritualistic ones, in western museums, he said: “museums are full of items that are valued in our western terms as objects but have deep spiritual value – we are trained only to understand their material culture.”
Above all, Scholten argued that repatriating artefacts is not a question of history, but of current geopolitical relationships: “there is an assumption that the meaning of repatriation is transactional, one off, and that it frees the nation of further obligations [but] it is a process that allows for building stronger relations.”
Dominic Selwood opened his response by stating: “Henry VIII wrote 17 letters to Anne Boleyn, some of which were pretty racy… most of them are now in the Vatican”. He claimed that the value of artefacts does not lie in their origins, but in their journey, suggesting that to repatriate artefacts would be to erase an important part of their history. He said: “the movement of cultural treasures abroad is constant… world’s highways have always run with objects in transit.”
His most divisive argument was that “the vast majority [of British-owned artefacts] were donated or purchased legitimately; Lord Elgin had permission to take the Parthenon marbles.”
Chika Okeke-Agulu’s speech was the most personal of the evening. Having been brought up in Nigeria during the civil war, he said that for his mother, “the lingering pain of that war was waking up and finding that the shrines had been systematically looted”.
Okeke-Agulu further claimed that the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was introduced suspiciously soon after most African countries won their independence. He said, “Africans have been asking for these treasures, for these incredibly valuable artefacts, since my lifetime”, suggesting that the Convention was passed to bar newly-independent nations from requesting the return of their artefacts from European museums.
Above all, Okeke-Agulu urged the audience to pay attention to the reception of Benin artefacts that were recently returned by the French, claiming that the immensely positive response from the Nigerian people indicated “the beginnings of the revival of the people who were for so long damaged by colonialism”.
Stephen Fry took to the floor later, greeting the various members of the audience as well as the “assorted media scum” [thanks, Stephen]. He was keen to express the function of the Union itself within the repatriation debate: “You can send a message to the world, as this chamber has often done in history. It has shown where the current of thought is trending.”
Primarily, he discussed the Parthenon marbles, which he claimed were “sawn and hacked away from the frieze of that extraordinary building… These were looted and stolen and exported without licence and they need to go back.”
In response to the argument that the artefacts are being used for educational purposes in museums, he retorted: “only 1% of what the British Museum holds is on display. 99% is simply not available…What should be written on the entablature is that star phrase of Frankie Boyle, ‘Gun Beats Spear’.”
Fry told the audience that if the Parthenon marbles are finally returned, “Britain will have done something which it hasn’t done almost in my lifetime: it will have done something classy.
“There is a future in repatriation which is more than tearing it out of one museum and putting it into another… send a signal that you here in the Oxford Union are ready to embark on an exciting adventure that will only enrich everyone.”
The debate was drawn to a close by Gary Vikan, who lamented his bad luck in following Fry. He argued that there are three possible options for the repatriation of artefacts: that this debate “blows over”, that the artefacts are unilaterally given back, and that a 50/50 partnership is drawn up between the museums holding artefacts and the nations that have a national claim to them.
Forty years after Boris Johnson argued in a Union debate that the Parthenon marbles should be returned to “where they belong”, the audience of that same chamber reached the same conclusion. The only remaining question is whether the debate will need to return in another forty years’ time.
Sunday, May 10, 2026
On Receiving The Behrman Award at Princeton
It has been a tremendous feeling of gratitude to my colleagues and peers at Princeton University for being receiving, last Saturday, the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, which “recognizes extraordinary faculty distinction in humanities and publication; in teaching and advising; and in humanities-related University service.” The award dinner at the magnificent Prospect House dining room, was glorious--the sort of thing hardly imaginable anywhere else. And to have my mother, my children, two sisters, as well as three of my dearest friends (who came in from California and Florida) present (while my wife was, still is, in Venice installing her amazing work at this year's Biennale), meant everything.
Saturday, April 25, 2026
Keynote Lecture at AAH Annual Conference, University of Cambridge
So, on April 10, 2026, I made a quick one-day trip to the University of Cambridge to give a Keynote Lecture at the Annual Conference of the Association for Art History. There, I spoke on a subject that anyone who has followed my activities for about a decade now may know: the restitution of many of Africa's significant cultural heritage held in imperial (aka, formerly Universal, but now Global) museums in Europe and the US. I explored how recent gestures of knowledge restitution in a few museums portend the making of what I call the postcolonial, global museum. The audience's applause at the end was, I must say, unusually looooong for an academic event!
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
You are welcome to the presentation of "Scale Boy" this fascinating memoir by the award-winning author Patrice Nganang. He will have a highlight conversation with my amazing colleague Eddie Glaude. Hosted by Africa World Initiative at Princeton. April 2, 2026.
Sunday, December 7, 2025
For Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
Stand your ground
Against bullies
And small men
In big houses
Stand tall sista
Against bigots
And hegemons
From yesterday
© Chika Okeke-Agulu. Dec. 6, 2025
Artforum Best Books of 2025
By Jack Bankowsky, Thomas Crow, David Getsy, Andrea Gyorody, Nate Lippens, Sianne Ngai, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Purtill Family Business, Kathryn Scanlan, Barry Schwabsky, Ira Silverberg, Joe Westmoreland, John Yau, Mi You
My Selection: Dan Hicks, Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann. 592 pages)
How times change. In 2002, the directors of several of the largest museums in Europe and the United States, among the most consequential and revered voices in scholarship, told us that the so-called universal museums had a kind of manifest destiny to keep the best examples of the world’s art and cultural heritage in perpetuity; never mind that a good portion of them were taken through spectacular acts of military violence, diplomatic subterfuge, suspicious bargains, ingenious chicanery, and simple or elaborate theft. The defenders of institutions mostly forged by imperialism had reason to raise the ramparts against the advancing hordes from the postcolony. In 2020, Dan Hicks, the British archaeologist and curator at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, a veritable insider, fired a discursive bazooka against imperial collections in his wickedly titled book The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, focusing his lens on looted treasures of the Benin Kingdom held in British museums. That book called for the return of everything in museums that had been stolen or looted by agents of empire and their accomplices to their original owners. Now, in his latest book, Hicks wields his critical sledgehammer against one of the most visible subjects of the contemporary culture wars: monuments.
As the book’s title proclaims, “Every monument will fall.” What does Hicks mean by this? Well, it’s complicated. Like the dogged archaeologist he is, Hicks meticulously digs through the layered and fraught histories of monumental sculptures and structures built by empire’s agents and institutions for self-perpetuation, often at the expense and in suppression of subject peoples’ imaginaries and aspirations of selfhood. Then, he proposes the deconstruction—or, better, demolishing—of the logic, politics, and ideologies behind the creation, maintenance, and mythologizing of hegemonic monuments and their enabling institutions. In this passionate and searing call for cleansing the hurtful and oppressive accretions of history that we call monuments, Hicks pulls no punches.
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
HE Yemi Osinbajo to give the 3RD Africa World Lectures at AWI, Princeton, Nov. 13
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| Yemi Osinbajo, Photo courtesy, Mo Ibrahim Foundation |
His Excellency, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, the immediate past Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will give the 3rd Africa World Lecture at Princeton University on Nov. 13, 2025. Since his tenure in Abuja, Osinbajo, an ardent advocate for innovation as driver of African development and futures, has keep a busy international profile. One of his most consequential recent appointments is his role as the Guardian of the UNDP-supported Timbuktoo African Innovation Foundation. He is presently leading the international election monitoring mission for the presidential elections in Cote d'Ivoire this month. The previous lecturers were the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who gave the inaugural lecture (2023), and the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (2024). To register for the lecture and for online access, visit the Africa World Initiative website.
On the Louvre Museum Robbery
I sympathize with the people of France for the theft of several objects of great value to their nation. This is a terrible thing. I understand that these objects were commissioned by their past rulers for themselves and their wives, though they have since become part of their national patrimony. So, when French commentators say that the theft of these treasures is like the stealing of France’s soul, I get it.
Two things though.
First, I hope the people of France, in the wake of this national hurt, can now understand what if feels like to have national treasures of West African societies looted by French agents in the age of empire, just a few generations ago. I hope they (and their European cousins) can understand the hurt they caused the people of Asante, Dahomey, Benin, etc., whose entire national treasures they carted away and now kept in their museums for the delight of their visitors.
Second, I hope the people of France can now see the hollowness, or rather insensitivity of reminding Africans ad nauseam how unsafe their museums and palaces are and, following from that, why Europe’s great museums are the only institutions fit for storing and displaying the world’s art and cultural heritage. Two years ago, it was the British Museum, this week, the Louvre. Are these museums safe places to keep Africa’s and the world's captive treasures?
Anyway, I hope they return the stolen treasures.
We all hurt.
Friday, July 11, 2025
African art and artists deserve more continental art history and criticism
[From the Editor: Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 56, May 2025]
In the fall
of 2023, I was invited to Cape Town to give a keynote at a symposium held at
William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea. The subject of my
presentation, which was in response to the prompts sent by the organizers, the
BMW Art Generation, was what I believed then and still to be an appallingly low-level
production of high-quality academic and scholarly publications in the field of
modern and contemporary African art within the continent. There are historical reasons
for this, such as the absence of art history, visual studies, and criticism
programs in many universities and other tertiary institutions across the
continent, which often have established departments of fine and applied arts. In Nigeria,
which possibly has the highest number of MA and PhD programs in Africa,
although studio art was established in several universities by the late-1960s,
standalone art history programs at undergraduate level is still rare; at the
University of Nigeria, Nsukka, whose art department started in 1961, the first
art history postgraduate student enrolled in the late 1970s. To date,
relatively few of these postgraduates continue with art history scholarship as
their primary focus. In other words, academic institutions on the continent are
not producing enough professional art historians and critics who could build a
robust field of scholarship in modern and contemporary African art.
But it is
not simply a matter of universities and professional art history and
historians.
In fact, academic
art historians are only but a segment of knowledge producers within the art
industry. Before the professionalization of art history, and before it became a
discipline in mid-twentieth-century US and Britain, the practice of art history
and criticism already had a long and distinguished tradition in Germany and
Austria. And many key figures in the field worked outside of the academy. In a
few African countries, like South Africa, Egypt and a bit later Nigeria,
scholars, writers, and journalists with a particular interest in art published in
newspapers, literary and cultural journals, and in popular media platforms.
Their writings accompanied the work of emerging modernists in these countries. For
sure, political conditions in the three countries were different at midcentury,
with Egypt in revolutionary fervor, Nigeria newly independent, and South Africa
in the stranglehold of a high apartheid regime. Yet, art writing in various
media seemed to track developments in contemporary art on nearly commensurate scale.
What has
happened is that art criticism and art history on the continent have not grown
in tandem with artistic production. Take Kenya, for instance. In the 1960s, anyone from there and in all of East Africa wishing to train in fine arts had
only one viable choice: the venerable Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.
Today, Kenya alone has a handful of art and design schools, and nary a
full-fledged program in art history or visual studies, much less art criticism.
Apart from
the dearth of opportunities for formal training in art scholarship and criticism,
informed discourse in popular and elite platforms has also not grown at pace.
During the independence decade, with the new nations funding and promoting
national cultures, a generation of late-colonial era Europeans still active in
the continent’s nascent art industry, joined by young African writers and
artists, enabled a fair amount of postcolonial art writing in Black Orpheus
(Nigeria), Transition (Uganda), and occasionally in Drum (South
Africa, Nigeria, Uganda), and Al-Kawakeb (Egypt). Daily newspapers and
weekly magazines in Nigeria and South Africa published regular art criticism. One
thing is certain: nothing I have seen since the early 1990s, when we started
this journal, tells me that art writing on the continent, with the obvious exception
of South Africa, has built on the promise of yesteryear, nor has it matched the
exponential growth in quality and scope of art production.
And this was
the point I made at the Cape Town symposium, apparently, to the displeasure of
several of the panelists who argued otherwise. A particular claim made at that
forum was that there are numerous people writing on internet platforms, mostly
blogs and social media. Another was that my critique sounded like an imposition
of Western models and value systems on African knowledge production. To them, all is well with continental art writing, criticism, and art history. I do not
think so. For, despite the obvious pervasiveness of comments and debates on
social media chatrooms and private spaces about art, such, with rare
exceptions, have little influence and impact on decisions made by the
artworld’s legitimating institutions—museums, collections, and the scholarship. And
to the extent that most African countries have not developed these
institutions, the success of their artists on the international scene inevitably
depends on curators, art historians, and critics overseas supporting their work through
articles, reviews, books in print, and online journals and sites. If continental
knowledge producers wish to be on the driving seat; if they wish to “tell our
own stories,” they must write and publish these stories in the available
and relevant venues at home and abroad. Otherwise, others, increasingly
attracted to the work of African artists, will.
As Chinua
Achebe once asked: “A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the
Harmattan for drying them?”
***
In this
issue, we introduce a new section, “First Look”, the first since the early years
of our journal. This is necessitated by what we see as an opportunity to
present the work of emerging or mid-career artists who might not have received
full scholarly and critical attention in the pages of Nka (and
elsewhere) but who we believe are prime candidates for such. In doing this, the
objective is to raise awareness about these exciting artists and to encourage
scholars, critics, and curators to take a second look and, we hope, see them as
deserving of proper, in-depth study.
Our
inaugural First Look artist is the Kenyan-born, Nairobi-based artist BeatriceWanjiku. I hope you are as thrilled as I am about her work as a painter.
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
The War Against African American Cultural History and Art Institutions
Museum of African American History, Boston, MA
This small but respectable institution, Museum of African American History in Boston, has just been notified by the Trump administration that it will no longer receive federal funding, as do most museums in the US.
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Thursday, January 23, 2025
I am finally moving to Bluesky
After many years on Twitter/X, and given the cesspoolthat platform has become since Mr. Elon Musk took it over, I have decided to move to Bluesky, the new platform. If you are interested in and want to follow me, here is my Bluesky handle:
Sunday, January 5, 2025
Featured in Princeton University's "Audacious Bets" Video:
This really nice video was recently produced by Princeton University for its Venture Forward: "Audacious Bets." Proud to be featured in this program and for the recognition of my work at the university.
On Belgium's Kind Leopold II and the "Congo Holocaust."
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| Men with severed hands |
I refer to the sometimes-called “Congo Holocaust” perpetrated by the Belgian King Leopold II (between about 1885 and 1905), which by some accounts reduced the population of the Congo by half. With the initial support of the US Congress, and subsequent approval of the European powers Leopold had claimed the Congo territory--ironically called "Congo Free State"--as his personal property at the Berlin-Congo Congress of 1884-85. Below is an excerpt from John Daniels’ 1908 comment on the 1905 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into King Leopold of Begium’s Congo Free State. That report was the basis for the successful international human rights campaign that forced Leopold to hand over the territory to the Kingdom of Belgium, which in turn colonized and voraciously exploited the territory until 1960. The Congo region never recovered from King Leopold’s crime.
“The [1905] Report of the Commission of Inquiry shows that
the great underlying iniquities in the Free State are: first, the wholesale theft
by the "State" of all the land except the merest hut spaces, leaving
the natives landless in their own country; second, as a necessary concomitant
of the theft of the land, the seizure of all the produce of the land with which
the natives might and should engage in legitimate trade for their own
betterment, and by the almost total lack of which they are rendered
possessionless in their own country; third, the enforcement upon the natives of
a so-called tax in labor (that being, as the Congo officials naïvely contend,
the only commodity left to the natives with which to pay taxes) which is so
enormous, as actually enforced, that it keeps the natives at work for the State
almost incessantly, making of them at last slaves in their own country.”
John Daniels, “The Congo Question and the "Belgian
Solution" The
North American Review, Vol. 188, No. 637 (Dec., 1908), pp. 891-902.
Saturday, December 21, 2024
J'accuse, Nigerian Government and political class!
As of this morning, Saturday, December 21, 2024, at least 100 people, mostly women and children were crushed to death in three different parts of Nigeria: Anambra and Oyo States, and the federal capital, Abuja. How? They all trooped out in search of free rice distributed by state or private organizations ahead of the Christmas celebration. Clearly without plans for adequate crowd control and without care about the level of desperation among the population, the organizers failed to manage the process, leading to stampedes. So, scores of hungry mothers, wives, and children went in search of food. They were served death. We mourn the dead.
Words fail me.
I feel nothing but utter disgust for the criminal enterprise called governance in Nigeria today. We have watched with increasing alarm as a network of individuals from all parts of Nigeria systematically take the country hostage not just by corrupting the political process as never before, but also simultaneously binding the economy into dirty bunches and hauling them, with stupendous brazenness, into their godforsaken private bank accounts. Or in a good number of instances--according to news reports--into vast septic tanks, when they find no means of moving their loot into the vaults of financial institutions scattered around the planet.
I feel nothing but deep indignation for the folks in Nigeria who have bled that country for so long to the point that not even water sips out of its veins. And yet, there is no accountability. No one here or out there to force them to stop their murderous rampage on a most resilient and resourceful folk who make up arguably the world's most complicated nation (500+ languages; almost 400 ethnicities; nearly 50/50 ratio of Muslims and Christians; 220 Million people in a contiguous landmass just a third more than the US State of Texas).
The lack of accountability and the brazenness of Nigeria's political process would, in 2023, see a ruling party that did its best to immiserate the entire population and watch as frightening levels of insecurity spread over the land apparently returned to power for another four years. Or do you think that Nigerians are tragic masochists edging ever closer to auto-asphyxiation?
The economy has cratered since that election. The government feeds the people slogans. The politicians allot themselves mindboggling salaries and, alongside their accomplices outside of government, do their best to live their versions of the high life. Even so, the recent photo of a family in Southeastern Nigeria with children showing telltale signs of kwashiorkor--that dreadful malnutrition disease perhaps seen first in postcolonial Africa during the Biafran War and since in some of the world's worst sites of humanitarian catastrophe--announced the frightening reality of today's Nigeria. That photo tells you everything you want to know about the people who turn up at these Christmas rice distribution events and end up dead.
I do not know how we get out of this.
Damn the vampires!
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