Sewa

[Richard Brody @tnyfrontrow]

The realism of Akinola Davies, Jr.'s first feature, My Father's Shadow (opening next Friday) is something else, more like mytho-realism, because its first-person story goes past personal memory into family, community, and history; highly recommended: https://t.co/GLFK933ca9

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

What you describe (well) is not simply hypocrisy or individual wickedness; it is the most distilled expression of the Nigerian condition. Financial violence is not a side effect of our society—it is the mirror that reflects, with painful clarity, every other violence we have normalised. A man who lives in a ���200 million house, drives V8 engines, sends his children to million-naira schools, and then pays a gateman ₦30,000 is not an aberration. He is a priest in the shrine of Nigerian violence. His behaviour is not a deviation from our culture; it is one of its central liturgies, performed daily and without shame.
This is the part we refuse to confront: many Nigerians who rage—correctly—about government dysfunction are themselves waiting for their turn to wield the very weapons they condemn. They are not opposed to violence; they are merely opposed to being its targets. Our anger is not moral; it is positional. We are outraged that violence has not yet favoured us. What the state does with police and policy, citizens do with salary slips, house rules, religious authority, and silence. The difference is only in scale.
Because the violence is never only financial. It is ethnic, religious, political, sexual, domestic, psychological. It is the teacher beating a child until they faint. The woman shaving the hair of the s̶l̶a̶v̶e̶ underage child who "works" as her "househelp" while braiding the hair of her three year old child. The landlord raising rent without notice. The rich pastor demanding tithes from the unemployed. The civil servant inflating a contract because “everyone does it.” The boss who cannot imagine a worker deserving rest. The man who believes his wife’s suffering is part of divine order. The person on Twitter who asks why the Shiite who was massacred in cold blood dared to stand in front of a soldier. The young Nigerian who laughs at a video showing horrific violence against a gay person, asking: Why are you ghey? The famous person who uses the police as private thugs to kidnap and jail a person who said something he did not like. The gateman treated as less than human by people who weep about bad governance. Nigerian life is a hydra-headed set of violences, enacted casually, instinctively, almost aesthetically—as though cruelty were an inherited art form.
Everywhere in Nigeria, there is a small tyrant rehearsing for the day they become a big one.
This is why I part ways, however gently, with Achebe’s insistence that Nigeria's tragedy is “simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Leadership is never simple, and failure is never square. Violence in Nigeria is not a malfunction at the top; it is a cultural operating system—pervasive, inherited, ritualised. It is cultivated, nurtured, and released into public office by a culture in which violence sits comfortably in the private sphere. A country does not repeatedly elevate cruel, indifferent leaders unless cruelty and indifference already flourish in the intimate lives of its citizens. Nigeria’s tragedy is not simply a “failure of leadership.” It is a society that has made violence normal, acceptable, even aspirational. Leadership amplifies what the culture has already perfected.
Nigeria is not broken only at the top. It is broken in the everyday decisions of ordinary people who do not see the humanity of those beneath them; in the casual brutality that has become the air we breathe. The man paying his gateman ₦30,000 is not simply stingy—he is participating in the same moral architecture that makes bad governance possible. He is the government, scaled down to the size of a compound. His choices are not separate from Nigeria’s dysfunction; they are its most intimate expression, its microcosm, its domestic theology.
Until we confront the fact that the violence of Nigeria is not only systemic but cultural; until we admit that many citizens are eager apprentices in the same cruelty they denounce; until we recognise that oppression is not only something done to us but something we rehearse and refine—nothing will change. Nigerian culture is violent on every level.
A country is the sum of its small violences. And in Nigeria, those sums are enormous.

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@lolaloveandart A few sources. It’s mentioned in her article with the Irish Times

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@BGHERSELF @Damiar0s LOOOL screaming at this interaction

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@omotayoagunbiad ❤️❤️❤️ yes aunty!

[Sammy Gecsoyler @SammyGecsoyler]

I'm looking to speak to people in their 20s or 30s who grew up in overcrowded family homes and still live there for a story

Feel free to DM or email [email protected]

[Funmilàyö @LayoChristina]

Nigerians have an innate gift of making the simplest of transactions a melodrama, a literal movie. #oraclechamber

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@morgankofori @weareskinmag This is great, Morgan!

[SKiN @weareskinmag]

Scarification—Permanent wounds on a nation (A Thread by @morgankofori )

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@debbiezenx Omg guys not me just randomly seeing this 🥺 I can cry @nunufave ❤️

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@BGHERSELF My manager 🫣❤️

[Ling Low @sweetnlowling]

“I think about who gets to be a writer or an editor, who can afford to wait for that livable salary or that higher advance.”

In light of all the Granta discourse, this by @nicolesjchung on writing and financial precarity is excellent: https://t.co/65MBKrqr6W

[Sewa @__adesewa]

Ko l’orin, ko sii tun ko

[Sewa @__adesewa]

Okan mi ko l’ ebi mo,
Mo mo niwaju ofin
Enit’ o ti we mi mo,
Ti san gbogbo gbese mi. 🙌🏾

[gal-dem @galdemzine]

We are incredibly sad to announce that gal-dem is closing.

Several factors that have contributed to this difficult decision, including numerous challenges with running a small, mission-driven, independent media company. We’ve shared more here https://t.co/0jAK94fG55

[Sewa @__adesewa]

@BGHERSELF I’m crying! 🥺 Thank you friend, love you always ❤️

[Sewa @__adesewa]

“Davies added: “What he agreed to do was not simply expedient in the clinical interests of his daughter, Sonia, it was exploitation, it was criminal.”

[Sewa @__adesewa]

“It is no defence to say he acted out of love for his daughter. Her clinical needs cannot come at the expense of the exploitation of somebody in poverty.”

https://t.co/wPccaroGBl