# Mangoro
> Mangoro publishes essays, criticism and cultural observation for the thinking Nigerian
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### About Mangoro
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T14:52:49.000Z
Mangoro is a magazine and civic-intellectual project for the curious Nigerian.

It publishes essays that examine the forces shaping our lives, culture, institutions and future: from literature and religion to politics, cities and artificial intelligence. It connects Nigerian experience with ideas without surrendering judgement to ideology or technology.

Beyond interpreting Nigeria, its purpose is to strengthen the country's capacity to think and act through conversations and experiments.

Mangoro is a deliberate experiment: an editorial mind at work using the best tools of the day while retaining human taste and judgement.

It writes as if its readers are intelligent and as though their minds matter, because they do.

Expect compelling opinions and conclusions, criticism with a perspective and ideas capable of becoming public projects.

Mangoro senses that Nigeria is catching up to itself and wants to become the place where it thinks through what it might become.

Pull up a chair. Come with suya.
## Posts
### Who Taught Nigerian Christians to Fear Ìṣẹ̀ṣe?
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/who-taught-nigerian-christians-to-fear-isese-2/
Last updated: 2026-09-25T15:13:00.000Z
Most Nigerian Christians first encountered Ìṣẹ̀ṣe as a warning and something to fear.

For them, Ìṣẹ̀ṣe was behind every family problem. Any visit to the village required spiritual caution, supported by fasting and prayers.

Fuelling the fears are several motifs that sit in people’s imagination. One is a shrine draped in white and red cloth. It was where a traditional priest prepared a sacrifice, or, as Nollywood has convinced people, where a rich man with poor morals went to secure what he wanted. Sacred objects get destroyed. Ifáṣeun becomes Olúwaṣeun; Ògúnlówò turns into Jésùlówò.

Nigerians have repeated this across generations. Before Pentecostalism, missionaries and colonial structures already laid much of the groundwork. Yoruba converts also played major roles since they were the one that translated the Bible and wrote hymns. As Christianity became infused into Yoruba, contempt for Ìṣẹ̀ṣe grew as well.

No better example than the treatment of Èṣù.

The popular view is that Samuel Àjàyí Crowther translated Satan as Èṣù in Bíbélì Mímọ́, a seed with far-reaching consequence. Dr Tunde Adegbola, a Christian apologist, analysed the text and counted 56 occurrences of Satan in the English Bible and found Sàtánì in 55 of them. Psalm 109:6 was rendered olùfisùn, the accuser. The Greek diabolos typically rendered “the devil” in English became Èṣù in the Yoruba New Testament.

Crowther clearly had transliteration available to him because he used it elsewhere, without the nuance, and so Èṣù became Satan, the Devil and the name behind every demonic force. The consequence has loomed large since then.

In the Yoruba imagination, Èṣù is a messenger and custodian of consequence. The crossroads are its station. But he is not the same as the rebel of Christian theology, that one that stands against God as Satan does. This raises a basic question: what, exactly, was being condemned when Christians sing that Èṣù has been defeated? Whatever it is, Èṣù is far different from what a child imagines bearing horns.

How about Ifá? How is the corpus of Yoruba belief system diabolical? Its 256 odù contains conducts, prescriptions, philosophy, jokes, etc. A babaláwo learns it orally over many years even though nobody claims to know all of it. Professor Wándé Abímbọ́lá published parts of the corpus while serving as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ifẹ̀. That alone should have made it harder to dismiss Ifá as the preserve of the uneducated or whatever *voodoo* or *juju* are in popular notions. And Sophie Olúwọlé spent her final book placing Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the deity of wisdom, beside Socrates.

The Yoruba way is expressed in its political heritage too. In Ọ̀yọ́, the Aláàfin ruled alongside the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì. It is a system of divided authority and a mechanism for removing a ruler long before European constitutionalism came.

And there is oríkì, the Yoruba poetry of invoking heritage and presence before churches directed the method towards Jesus.

What do Yoruba Christians call God? The missionaries adopted Olódùmarè and Ọlọ́run. These are names appropriated from Yoruba thought.

Enter music. The talking drum, gángan, is a useful case. Some early missionaries rejected the instrument because of its association with traditional worship. Over time, gángan graduated to leading praise and worship in churches where people pray against ancestral covenants. The rationale is that the drum no longer carries its old religious and primitive meaning. Toh!

Vernacular translation is one of Christianity's distinctive strengths. It remakes itself in every language it enters. From this position, the church only redeemed and repurposed the talking drum for God.

Christianity also had strong institutions behind it, including mission schools and the printing press technology. It wielded them, successfully, for its subjugating mission. The same gángan that was heathen in the grove became holy in the nave.

Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, for instance, publishes prayers against marine spirits, ancestral evil holds, foundational bondage, and attacks upon destiny: the core of its spiritual universe.

That last category is particularly revealing. Destiny relates to one’s head. Head, in Yoruba, is *orí*. In Yoruba thought, it is more than anatomy. *Orí inú*, the inner head, concerns one’s spiritual individuality. A person chooses a destiny before entering the world. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, or Paul do not give the head this precise spiritual function. The Bible contains no comparable idea carrying a destiny that requires spiritual maintenance. Prayers for guidance and the deliverance of the head are common with Yoruba Pentecostalism. Marine spirits are similarly difficult to locate in scripture.

There is also the structural difference between African tradition and the European import. Ìṣẹ̀ṣe practices were often organised through towns and lineages. There were no central council, binding creed or canon. Yoruba wars were fought by people who consulted Ifá and dedicated victories to Ògún. The wars were never contests to impose one creed upon unbelievers.

Exclusive monotheism of Abrahamic religions works differently. If there is one God, another one is considered a rival and therefore false. The thinking is that if any rival system appears to have power, that power must come from somewhere illegitimate. That, dear reader, is the logic that Èṣù and all the òrìsàs suffer from.

It also produces double standards and selective scrutiny. During the 2026 Ọ̀ṣun Òṣogbo Festival, a 10-year-old girl, selected as Arugba, prompted an argument over child welfare. The argument is important but the public language around indigenous religion often intensifies more than it does around Christianity.

Some years before, a footage circulated widely showing Bishop David Oyedepo slapping a young female congregant during a church service. He later defended the act. A suit brought over the incident was dismissed because the applicant had not identified the woman.

The two instances raise questions about children and religious power. But their treatments are not the same. Ìṣẹ̀ṣe is already accused of barbarism before any reasonable investigation. For a bishop, he gets congregational pride. This is simply hypocrisy.

Ìṣẹ̀ṣe still has its own challenges. It does not need to validate itself, but it is accountable for correcting erroneous interpretations of its ethos and beliefs. With technology and channels to distribute knowledge, it has no excuse, and it cannot continue to play the reactionary game when far more equipped forces are controlling its narratives.

For most of Nigerian history, somebody else explained Ìṣẹ̀ṣe to the public. *Living in Bondage* set a pattern that Nollywoodrepeated for decades: occultism, ritual wealth, afflictions, torments, until Christian rescue.

But these days, the cameras have begun to move differently.

The Yoruba epic films, including *Anikulapo* and *Jagun Jagun*, depict Yoruba cosmology as a world with its own internal logic. These films proudly showcase diviners, medicines, kingship and sacrifice to exist inside the story instead of waiting for a pastor to explain them.

That matters because a person can now hear that Èṣù is Satan, reach for a streaming platform and encounter a corrected account. At the time of writing this, it is now common to see practitioners explain Èṣù on Instagram and TikTok in ways that dispel the damage done by churches. Hallelujah!

None of this means the new representation is pure. Of course! Ìṣẹ̀ṣe also has serious questions to answer about fraud, animal welfare, opaque fees and harm to children. Like other religions, there are bad eggs that sometimes ruin the basket. The Pentecostal believes the òrìṣà are inherently dangerous.

Much of Europe turned its gods into culture. Odin got Wagner and then Marvel. A Lagos schoolboy can study Greek mythology without anyone suspecting his spirit may have been contaminated in the process. The Yoruba gods never receive clean treatments. They remain in active service as the enemy from village-people.

A god you are still fighting every Friday is a god you have not stopped believing in.

Somewhere tonight, a congregation will bind Èṣù and cast him out. They will do it again next Friday.
### Ten Radical AI Ideas Africa Needs Now
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/ten-radical-ai-ideas-africa-needs-now-2/
Last updated: 2026-07-27T17:39:10.000Z
1.  
**Customs Without Confusion**  
Create an African trade engine that classifies goods, interprets rules of origin and explains customs requirements in plain language.

A furniture maker in Lagos should be able to ask what it takes to sell in Kigali and receive a usable answer. Customs officers could issue faster decisions, while businesses could inspect the reasoning and appeal mistakes. Continental trade becomes real at the border desk, not inside the conference hall.

2.  
**Fingerprint Every African Song**  
Build a continental listening system that identifies music played on radio, television, streaming services and in licensed venues.

Sub-Saharan Africa was the fastest-growing recorded music market in the world in 2024, up 22.6 per cent, and Africa still earns 1 to 2 per cent of global recorded revenue. Nigeria alone loses an estimated $231 million a year. Audio fingerprinting was solved in 2003\. Every recognised play enters an open record that artists, producers and collecting societies can inspect. The technology already knows when a song is playing. The missing institution is one people trust to count honestly and send the money home.  
  
3.  
**The Herbalist Files**  
Build an African traditional knowledge library that records medicinal plants, treatments and preparation methods in the languages of their custodians.

The archive would establish prior knowledge before an outside company claims invention. Researchers could also screen documented remedies for promising compounds, with ownership and payment terms agreed before any discovery. Some knowledge would remain private because its custodians said so. A library can preserve a secret without publishing it.  
  
4.  
**Let Every African Language Speak**  
Digitise radio archives, church tapes, court recordings and oral histories, then use them to build speech systems for African languages.

Africa holds something close to two thousand languages. Most have no usable written corpus, and many carry orthographies invented by missionaries who could not hear tone. Sixty years of recorded speech sits in national broadcast archives from Ibadan to Makerere, unindexed, and how much of it survives is not documented anywhere we have been able to find. A Wolof speaker should reach a machine in Wolof without passing through French first. Communities control access to their voices and share in whatever the recordings earn.

5.  
**The African Cancer Centre**  
Connect slide scanners to regional diagnostic centres where AI sorts tissue samples by urgency before a pathologist reviews them.

Nigeria has about 105 pathologists. Britain has about 1,800 for 66 million people. Where the pathologist is absent, cancer gets treated on guesswork. The system would flag suspected cancers, place urgent cases first and send difficult slides to specialists elsewhere. One pathologist could support several hospitals without pretending that a machine has become a doctor. The human eye remains responsible. It simply reaches the dangerous case sooner.

6.  
**Tell Farmers What Is in the Soil**  
Combine soil scans, weather records and local crop data to give each farmer advice for the field they cultivate.

Blanket fertiliser recommendations treat unlike soils as though they were identical. A farmer could receive a voice message explaining what the soil lacks, what to apply and whether the likely yield justifies the cost. Crop disease photographs attract more attention. The exhausted ground beneath the crop may be the larger problem. 

7.  
**Find the Children Who Have Fallen Behind**  
Give teachers a two-minute weekly voice test that reveals which pupils missed a concept and what each one needs explained again.

In a crowded classroom, a quiet child can remain lost for months. The system would return a simple report: twelve names, twelve difficulties, one teacher who can finally see them. This is smaller than the dream of an AI tutor for every child. It may be more useful on Monday morning.

8.  
**Find Where the Electricity Disappears**  
Use meter readings, transformer data and weather patterns to predict failures and identify losses across power grids and solar networks.

The system could warn that a transformer is close to collapse, locate abnormal consumption and show where a small solar grid would serve people better. Every hospital scanner, language model and digital classroom on this list eventually meets the same question: is there light?

9.  
**Give Africa a Trustworthy Map**  
Create an independent system that continually estimates populations, settlements and economic activity while mapping land claims with satellite images and recorded community testimony.

Governments cannot plan schools, hospitals, roads or elections using doubtful figures. The same system could identify parcel boundaries, while neighbours confirm ownership in their own languages. Every estimate should include its margin of error. A suspiciously precise number is still a suspicious number. 

10.  
**See the Ships**  
Create a shared maritime system that finds illegal fishing vessels through satellite images, radar and unusual movement patterns.

A ship may disable its tracking signal. It cannot disappear from the sea. Coastal states could share one picture of suspicious activity and act before foreign fleets empty local waters. The same system could protect shipping routes and detect pollution. Its power would require strict limits because an eye built for the coast can eventually turn inland.
### When Èṣù Watched The Odyssey
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/when-esu-watched-the-odyssey-2/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T10:10:42.000Z
I am in Lekki, watching *The Odyssey* by Christopher Nolan in IMAX cinema. On screen, Matt Damon appears on the deck of a ship. Waves rushed towards the screen. Two rows ahead from me, someone laughs when Odysseus lies to get away from trouble.

I imagined another spectator in the cinema who decided to take a seat where the aisles intersect. He immediately recognises the sea as the road of abrupt turns and undisclosed plans. He knows stories like this, although Homer never spoke about him.

This spectator was Èṣù.

According to Yoruba philosophy, Èṣù lives at the crossroads and carries messages between humans and the divine world. He appears when a simple choice hides its true meaning and observes promises and consequences. This is where Odysseus spends ten years.

Nolan understands the hero he is filming. Odysseus succeeds thanks to his ability to adapt to a situation. To the Cyclops, he introduces himself as Nobody. At Ithaca, he returns to his home disguised as a beggar. He does not reveal himself until revelation serves some useful purpose.

In the poem, Odysseus gets enough warnings. He visits the underworld to get a prediction from Teiresias regarding the sacred cattle of the sun, suitors devouring his property and the future challenges awaiting him even after Ithaca. The prediction is clear. But a warning would only benefit those who are able to follow it. In his case, a warning cannot control hunger or pride.

Ifá brings into play knowing and responding together. A casting by a babaláwo, the message of an odù concerning both the issue and what needs to be done. The response might require waiting, mending or ẹbọ. Èṣù carries the offering and connects interpretation with consequence.

As Professor Wande Abimbola explains, Èṣù is a neutral force whose reaction depends on the actions of an individual and on the circumstances of an encounter. The usual division between goodness and wickedness cannot contain him.

Greek religion also had prayer, sacrifice and offerings. Its gods could be approached, pleased and angered. The difference here is one of emphasis. In *The Odyssey*, prophecy often gives Odysseus a road that he must travel carefully. Ifá makes the response to revealed knowledge part of the consultation.

The scenes of disaster appear differently from Èṣù's seat. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and escapes, before shouting out his real name across the sea. The name is his address on which the curse of the Cyclops falls.

Homer recognises such errors as foolishness and divine anger. Èṣù draws our attention to the duty hidden inside every piece of knowledge. A name can save a man and expose him. A warning can become another temptation. Odysseus and his crew repeatedly understand enough to continue, then fail to honour what they know. The crossroads always remembers the difference.

Many Nigerians first encountered another Èṣù. In the Yoruba Bible associated with Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Christian devil took his name. Generations learned to hear Èṣù as an accusation, and the deity of thresholds entered a Christian story as absolute evil.

The work of Crowther and his collaborators also helped standardise written Yoruba and opened an immense literary inheritance. Scholars continue to debate the theology and fairness of the translation. For many Yoruba Christians, Èṣù arrives already judged.

On screen, Athena moves through borrowed faces. Signs come from the gods, but human beings must understand them in time. Nolan’s IMAX sea enlarges the problem. It is vast enough to swallow intention. For a brief moment, anything seems to be possible in all directions.

When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, he stands on his own shore believing he has landed somewhere else. Then the failure reverses. Ithaca cannot recognise him too. He enters his compound in rags. Only Argos, his old dog, knows him immediately. The dog dies on the dung heap where he has waited for twenty years.

Hospitality runs through *The Odyssey*. A stranger walks into a house and shows what kind of people live there. Zeus is always there to protect the stranger because every stranger might bring divine attention into the house. Yoruba stories know a similar test through Èṣù’s disguises. A person meets an ordinary traveller at the roadside and later discovers that the roadside had become a court.

The suitors are offered a beggar to feed. They throw a footstool at him. They think they are judging a powerless stranger. But the stranger judges them quietly. Their failure is complete even before the arrows fly.

Homer’s ending has a structure that a Yoruba person would recognise: redemption waits at the threshold inside someone thought of as an unimportant. Greek hospitality gives the scene its law. Èṣù gives it another witness.

The end credits started rolling. The lights come up in Lekki. People looked at their phones and started discussing how Nolan had changed things. Outside, rain sits in the potholes. Cars move to join the traffic headed for the toll gate. Brake lights gathered under the concrete. At the barrier, every driver stops.

One by one, the barrier raises itself.
### Who Will Write the Great Lagos Book?
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/who-will-write-the-great-lagos-book/
Last updated: 2026-07-25T13:44:46.000Z
In 1991, the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio published *Onitsha*.

The author, who later won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent part of his childhood in Nigeria. The book was set in 1948 when the town was a colonial trading post. It remains one of the more serious novels of that kind about a Nigerian city by a foreign novelist.

Let me provoke: it took a Frenchman to write Onitsha.

Let’s call the subject of this essay The Lagos Book. It would be more than a good novel set in Lagos. It would read Lagos with an anthropologist's patience and a storyteller's ear for urban randomness. That is because the subject, heavy and dynamic, would require a lot of excavating and cultivation.

Soyinka has written *Ake* and *Isara* superbly. J.P. Clark wrote the widely celebrated poem about *Ibadan.* Achebe wrote *Umuofia* as a place that exists in the imagination. Adichie has written *Nsukka*, the diaspora, the Biafran past. Teju Cole has written Lagos sideways. Atta wrote a fine novel that takes place there. Onuzo too. Abani gave us a darker Lagos. They entries contain memorable impressions of Lagos, but would any of those contend for the title of the Lagos book, in the canonical sense?

Where is the Lagos *Ulysses* or *Maximum City or Istanbul*? We have not found the Nigerian writer who has decided that this city would be the work of a lifetime, and would take, say, ten years working on it, to make everybody admit that, Lagos, finally, is on a page.

Maybe this is the wrong question. Maybe the novel cannot contain Lagos. Maybe Lagos wants an epic form. The question would then be a search for a chanter, not a Joyce.

And if it's destined to be a novel, why hasn't it been written?

One reason is that since the 1980s, Nigerian fiction has been increasingly produced outside the country. The agents and the editors are in London. The prize juries are often in New York and Stockholm. While the arrangement has rewarded Nigerian fiction generously and reputationally, it tends to favour books it can follow on a first reading. The familiar tropes include the anatomised village, the war, the immigrant at Heathrow, framed as pilgrim rather than professional. The argument runs that a Lagos written from within is harder to follow on a first reading, so the arrangement does not back it.

Fair to say this argument may not survive its examples. The same arrangement marketed Naples through Ferrante and Bombay through Salman Rushdie. It awarded Mahfouz the Nobel without requiring him to explain Cairo. The point is that the local book has travelled and made money, which suggests that the arrangement (actually an apparatus), and indeed, its homegrown version, can carry a city that won't translate itself. It's a different point whether the weight would be carried evenly because Naples and Cairo enjoy a universality that Lagos is asked to earn. Maybe. Blaming the arrangement and a lack of local publishing infrastructure is easier than admitting the book has not been written, but both can be true.

The first generation of Achebe and Soyinka came of age in the village or in university towns. *Things Fall Apart* is Ogidi, or, one might say, Umuofia transformed from Ogidi. *Death and the King's Horseman* is Oyo. This might have been the case because colonial encounters were more visible in those places, and the city a less obvious subject. Achebe's Lagos books fit this pattern. *No Longer at Ease* makes the city the scene of moral collapse, and *A Man of the People* sets its capital nowhere.

Cyprian Ekwensi’s *People of the City* was published in 1954, four years before *Things Fall Apart*, and is a Lagos novel. *Jagua Nana*, in 1961, is wholly Lagos, with its showcase of nightclubs, the party politics, and the ageing and magnificent woman at its centre. Yes, Ekwensi may have been the first to write the megacity. His work was filed under popular fiction, the Onitsha-market type, which by contrast moved Achebe and the village into the more serious space. This means most writers of that generation passed Lagos through. The one who didn't was demoted. (The Nigerian government and the literary establishment owe Ekwensi a special posthumous recognition.)

The generation that followed inherited the posture. It became the shape of most of their work and was reinforced abroad by a foreign system that viewed villages and diaspora settings as exotic backgrounds. *Chai!*

What language should the Lagos book be written in? Pidgin might be the candidate, at the risk of alienating some readers. The translation industry is thriving these days. Pidgin functions as a working tongue in Lagos because it is spoken at bus stops and during Sunday lunches before English takes over. It signals comradeship in some settings and carries a stigma in others.

The executive who speaks in pidgin while joking will not speak it in the boardroom. Our languages are labelled colloquial; English is treated as premium. That is the reality. Writing Lagos in standard English is writing it with one hand. The works that come closest keep pidgin in narration and dialogue, which hands the reader a translated Lagos. The only notable work with pidgin as its primary register is Ken Saro-Wiwa's *Sozaboy*. It has no successor for reasons partly aesthetic and commercial. The Lagos book that combines pidgin and English in a way readers can appreciate would be a major work.

Writing Lagos honestly means letting the languages run where standard English is inflected by Yoruba or Hausa or Igbo, and pidgin in natural stretches. A reader who cannot tell "How body" from "How are you?" gets it from context. It's how one learns Rushdie's Bombay and Ferrante's Naples.

But novels usually take years to complete. The Lagos a novelist starts may not be the one the novelist finishes. This may be why much of the best Lagos writing has been reportorial. Understandably so, since the past is the only part that stops moving. Suketu Mehta resolved the same problem for Mumbai by writing *Maximum City* as narrative nonfiction. Maybe the Lagos book will be nonfiction too.

One difficulty might be how to make a single book carry a city like Lagos without turning it into an inventory. And Lagos has too much material.

I imagine Lagos written as performance, say, aso ebi as both uniform and rank, the air-conditioned hush of Banana Island above a street that floods every July. A writer without an ear for these registers will not manage it.

Then there is the brochure version of Lagos, the one where Eko Atlantic rises and rendered like Dubai or Singapore. That is the thing about Lagos. It is never short of optimism and confidence.

The operational infrastructure for this book exists now. Cassava Republic. Masobe. Ouida. Even Substack. And a dozen experiments running out of laptops in Ikeja and Port Harcourt. A Nigerian writer can now write a difficult book, find a publisher, and find readers who require no translation.

Le Clézio wrote Onitsha from outside, with a child's leftover and limited knowledge. If the Lagos book comes out, it will be written by an insider who knows a Friday in Ikoyi is different from a Friday in Ikorodu. Who knows maybe the book is already in draft, in a laptop in a room where the power keeps going off.

Maybe this wish is itself a problem. Should the Lagos book be measured in European terms of a single author, a single masterpiece, a city flattened like Joyce's Dublin, for a global audience*?*

I only know I want to read the book. Maybe I am asking for too much.
### The Federal Republic of Olodos
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/the-federal-republic-of-olodos-2/
Last updated: 2026-07-25T13:41:10.000Z
*Olodo* is the boy who came 14th in a class of 35\. With him, everyone after his rank would be subjected to a small public humiliation. The word presumed that school was the road to success, and that being slow on it was a disaster. The future belonged to those who sat in the front of the class, raised their hands during question time, and got higher marks in homework.  
  
But that world has come apart. The students once tortured with that label are taking a different road.

YCee recently appeared on the Afropolitan Podcast and gave the moment a name. He called it the Olodo Uprising, a brilliant coinage that describes a revolution that rewards shallow behaviour above intelligence. He said it has replaced yahoo-yahoo culture. He named the streamer Peller as an embodiment of the uprising. Within a week, the phrase became more popular than it had ever been.

The most cutting response to YCee was from Jarvis, Peller's partner. She said she was a graduate, but with jobs being scarce, she had turned to content creation. She asked her detractors what they expected her to do. Clean toilets?

It is one of the strongest arguments in the viral debate. If a system promised that education would lead to livelihood and failed to fulfil that promise, people will reconsider the value of education. They are being economically literate about a contract the state broke. Calling them olodos provides moral satisfaction but reveals a lack of analytical depth, which is itself a sophisticated olodo thinking.

The contract asked people to study, get qualifications, find work, build a life and pay taxes. But the state abandoned its side of the contract through a series of failures that devalued certificates. The economy relies on extracting wealth from oil more than on broad productivity. A young person who sees all of this and chooses to record herself eating amala for two million viewers is making a rational decision within an irrational economy.

Educated people have noticed that their prestige has collapsed, so they have given the collapse the dignified name of national decline.

Peller earns more money than most first-class graduates, and to complain about this is partly reasonable. Nowhere in the world does a first-class degree automatically guarantee a high income. But aspiring to academic excellence should be encouraged in a society that generally values and rewards excellence and competence.

The complaint, really, is also the complaint of a class that is reacting to a loss of social standing. Their complaint contains a real concern, which Jarvis only partly answered. Every country produces its share of the unserious and the trivial. Where America churns out Nobel laureates, it has its share of junk TV. A reasonable country refuses to let one side become its most prominent national definition.

Nigeria has not negotiated that contract yet. Other nations have made versions of it. They agreed to fund education, reward disciplined careers, and build institutions to keep the agreement. South Korea used it to focus on engineering and steel. India, perhaps the closest to Nigeria in economic and social contradictions, built lasting expertise in software and medicine.

For us, we celebrate education in speeches while underfunding schools. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, and exams are mostly designed to reward cramming over critical thinking.

And this is where I should be careful. But let's face it. Religion also sits inside the problem. It consoles, disciplines, moralises and deepens. But when it devotes more than reasonable attention to giving and managing hopes, it takes parts of people's attention from the business of nation-building. That's not a mere hypothesis. An observer familiar with Nigeria's brand of religiosity might wonder how a brain conditioned to interpret structural failure as a spiritual attack can build the mental capacity for, say, engineering. A student who forfeited a potential career in physics for deliverance ministry because of claims about ancestral enemies has been robbed in a way the church will not acknowledge. Where do we even start to reverse that?

When a country's clergy class is more famous than its surgeons and engineers, it reveals everything about its priorities.

We know colonialism bears undeniable blame for fracturing institutions, borders, languages, and imagination. It left unhealed wounds. But at some point, a country has to look at what it has done since the colonial masters left.

The complication with our beloved country is quite fascinating. It is globally recognised for its literary, cultural and entrepreneurial achievements, which suggests a progressive and innovative national character. And somehow it continues to elect the same political class across generations and pretends to be surprised.  
  
Still about the educated class.

The discomfort around the Olodo Uprising debate is that the class talking about it has also helped to build it. They staffed the universities and served on boards that favoured hiring candidates through personal connections over merit. And then they wonder why the country sounds different from them.

There is a brilliant line in 2Face's song, "Higher (Spiritual Healing)," that should become part of folk wisdom. "To be civilised, you don't have to be educated." It suggests that seeing the light does not require formal schooling. It dismisses the kind of education that does not produce wisdom or cultivate the mind, as they are fundamental to everything else. A country without them can buy technology, announce reforms, invent Afrobeats, organise the loudest Detty December, sometimes win at football. It will still wobble when character is required.

Let us go home. The country needs more than programmes or policies. A culture is repaired in what parents praise and condemn. When the home yields to the dynamics of bad government, children are likely to be trained for survival without character. Smartness replaces truth, credentials lose value because they cannot quickly become money. It becomes commonplace not to question the source of sudden wealth.

Back to churches and mosques, which have a difficult choice to make. Faith that reduces fear is one thing. Faith that monetises fear is another. The pastor or imam who chooses to reduce fear will lose some of his audience to the one who monetises it. The marketing competition among Nigerian Pentecostal churches, for instance, would embarrass many corporate brands. Almost no Nigerian religious institution would be willing to lose members in the interest of national reckoning.

Media enjoys the same incentive. Sensational headlines generate more click rates than carefully crafted headlines. These forces shaped the influencer and attention economy that both YCee and Peller now inhabit. Their aesthetics differ, but the underlying logic is similar.

All of this presupposes trust, which is in ridiculously short supply in Nigeria. A society whose people no longer trust teachers, the economy, government, media, or the law will not always turn to those institutions when it needs them. It will turn to whatever offers quick and visible proof. Attention. Fame. The Olodo Uprising is, in some way, a market correction by people who lost faith in the longer auctions.

The small population of the cultivated class has work to do. There is a habit inside Nigerian intellectual life of preferring the country as material rather than as a living nation. The diasporic essay about the country. Another podcast about the country. Etc. The actual work of building institutions is less rewarding and is undertaken by fewer of the kind of people who should be doing it. Jarvis may have read the contract correctly or incorrectly, depending on who is judging, but many of the people who could read it have read have chosen to dismiss it.

When school disappointed him, a schoolboy in Yaba decided to film himself for two million viewers. He is now rich and spends more time filming in a room running on a generator. This boy does not see himself as a symbol of national decline.

A professor is preparing a paper for a conference she is unlikely to attend because her salary has not been paid for 3 months. She does not consider her case a sign of national decline either. She is busy trying to survive and has no time for the metaphor.

The Olodo Uprising did not come from nowhere. Na we make am.

Renewal will begin with a small and dedicated group of people. Teachers who genuinely enjoy their work, civil servants who refuse bribes, parents who read after dinner, etc. The country we need will be built by them when these small acts add up and scale nationally.

Some of them have already started. Do not call them olodo!
### A Soyinkian Reading of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/a-soyinkian-reading-of-pope-leo-xivs-magnifica-humanitas/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T09:58:35.000Z
Pope Leo XIV has given the age of artificial intelligence its first great theological image. In *Magnifica Humanitas* the encyclical establishes two opposing building sites. One is Babel, the real estate of human efficiency, built because men wanted to make a name for themselves. The other is Nehemiah's Jerusalem, the city where God and humanity live together. One imagines it as a sprawling metropolis, built by a patient construction team under divine supervision. The pope's document says no technology is neutral because it tends to reflect the character of those who design, fund, use and regulate it.

It is a beautiful image worthy of critical consideration. It evokes Augustine's binary frame that sees the world as two cities battling over the soul. Viewed through another lens, the choice between Babel and Jerusalem says more about their architects than about the materials used in their construction. So I read the encyclical from a place the Vatican is unlikely to look at: the workshop of the Yoruba deity, Ogun.

My scripture is Wole Soyinka's *Myth, Literature and the African World*, a book from his Cambridge lectures. It argues that African metaphysics is internally coherent and does not yield to the European tendency to split. I borrow this posture, and I am carrying it to Rome.

In the essay "The Fourth Stage," Soyinka gives Ogun his fullest reading. Ogun is the god of war and the road, of iron and the forge. He is also the patron of poets and hunters. This multiplicity, embodied in a single entity, leads Soyinka to say that Ogun is "a totality of the Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues", the Greek principles that the European orientation has always separated.

Besides being a master craftsman, he is a drunkard who kills his own. A reluctant king happiest left alone with his tools. In essence, the Yoruba philosophy keeps these contradictions and tensions whole: a deity that holds creation and destruction in the same hands.

The underlying myth behind the reading is a story about the first technology. Human beings and the gods used to live together until they were divided, and a vast gulf opened between them. This space, Soyinka teaches, is the fourth realm, the abyss of transition that lies between the living, the dead and the unborn.

The gods then decided to cross but could not. Enter Ogun. With a tool (the first tool) "forged from the ore of mountain-wombs," he successfully created a path through chaos and called everyone to follow him across. He became the first to conquer transition, becoming the god who made the road on which everyone and everything else could travel.

He was made king of Ire, a position he reluctantly accepted. On an occasion when he went to war, while resting, Esu, the trickster, presented him a gourd of palm wine. He drank it. In the drunken battle that followed, he lost the ability to differentiate his men from the enemy and cut both. Praise-singers keep the memory alive: "Ogun kills on the right and kills on the left." The toolmaker and slaughterer appear in one body, motivated by one will. Soyinka's intuition recognises that the creature who simultaneously builds and crafts uses the same tools for slaughter.

Bring Ogun into the same room as the encyclical. *Magnifica Humanitas asks whether artificial intelligence is Babel or Jerusalem and recommends orienting it towards God to redeem it or keep it under check.* Ogun knows no second city or any orientation that cleanses the forge. Something breaks when you keep the instrument that crosses the abyss and strip out its power to kill. It is one instrument and one will. The four hands that the encyclical separates (devise, fund, use and regulate) are what Ogun closes into a single fist. The danger is beyond our machines or about Babel. It lives in the thing inside the culture that is known but not mastered. A theology of AI that began here would not worry much about the question of which city to build but ask whether we have grown enough to carry what we forge.

Soyinka stretched Ogun further, or rather, he saw the modern manifestation of the god early. In his poem, *Idanre*, Ogun appeared in electrical pylons, present in the high wires and threaded through the modern infrastructure that hums under everything we build. It is easy to find him again in electric vehicles and data centres. He will remain the god of anything we forge but cannot fully control, which is the closest definition of the machine now being raised in California and Shenzhen.

This frame carries costs that experts on Soyinka's works rarely admit. To some extent, this "Yoruba worldview" is largely his own invention. He fashioned his Ogun in argument with Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, and published the essay in a volume honouring the British Shakespearean G. Wilson Knight. The field correction came later, when the anthropologist Sandra Barnes assembled Africa's Ogun and found a deity more plural and more local than the single figure Soyinka required. Paulin Hountondji made a charge against a single anonymous "African worldview," advocated by a luminous mind, because of the potential consequences of freezing a living plurality into a myth. The charge has its flaws, but it gives a decent perspective. Augustine's *The City of God* and its influence on Western thought is also the work of a luminous mind. It reads scripture through Plato and Roman law by condensing centuries of inheritance into a binary that would later seem eternal.

Whether as cosmos or doctrine, the fact is that the two constructions build things. The question is which of them better explains or accounts for the use of tools. This is where I think Ogun is stronger because he rejects the second city, though not a guarantee of safety.

In his *Ogun Abibiman* poem, Soyinka invokes Ogun to bless the war of liberation, and the god gladly responded. The same tragic hero that crossed the abyss now dignifies the carnage instead of restraining it, admitting the very Promethean impulse the encyclical fears. If this essay is read by those training frontier models, they may feel flattered that their road is the only road across or proportionally the better alternative. (One remembers how some builders of the bomb that levelled Hiroshima still justified its necessity in the face of moral ambiguity). Augustine at least gives them a brake. A two-city construct means one of them is wrong, and a man can be told he is building the wrong one. Ogun gives him catharsis, which may be worse than nothing on a Tuesday when the loss curve is still falling. I cannot fully answer how. But I can say Ogun names the danger even when he offers no remedy, and a true but untreated diagnosis is closer to honesty than a cure applied to the wrong sickness.

I have carried Ogun to Rome as a peer and cosmology that stands on its own and owes the encyclical and the disembodying wisdom of Silicon Valley no deference. Soyinka has always wanted that for Africa, a seat at the table of first questions instead of a chair in the corridor. That should be understood in a contemporary sense as a call for Africa to admit itself in the centre of the unfolding of the new world, both philosophically and technically.

The encyclical presents Augustine's two cities as if they represent every human reality. As this essay proclaims, there is another tradition older than Augustine, in which the toolmaker and the destroyer are the same entity, and the road across the abyss is the one we forge ourselves, carrying the cutlass that saves and kills.

The *Magnifica Humanitas* asks which city we are building. Ogun wonders if that was the right question. The cutlass is one blade.
### Dami Ajayi Records the Inner Life of Nigeria
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/dami-ajayi-records-the-inner-life-of-nigeria/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T22:31:28.000Z
In Konji Blues, from Dami Ajayi’s debut collection *Clinical Blues*, the speaker compares the rawness of a first sexual encounter to pickled onions in a salad:

The first time was raw  
Like the pickled onions  
In a salad of insatiable libido.

A stand up comedian would use the image to deflate the seriousness of sex. Ajayi lets it carry weight. The body in heat is also a body that ate something earlier, that lives in a kitchen, that is funny and self knowing about its own appetites. The line is comic and quietly sad at once.

He has been making this move for three collections now. *Clinical Blues*, *A Woman’s Body Is a Country*, and *Affection & Other Accidents* form a loose trilogy of body, city, illness, love, and drift, and across all three he takes the small physical detail and will not let it stay small. Updike called this giving “the mundane its beautiful due.”

Ajayi is not a public poet in the Soyinka mode. Public address has so dominated Nigerian poetry since the 1960s that a poet who declines it is liable to be read as having declined seriousness itself. Ajayi declines the mode and keeps the seriousness.

Where the Osundare and Ofeimun generation located their work in the broken country and its public weather, he has located his in the country’s most underwritten subject: the inner life of the contemporary Nigerian, in love and out of it, drunk in the bar and sober in the consulting room. A poet who writes about a love affair across five cities, or the look of a hospital ward at three in the morning, can be accused of writing trivially. The inner life is where most of any country lives, and the poetry that attends to it does the country a quieter and more durable service than the poetry that writes the country’s name on every page.

The ward poems are the hardest of the three collections. The title poem of *Clinical Blues*, a ten part sequence, treats the hospital as a site of moral attention:

Little angels become sickly,  
Bespectacled, pregnant like  
Physiologic scenarios.  
Your pathologies are case noted in the mist  
Of growing bills and dying resolves.  
Then Mummy does not love you again.

This is the language of a registrar who has written too many notes and seen too much. Pregnant like physiologic scenarios is the phrase of a tired doctor at three in the morning, the simile reaching for the textbook because the actual description is too painful. Then the last line abandons the case notes altogether. Mummy does not love you again. The plainness of the Nigerian English construction, and the catastrophic tenderness of again. This is his craft signature: sustain a register, slip in a sly symbol, then break everything with a sentence in the language people speak at home.

*A Woman’s Body Is a Country* is the more temperate book. The experimental playfulness of the debut recedes, and feeling comes closer to the surface. It is also the book in which Ajayi turns his close attention to Lagos. Lagos Bunnies is the central sequence, a set of small portraits of city locations: Johnny Just Drop, Go Slow, Ikoyi Blindness, and others. Each section names a place and makes a small claim about it. Ikoyi Blindness:

Ikoyi rarely sees beyond finery  
beyond visual precepts  
like manicured foliage  
old orchard trees, bougainvillea  
& an occasional power cut.

Five lines of bourgeois inventory end with the small disclosure that even Ikoyi has power cuts. Ajayi places the inconvenience inside the finery, lightly, almost casually, and the class structure of the city enters the poem.

Go Slow does the same work for the Third Mainland Bridge:

smile at the unperturbed lagoon  
shimmering with the full moon’s affection.  
This gridlock detours at Redemption Camp  
& this will be the longest day of your life.

The lagoon is beautiful. The traffic is biblical. Ajayi files Lagos the way he files the body: in close up, with affection, and without pretence.

There is also the metaphysical Ajayi, in the seventeenth century sense. My Love For You Is Psychosis stacks unlikely images and refuses to settle them:

This gridlock is a blacksmith’s forge.  
This love, this anvil, this fulcrum.  
This splurge, this spring welled up  
like a burst pipe line.  
This forlorn poet, this failed academic,  
this fumbling minstrel, this futility.

Fourteen lines of this, then a confession of method:

contrast, similes, metaphors, quotidian realities.  
My love for you is psychosis.

The Donne move, made on a Lagos bridge in twenty first century English, with a burst pipe line and Redemption Camp sharing a stanza with a blacksmith’s forge. That ease of inheritance is one of the gifts of his generation, and Ajayi uses it with unusual freedom.

There is also the older subject he has only glanced at: the city in the moment of its emigration. The *japa* wave is one of the defining social movements of recent Nigerian life. Oriogun has written the exile's side of it, the arrival and the ache of elsewhere. Nobody has yet written the departure lounge, the sold furniture, the last embrace at international departures, with the domestic attention Ajayi gives to everything else. 

The poet who wrote five-city heartbreak in *Affection & Other Accidents* can write five-city emigration in book four.
### On What Ground Does Africa Think?
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/on-what-ground-does-africa-think-2/
Last updated: 2026-07-27T12:32:33.000Z
A paper titled [*Fourth Heritage Attention is All You Need*](https://4thheritage.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Fourth-Heritage-Attention-is-All-We-Need%5FFINAL-1.pdf?ref=themangoro.com)circulated in some corners of the African internet. Written by authors from Uganda’s Fourth Heritage Initiative, its central metaphor borrows from the famous 2017 machine learning paper, arguing that the African mind is shaped by what it has been trained on. Its inherited data, tribe, religion, and colonial modernity have produced what the authors call *porous minds,* which leak focus, seek certainty through superstition or borrowed prestige, and struggle to sustain long-horizon thought. As a remedy, they proffer a fourth heritage that retrains attention and reweights other inheritances.

Essentially, the paper asks: on what does Africa stand when thinking on its own?

To answer that would, firstly, require admitting that there is no single African experience because the continent contains 54 countries, thousands of languages, multiple religions and sharply distinct colonial inheritances. The Maghreb belongs as much to the Mediterranean and the Islamic world as to any sub-Saharan affiliation. Ethiopia carries a Ge’ez literary tradition that is older than many European national cultures. Any project that ignores this diversity and reality risks flattening it. The Fourth Heritage paper limits its argument to tropical Africa, in which what follows also describes a poster.

My favourite part of the paper is its taxonomy of *killer mindsets:* the inferiority complex, victimhood, self-hate, herd mentality, copycatism and the *African elite dilemma*. The initial five echo Fanon, Biko and thinkers from their tradition. The sixth is fresh. With it, the authors claim that as Africans become more educated and more globally competitive, they often become more detached from the African orientation that formed them. This gives birth to the strong and rather convincing notion that African societies raise intelligence that later serves the priorities of foreign institutions. They call this *scattered intelligence.* Quite a phrase.

And *shallow collective memory*. People are shaped by what they can remember and pass forward. Jan Assmann distinguishes between communicative memory (lasts roughly 80 years) and cultural memory (lasts for millennia). The authors apply this distinction to African societies because the memory infrastructure that holds the societies is currently fragile.

The argument invites a closer look. The authors propose a *Heri*, an architecture that relates to identity, cultural orientation and creative discipline. They claim that Japan possesses one, a deep commitment to work perfection, while Africa does not. But no civilisation can be reduced into a slogan without losing some essence. The Japanese cultural posture is actually closer to *kata,* the disciplined practices of inherited form through which mastery passes across generations. Kata is a posture, far from a catchphrase. The same is true of any serious civilisation.

At independence, most African societies lacked a shared intellectual posture robust enough to absorb modernity without dissolving into it. By contrast, India retained its Sanskritic traditions post-independence. China maintained its Confucian administrative heritage. Same as Vietnam, Korea and the Arab world. They drew on other deep continuities, as each possessed traditions that act as an intuitive immune system during political recovery.

It was, and has been, harder in Africa because colonialism fractured language and institutions. Add the slave trade, and we have an impossible design for a single civilisational posture.

This has been a concern for African philosophers. Valentin Mudimbe made the case that "Africa" was largely a European construction and then inherited by intellectuals and a new elite. Paulin Hountondji separated ethnophilosophy, the Western narratives of what we Africans supposedly believe, from the philosophy we actually do. There have been calls for conceptual decolonisation that allow for thinking through African categories rather than those translated by Europeans.

These projects share a claim that the author's paper reaches without explicitly naming. By addressing African problems on African terms, African thought becomes generative when it stops facing an outside audience. This is a better posture than prescribed content. A thinker standing on African intellectual ground asks different questions and produces different artefacts from someone who stands elsewhere and reaches back to Africa for materials.

To clarify this difficulty, Soyinka famously quarrelled with Senghor and Ali Mazrui. Soyinka mocked Negritude with his famous line that a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude; it pounces, to which Senghor replied that the tiger does not proclaim itself because it is an animal. Because humans constitute themselves through symbolic life, to refuse articulation is to refuse part of our humanity.

Soyinka criticised Mazrui's *The Africans: A Triple Heritage* for placing Islam and Christianity beside indigenous African traditions since both religions entered much of Africa through coercion and conquest. Mazrui responded that Soyinka was claiming the sole power to determine who should be sufficiently counted as African.

They were both partly right. Soyinka saw the violence hidden inside the language of inheritance. Mazrui saw that purism could erase the Muslims of the Sahel and the Swahili coast. A rooted African posture would need to hold both truths. The imported traditions require criticism. It is also true that centuries of African life have also remixed them.

What might then serve as the ethos the authors seek? I propose one: *Ubuntu.*

Through popular usage, Ubuntu has been reduced to a phrase that mostly lives on T-shirts and appropriated into corporate language. In Mogobe Ramose's work, Ubuntu carries real weight. "I am because we are" admits that knowledge is relational and the isolated and overly individualised self is the wrong starting point for communal negotiations. Similar ideas appear in *sankofa, àjùmọ̀ṣe and igwebuike.* Across different African thoughts, obligations and inheritances emerge in the context of relationship from which it draws and serves.

The paper is right that Africa needs a generational project of mental retraining. But this must happen through rooted thinkers and institutions. The *Knowledge Tower* the authors imagine will rise one book, one essay, one library and institution at a time, all served within an Ubuntu framework. These builders would first answer African questions, without resentment or reservations.

Mangoro is a small attempt at this posture, addressing Nigerian and African readers first and serving them without dumbing down to suit popular or merely commercial obligations. Others are welcome to join.

The *Fourth Heritage* authors have done something rare by making criticism part of their framework's legitimacy, and to add, legacy. Different from movements of African renewal that end up hardening into orthodoxies because they perceive criticism as betrayal and affront.

Mangoro enters that argument with two points of disagreement. Thinking happens within communities that make judgement possible and a civilisational ethos cannot be built in the shape of a slogan. The agreement is on the urgency and need to rebuild Africa’s intellectual ground.

The conversation has begun. The rest lies in the writing, the institutions and the slow work of standing where Africans already stand but standing there more deliberately.

>  
> Recommended reading:  
>  
> [The Invention of Africa (Mudimbe, 1988);](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invention-Africa-Philosophy-Knowledge-African/dp/0253204682?ref=themangoro.com)  
> [African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (Hountondji, 1983);](https://www.amazon.co.uk/African-Philosophy-Second-Reality-Systems/dp/0253210968?ref=themangoro.com#:~:text=In%20this%20seminal%20exploration%20of,from%20the%20Western%20philosophical%20tradition.)  
> [Cultural Universals and Particulars (Wiredu, 1996);](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Universals-Particulars-African-Perspective/dp/0253210801?ref=themangoro.com)  
> [African Philosophy through Ubuntu (Ramose, 1999);](https://www.scribd.com/document/717584996/African-Philosophy-Through-Ubuntu-Mogobe-B-Ramose-Z-lib-org?ref=themangoro.com)  
> [Communicative and Cultural Memory (Assmann, 2008)](https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/1774/1/Assmann%5FCommunicative%5Fand%5Fcultural%5Fmemory%5F2008.pdf?ref=themangoro.com);  
> [Fourth Heritage Attention is All You Need (Kirunda, Muganzi and Kisakye, 2026).](https://4thheritage.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Fourth-Heritage-Attention-is-All-We-Need%5FFINAL-1.pdf?ref=themangoro.com)
### Na AI Go Save Our Language?
URL: https://www.themangoro.com/can-ai-save-nigerias-dying-languages/
Last updated: 2026-07-14T18:09:29.000Z
A language dies in the long quiet years when the children stop answering in it. The grandmother speaks. The child understands but replies in the bigger language of the bigger market. The grammar survives one more generation as comprehension, then disappears as speech. By the time a linguist records the last fluent speaker, the language has usually been dead for thirty years in which the linguist is left to capture a specimen.

Nigeria has more than 500 languages, depending on where one draws the line between a language and a dialect. [Ethnologue](https://www.ethnologue.com/?ref=themangoro.com) counts 520 living indigenous languages and twelve extinct. Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo each have tens of millions of speakers; Pidgin has tens of millions more. A long tail of smaller languages are down to a few hundred speakers.

Before the eulogies, a harder question: does it matter, and if it does, can the technology, Artificial Intelligence, now reorganising everything else be turned toward this before it's too late?

It matters, for reasons older than Nigeria. Writing preserves memory which shapes survival. When Europe's vernaculars began appearing in print in the fifteenth century, books told their speakers that their language was fit for serious thought too, as only Latin had been. Without books, a language is cut off from the myths and stories a people uses to explain who they are.

A colonial lie lingers nearby with a proclamation that Africa had no history because it had no writing. But West Africa Timbuktu's libraries and the Sokoto Caliphate produced substantial written literatures. Many Nigerian languages never made the crossing into print because conquest broke transmission chains and the economy attached opportunity to English and the three largest languages, so a parent's love became, rationally, a reason to raise a child away from the smaller one.

The Nigerian state made this more urgent in 2025, when the government cancelled the National Language Policy and made English the main medium of instruction. It reversed the 2022 policy which had required six years of mother-tongue instruction. Faced with teaching children in Nigerian languages, though, the country chose English. That is the setting for the machines.

The promise is real. Modern language technology can transcribe recordings, help build a dictionary and grammar from a corpus that once took a career to assemble. It replaces neither linguists nor fluent speakers. But for a tongue with a few hundred speakers and no written tradition, the floor for what's possible has significantly dropped.

There is already an African model for doing this. Masakhane is a research network founded in 2019 with hundreds of researchers across the continent. Native speakers are co-authors with openly released models. In 2026, Masakhane joined Microsoft's AI for Good Lab, the Gates Foundation, and Google.org to launch LINGUA Africa, an open call funding community-grounded language work, on the principle that a language belongs to its speakers.

Profit is another force. Most of the world's easily available text is already absorbed into large models; low-resource languages are among the few bodies left. The incentive is obvious: harvest whatever Nigerian-language speech and text exists, fold it into systems owned elsewhere, and sell it back to the communities it came from. The language survives in the model, dies in the mouth, the most modern way a language has ever died.

If the machines are to rescue rather than harvest, the work cannot be left to the market or to volunteers alone. It requires the state to treat documentation of endangered languages as national infrastructure. That means funding the unglamorous work, recording, orthography, corpus-building, training computational linguists accountable to the communities they serve, and giving the work status.

It would also take Nigerian Pidgin seriously. Pidgin is the largest language in Nigeria the state refuses to fully acknowledge, spoken by tens of millions across every ethnic line, the nearest thing Nigeria has to a genuinely national tongue built inside the country rather than inherited. It has been creolising for generations; for many Nigerians it is now a first language, with no settled orthography and no place in the school system its reach warrants.

Professor Ben Elugbe, who died in 2025, spent much of his career arguing that this was an error the country could afford to correct. With Augusta Omamor, he wrote the foundational study Nigerian Pidgin: Background and Prospects (1991). He rejected writing Pidgin as broken English, favouring a system closer to Nigeria's indigenous orthographies. Pidgin is Nigerian and should look like one on the page. The standardisation he called for would do for Pidgin what print did for the European vernaculars.

Both the dying languages and the unacknowledged one reflect the same habit: the state deciding which Nigerian speech counts as serious. New technology makes that cost harder to ignore. What's uncertain is whether anyone with power thinks it's worth doing.

Can AI save Nigerian languages from extinction? Not by itself. It is a tool, and tools follow the intentions of whoever controls them. Whether it happens is a political question.

What's true is that the door is open. With a few thousand recorded sentences and a community treated as co-authors rather than subjects, a language headed toward specimen status can instead become archived, teachable, searchable, alive enough to be handed to a next generation. The first great chance for most of these tongues was the printing press, and they missed it through no fault of their own.

It would be the bitterest kind of repetition to miss the second one, while the means to take it sit in every phone in the country, waiting for someone with authority to decide that a grandmother's sentences are worth as much as an advertisement.

They are worth much more. Someone should say so with a budget.