Chronicles 1
Cornelius Hamelberg
Since my grandson Malcolm is now "prepping" by writing Chronicles as part of his upcoming exams in Swedish, English and Spanish, to keep him company I think that I’ll try my hand at writing Chronicles - the type of Chronicles which give me a lot of latitude (unlimited scope). Better still, I’ll give or rather award myself a poetic license and a lot of latitude for attitude, as much latitude as I may need, as that should be much better than merely “ ruminating”. I’ll occupy some holy middle ground in cyberspace, and with some of the fire-power of both the poetic and the unimaginably unpoetic word which was in the beginning with God, kill all my enemies, hit the pretentious tree monkey and the cheeky, uncivilised Chimpanzee / wannabe baboon with one stone, the same one that David the shepherd boy used when he slew loudmouth Goliath.
I’ll kickstart my Chronicles series right here , with this not so juicy piece of Diaspora news:
In the course of conversing with Baba Kadiri last night, it was brought to my attention that Kayo Shekoni, the sister of Ayodele Shekoni , was on TV4 on Sunday to tell all about her recently published autobiography 👍
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Over 40 years in the spotlight – Kayo opens up about tough upbringing in autobiographyOver 40 years in the spotlight – Kayo opens up about tough upbringing in autobiography
The brother's dramatic kidnapping • Gone for seven years
Updated: February 10, 2025 Published: February 10, 2025
She has made us dance, she has shone on stage and inspired us for decades. Now Kayo Shekoni releases her autobiography Before the Night is Over. In it, she opens up for the first time about an upbringing marked by exclusion, her brother's dramatic kidnapping and the struggle to find her place in the world. She also talks about how a little glitter every day can make everything a little easier and how Olof Palme probably helped in the tough fight to get her brother home.
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I was surprised about all of the above because I was at Papa Shekoni’s funeral and the reception lunch afterwards at Back a Yard , a Jamaican Restaurant at Folkungagatan, and remember the impressive, loving, admirable role that Kayo dutifully played at her father’s final farewell send off…
Just in case you’re wondering, what good can come out of Babylon, for many expectant viewers, especially the pious Swedish viewers of non-foreign and non-African extraction, the linchpin of the programme was the part of Kayo’s narration that so incensed even the not so sanctimonious Swedes : That as an act of love, in the middle of divorce proceedings Papa Shekoni allegedly “kidnapped” his dearly beloved son and transported him back home to Nigeria, supposedly for acculturation purposes, the pious and the not so pious among us seeing this as some kind of unforgivable crime against humanity.
If acculturation purposes was the possible rationale, what were the other motivations? One can only discuss the matter further and hazard some guesses in the human context of the ongoing culture wars between the Wild West and Islam for example, misleadingly portrayed as Clash of Civilizations - in which the baboon in Owerri is prone to seeing himself as at the acme of the civilized one and yours truly who does not love his enemy, as the chimpanzee, not realising that we are from the same family tree, perhaps because he/she/transgender has been reading a little Stephen Spender, Wallace Stevens, and W.H. Auden and sincerely believes he/she belongs to the same civilised category as those three, excluding the likes of me and others who have never done poetry, or committed some of the barbarities committed in WW2 during the history of Civilisation, East and West. The cure for such a malady is to drink deep of the palm wine and the ogogoro that should keep him inebriated, exactly as Alexander Pope jokingly told you in his An Essay on Criticism which he wrote when he was twenty-three years old,
“A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
In Sweden where Integration , not cultural integration is an issue, the safest rule of thumb is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” and in that regard, Sweden is no exception to the ongoing culture wars. Sweden is a country in which foreign cultures, foreign cultural norms, ethical/unethical practices that are at variance with Swedish cultural norms or which “ deviate” from normative Swedish standards, are looked upon with suspicion and great disapproval. For instance, there’s a hue and cry against honour killings, and, sadly, there have been Honour killings in Sweden . ( I was visiting an Iranian lady friend ( a 100% platonic relationship) when she got a phone call from her brother who was on his way and she told me that I had to leave immediately, because if he found me with her he would kill her. )
There have also been a few cases of fathers taking / abducting their children, especially their daughters back home, to instil in them some good old “ home training”, home being the place where they inculcate some home values. A pious Muslim father especially of the patriarchal type has constant nightmares and fears nothing more than his daughter being fully immersed in what is often referred to as the coca-cola-i-zation of culture, and their daughters in particular being corrupted by full immersion baptism in that kind of Western dunya disco culture, where everything goes, it's free sex everywhere, and and womanhood's motto is “ I can do what I like with my own body!”
Years ago, a kotoh from Shierra Leone told me tearfully on the phone about an Arab guy who he said used to pick up his sweet, sixteen year old daughter in his luxurious Mitsubishi Pajero, drive her off to his den of iniquity for the weekend and return her on Sunday evenings. It's always the demonization of “the other” - in this case “ an Arab guy” , not an Ethnic Viking. There's the famous case of “Not Without My Daughter” - an American story
OK , so if you want to reduce Papa Shekoni’s case to merely a moral issue (what else could it be?) there’s the 8th Commandment written in stone by the finger of HASHEM the Almighty 👍
Torah : Thou shalt not kidnap
Question : In the story of The Akedah , should Abraham have been charged with kidnapping Isaac?
In the case of Dear Papa Larry Shekoni these are some of the desirable results that were achieved :
Dele became a real Yoruba man.
Dele lived in a Yoruba environment
Dele now speaks Yoruba fluently as his mother tongue.
Dele attended King's College in Lagos.
I know the case of a father who took his son to Merry England when he was six years old, in that case, the poor boy had acquired the Fulani Language as his mother tongue because up to that point he had been playing mostly with Fulani children , so when the boy’s dad eventually decided that he did not want his son to become a “ Fulani boy” , he took him ( not kidnapped him) to Merry England to live in a different language and cultural environment….and that was the beginning of another Chronicle