OYELADUN🌻

Disaster does not understand Yorùbá, Igbo or Hausa. When the tsunami of bad governance comes knocking, it will swallow you and I, young and old, innocent and guilty, regardless of our supposed differences or ethnic affiliations. May our eyes be opened someday.

The pathos through juxtaposition, that this particular video is. I will forever be glad that I was able to touch on the 2025 Oworo demolition with this work. I am yet to see enough works that speak to this horror, and I fear that without enough works documenting real events like this, the politics of time and propaganda may distort the narrative in a few years. I have witnessed the horror of displacement at some point in my life, and even then, I cannot imagine what it was like for the people of Oworo who lived through this demolition. I cannot imagine what it was like for the children who lost the whimsy of their immediate world and watched everything they had grown to know reduced to rubble. I cannot contain the entire story of Oworo in a picture book like this, nor even in a novel. But I hope, at the very least, that a child from Oworo, or anywhere else in the world, will read this and understand that they are not alone in the horror of displacement, and that children like them are ably represented in stories and are not minor characters in the script of the world. I hope children who have never experienced displacement will encounter this book and learn that it is the reality of some children, some people, not so far away. I hope they know for a fact that displacement is real, and that displacement is evil. I hope an adult will encounter this work and be drawn into digging up the story of the unjust demolition in Oworo in 2025. And I hope this work does not exist in isolation, but leads more creatives to make more honest work on this subject. A writer is first a witness, and I am a witness. Before the pen, there is the seeing: eyes that refuse to look away, and a memory that refuses to let the ground be forgotten. I am a writer because I witnessed, and I will keep writing so that what was witnessed is never rewritten. All of my heart remains with the people of Oworo, now and always. Grateful to the brilliant @MclaniyiS for gifting me this mise en abyme in the form of a video. Thank you for being a witness too.