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The Enemy next door
While growing up, I was an avid and very fast reader. In my early days in the secondary(high) school, I read all the possible books of Pacesetters series I could lay hold on(surprisingly you can still get them now). If you are from my generation, you may remember “Evbu my love”, “Rich Girl, Poor boy”, “Naira Power”, “Agony in her voice“, “The Cyclist” ,The Betrayer“, ”The BlackTemple”, “Death is a woman”, “The Equatorial Assignment” ,“The Undesirable Element,” and so many more. I remember reading about the main female character: Bintu in “The Undesirable Element” following the Alhaji and the next thing, she was pregnant. The Pacesetters African novels were written in such…
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Red Light
Just this evening when I decided to do my evening duties of writing, I came across the news that it appears BBC Radio 2 has decided to ban the songs of one of the music legends of our time because of the allegations of child sex abuse. I am not taking sides and checking the veracity of these accusations but would love to say that sometimes these things happen much more than we realize. The word “child” could actually be figurative and in a religious context, some adults could be seen as children when compared to their leaders. Unfortunately, people sometimes abuse their spiritual position and just like Folake showed…
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Defiled
I didn’t understand my first encounter with sex. Yes, I didn’t have an inkling what it was because I was about six years old. You heard me, six years old! My mum would leave us- my two brothers and me in the care of a male neighbour when she goes to the market. He lived in a one bedroom apartment downstairs and we lived in a flat upstairs. My mum went to the market like two or three times a week. We would all be playing in the room, then he would bring out a coin for my brothers and ask them to go buy sweets. He would…
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This March – #Me too
If the first time you had sex was on your wedding night (highly recommended and possible ) or perhaps at your own free will , you may appreciate to some extent what we are talking about this month. For some others, that experience is foreign and I dare say that the eleven-year-old girl who was raped and became pregnant by her grandmother’s partner in Argentina recently is another extreme of the spectrum and in between these two are several variations that is the experience of most people. The choice of giving yourself to someone by your own free will and because you felt it was necessary and part of an…
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Too Far
I wanted to write about a beautiful experience when I first got the invitation to contribute to this blog some months ago. Something I would read, that would bring a smile to my face as I would recount the memory. Something he did right! Oh there must be numerous examples to be honest … but I couldn’t remember anything I could actually write about. I knew things hadn’t been great for a while but I didn’t realist how badly we had drifted from each other, until some three weeks ago. I was looking for a particular file on my hard-drive – I couldn’t remember the name as I had saved…
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Left Alone
She laughs even though it hurts. She smiles though it cut deep down. The pain is now a constant, an expected foe. They promised to stay but that didn’t happen, as she expected.It started with her father, of course, when he decided he could love her from afar. He was there physically but never present, he just wouldn’t or couldn’t connect with her. She saw how other fathers were and couldn’t quite understand why hers was different.The same, of course, was received from her mother.Every time it happened, she laid her protective bricks. It happened so often from “friends” and “family” that she had her fortress up in no time.…
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There to the End (2)
Benny continues her story till the Final parting. Her friend kept asking if she was still breathing and we were told she was breathing, I was just crying to GOD for mercy. I was too scared to ask if she was breathing and I wanted to scream at the friend to stop asking. The hospital was a 3 minutes drive, we rushed to the emergency, I rushed in to call a doctor, the doctor came took a look at her, checked her pulse and said SHE IS GONE. I called my husband and he was SHOCKED, we had left him standing and talking with some neighbors at home outside…
