Hint: it’s not just for communicating I mentioned in my previous post that I learned Hausa during my year in the north. That’s not the entire story, though. You see, from the start of my time in Gombe, I set out to learn Hausa. Right from orientation camp, I bought a language book and CDs …
Tag archives: History
Growing up as a nerdy-ish kid
…and discovering a superpower, and how to make space (This isn’t me, of course, nor did I have the glasses most of the time, really, but whatever.) I grew up loving books. I read every chance I got. I read while walking on the road, when I did house chores and during classes in school. In …
As history, the Bible isn’t quite normal
No, really. I’ll explain. As historical records go, the Bible is pretty weird. I guess I’ve always known that on some level, but it came really clear after I wrote about history and how we get it wrong. In that article, I mentioned Chinua Achebe’s quoting the proverb about how the history of the hunt is …
What every effective leader knows
(That many of our leaders don’t seem to) And history is not what we think it is. While thinking out my second point in my post on what history really is—that it’s not merely what happened, but what’s recorded and (especially) transmitted—it occurred to me Nigeria suffers a failure on just that point. I explore that here. …
No, history is not “what happened in the past”
What it really is, and why that matters History is a funny thing. If you ask most people what history was, they’d reply something along the lines of, “What happened in the past.” Which is, well — not quite right. I mean, it’s almost right, but this is one of those cases where almost isn’t enough. Like, you …
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