i be naija

At a thanksgiving party hosted by a friend recently, there was a noticeable frenzy to take, and be in, photographs. Apparently, everyone knew that the pictures would inevitably end up on Facebook and it seemed everyone wanted to ensure that they were properly represented. True enough, while the photographing was going on, one of our other friends was on … Facebook. Such was the fever that our host remarked, “Facebook will soon consume everybody’s life.” We all laughed.

Of course, this is no laughter matter… I’m still grappling with the Facebook phenomenon myself:

2004

• Three Harvard nerds (led by Mark Zukerberg) found “The Facebook”
• 09/ the owners of ConnectU file suit against FB, alleging that Zukerberg stole source code from them
• FB receives ~ $0.5M from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round
• 12/ FB’s user base exceeds one million

2005

• 05/ FB raises $12.8M in venture capital from Accel Partners
• 08/ FB buys the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface Corporation for  $0.2M
• 10/ FB’s expansion trickles down to most small universities and junior colleges in the United States, Canada, and the UK

2006

• 03/ BusinessWeek reports a potential acquisition of FB. FB reportedly declines an offer of $750M; it is rumored the asking price was as high as $2B
• 04/ Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners invest an additional $25M in FB
• FB launches an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as FB Platform
• 07/ FB announced its first acquisition, purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt
• 08/ FB is featured in a Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy in the magazine’s annual college edition

 2007

• 08/ FB hires YouTube’s former CFO Gideon Yu
• 10/ AP reports Microsoft has bought a 1.6% share of the company for $240 million (valuing FB at about $15B)
• 11/ FB announces FB Ads; a marketing initiative which includes:
  •  a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their FB friends (FB Beacon);
  • the capability of businesses to host pages on FB for various brands, products and services (FB Pages)
  • a targeted ad serving program based on user and friend profile and activity data (FB Social Ads)
  • a service for providing businesses with advertisement analytic data including performance metrics (FB Insights).

Source: Wikipedia

On a personal level, the impact of Facebook has been profound. I have found friends from primary and secondary school, that I would likely have never seen again (in fact, one of such friends whose mother was my pediatrician, currently lives in Sweden! What are the odds I’d have ever run into him ever again?). Facebook has also provided numerous insights into the interrelationships among the people I know. The theme is recurrent: I discover that my secondary school classmate (in Lagos, Nigeria) is in fact the cousin of a Chicago acquaintance… or that a former neighbor is in fact the room mate of one of my buddy’s girlfriend—who is, by the way, the sister of another friend!

Of course, like everyone else, I have deep privacy concerns… do I really want my personal information (name, photos, e-mail address, up-to-the-minute statuses) so available? Do I really want the inter-relationships among my friends so clearly discernable? Are the benefits (finding old friends, gaining insights into interrelationships, keeping in touch, etc.) worth the risks (the biggest of which is related to privacy).

For now, I continue to be enamored of FB, yet leery of its potentials… I expect I will continue to enjoy FB (forging new friendships and relationships, rediscovering old friends, gaining insights into interrelationships), but will make an effort to mitigate potential risks by tightening my privacy options.

My biggest admiration for Facebook, through, rest with how extraordinarily innovative they’ve been (for example, their API offering turns out to be a game changer in the web app development space), how astonishingly responsive they’ve been to customer needs and yearnings, and how brutally on-point their execution of their business strategy has been.

Anyone with the slightest sliver of entrepreneurial aspirations better be taking notes.

Postscript: For whatever reason, here’s the Facebook that never came to be: ConnectU.

Read the Poem, Abiku, by Charles O.

Background

To the uninitiated, Abiku can be a rather daunting piece. This is so because an understanding of the meaning and implications of the Abiku concept is necessary for a proper understanding of the poem.

If the belief in the supernatural is all-pervasive in traditional African culture, then the belief in the inimical and diabolic variant is even more insidiously ingrained in that tradition. Abiku (figuratively “born to die”) in Yoruba lore refers to one such malevolent spirit who appropriates and insinuates a woman’s womb to be born and re-born, for the singular purpose of unleashing recurring tumult on such a woman. The woman, then, conceives, carries the pregnancy to term, delivers, only for the child, Abiku, to die within the first few years of its birth.

In some cases though, the spirit-baby pities her mother and decides to stay permanently.

The poem Abiku explores the travails of a woman who has birthed several Abiku. Each conception brought her an unnerving admixture of “elation and despair”. Indeed, she inhabited, perpetually, the twilight between exaltation and grief: in one year she would conceive, in another, deliver, and in a few more yet, mourn the death of the child. The poem captures a moment when our protagonist, pregnant again, sits on her windowsill and gazes at the night sky. Crying silently, she prays the gods to have mercy on her, and have Abiku stay this time. As though in assurance of a new resolution, the child stirs within.

Imagery & Symbolism

“Death” and “rebirth,” “emergence” and “spiral … into abyssal depths,” “elation” and “despair,” “arrivals” and “departures,” are imageries at odds with each other. We sense antagonistic forces—life and death, emergence and downward spiral, et cetera—engaged in tense battles, as though for their very own continuity.

The “accentuation” of the protagonist’s belly by the night’s full moon provides another striking imagery. For one, both are round; for another, both are, literally, full. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, just as the full moon heralds the dawning of a new day, the woman’s full belly portends the impending arrival of a new being.

Message

Undoubtedly, there are as many interpretations of a poem as there are readers of it. One of the messages I take away from the poem though is that, just as the protagonist, who had suffered repeatedly at Abiku’s hands, clung obstinately to the hopes of having a child that would survive past infancy, we all must remain steadfast to our higher aspirations in spite of (or, even, because of) the odds. We must, indeed, never resign ourselves to the accident of chance, or worse, fate.

Even in the face of forces seemingly outside of her control, our protagonist expressed hope for an eventual breakthrough (“maybe she’ll stay”) this time.

*

Rewritten from the original piece of May 9, 2002.

I should have gone fishing or skinny-dipping or window-shopping for that matter. I should have broken my resolution to abstain from clubbing… in fact, I should have done anything but sit through Bruce Willis’ latest yarn of an action movie. The experience was exasperating in its milder parts, and revolting at its crudest. I should have been watching SNL reruns.

Tears of the Sun is another Hollywood attempt to nurture the notion held by more than a few Americans (and, even more largely, Westerners) that Africa is one huge jungle, where man and beast co-exist in close proximity, and whose people are incapable of conducting the business of government without resorting to wanton massacre. Of course, it’s largely a matter of capitalism: Hollywood churns out features that sell, and features that align themselves with romanticized notions happen to sell very well. It’s a matter of giving people what they want, what reaffirms their smug convictions, and whatever makes them declare in self-adulation, ‘there goes us but for the grace of God’.

In the approximately ninety-minute feature, an “African nation” represented as Nigeria is portrayed as a massive forest (which, coincidentally, fits snugly into the West’s notion of Africa). “Nigerian” politics is reduced to a primordial tribal bloodbath perpetuated by the “Fulanis” against the “Ibos.”

Supposedly, the “Ibo” President (who, it appears, holds a part time job as a “tribal king” of sorts) is murdered by “Fulani rebels.” His son, who is “heir” to “the throne,” suddenly becomes the burden of the U.S. Navy SEALS dispatched to extract an American doctor from the “hostile” region. The juxtaposition of “presidency” and “tribal kingship” in one single man is an anachronism at best, and an aberration at worst. The variant of tribal politics depicted would have been more appropriately ascribed to another time and place.

At the very least, the plot could have been based on a fictitious nation, like Coming to America’s “Zamunda”—although this approach does not altogether address the fundamental issue at hand. Because it arbitrarily uses “Nigeria” as a label for its pitiful contrivance, Tears of the Sun is abrasive, offensive, and insolent. Additionally, it betrays the ignorance of the writers. (There are no “kings”, per se, among the Ibos, for a start.)

The people in the movie were most assuredly not Nigerians, the “native” language spoken was decidedly not a Nigerian language (and I might contend was not even a real language at all), none of the sound tracks had the faintest connection to a Nigerian ethnic group, and the quixotic jungle location was, I’ll bet, not anywhere near the Nigerian geographical space. So the epistemological question, then, is: why ascribe such an obnoxious plot to Nigeria?

To have people represented as Nigerians clad in tattered rags, referred to as refugees, and benevolently offered bits of American soldier food made me feel like running to the front of the theatre to repudiate, on the spot, the movie’s premise. If not for the release of the exasperation caused by the assault on Nigeria, I would have at least disabused the minds of viewers of the assault on their collective intelligence and sensibilities.

In the end, we are left with the impression that, once again, the caucasoid demigod has succeeded in saving the confounded African negroid from himself, as the helicopters rise in messianic ascension into the clouds. Indeed, the scene was reminiscent of the very Christ ascending into heaven, after saving wretched man from eternal damnation.

Tears of the Sun does nothing but unleash a demeaning onslaught on an African nation, and an unflattering abuse on the minds of a generation of Americans, with misrepresentations of the social and political realities of today’s Nigeria.

And, oh, the movie, if I were to assume the role of movie critic for a moment, has no real morals, hinges on warped principles, and would be receiving a rather charitable assessment if it were compared to, say, Schwarzeneggar’s Commando (which, itself, was a bad movie). Tears of the Sun is, to put it as it is, a lie.

My only regret is that my $9 (price of movie ticket) goes towards enriching a band of lying connivers.

The good folks at Wisdom Consulting Group have asked me to help spread the word about Tom Floyd’s Integration is a… Bitch!

In the book ($10.95, direct), Floyd recounts his experiences as the only Black employee at a Manufacturing plant in the ’60s, using cartoons. If you enjoy cartoons, you will absolutely love the book; if you are interested in various perspectives of where race relations in the United States once was (and arguably still is), I think you’ll find the book to be worth your while.

You can grab a copy of Integration is a… Bitch! by Tom Floyd from www.integrationisabitch.com.