Tolu Ogunlesi works as a journalist in Lagos, Nigeria. He was awarded a 2009 CNN Multichoice African Journalism Prize, in the Arts & Culture category. Before now he has worked as a pharmacist, a management consultant and a corporate communications executive. In 2008 he was a Guest Writer at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden; and in 2009 a Cadbury Visiting Fellow at the University of Birmingham, England. His work has been translated into Dutch, Latvian, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish. He owns one digital camera, two lenses and plenty of hope for a successful career in photography. When he isn’t travelling he is busy looking forward to travelling. The rest of the time he is to be found contemplating starting a novel. Email: [email protected] Website: www.toluogunlesi.wordpress.com
by Tolu Ogunlesi The first time I met ‘Kissbaby’, 21, he was a security guard at the Silverbird Galleria in Lagos. I was driving out of the parking lot, and as is standard practice in Lagos, tipped him. Then I became curious. I wanted to know what he did with all the tips he got.…
by Tolu Ogunlesi, in The Huffington Post (photo from Wikipedia): A few weeks ago, at the height of the News of the World scandal, I appeared on the BBC's World Have Your Say to talk about how – or if – unfolding events in the UK were shaping the way Nigerians regarded their colonial overlords.…
by Tolu Ogunlesi In its Feb 19, 2011 editorial, “A fresh chapter is opening in Africa’s history” the Guardian (London) observed: “The African lions are finding their voice. A new generation of men and women has the ambition and imagination to reshape the continent in their own image – confident, assertive, successful, bold and proud……
By Tolu Ogunlesi Nigeria's ongoing general elections have placed it in the news in recent weeks – a blend of hopeful and depressing news. Politics is a 'grand' theme, and generally partial to generalisations. Broad strokes are inevitable – Nigeria as a country divided into a “largely Muslim North and a largely Christian South”; Nigeria…
A year ago (February 2010) I met, in Lagos, Nigeria, Pascal Pecriaux, “Ambassador” for French champagne brand Moët & Chandon. The profile below provides insight into Pecriaux’s life – in and out of wine-tasting – and the Nigerian obsession with champagne. Nigeria ‘discovered’ champagne in commercial quantities (by importation, of course) following the oil boom…
By Tolu Ogunlesi There were only two Nigerians in TIME Magazine’s ’60 Years of Heroes’ special issue in 2006: Writer Chinua Achebe and musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Apart from being artists both men were politicians too – drawn, when democracy beckoned in the late 1970s, onto that treacherous terrain by the prospects of providing an…
by Tolu Ogunlesi Nigerians have been migrating to Britain for several decades. There was a wave of migration starting around the 1930s/1940s, which has continued more or less steadily since then, driven by a quest for education, and for a better life. The outflow to America followed that of Britain, but is today a significant…
By Tolu Ogunlesi 1. Africa their Africa When Western tourists talk about Africa somehow it seems to me that what they really mean is East and Southern Africa, places like Namibia and Kenya and Botswana and parts of Uganda where you will find safaris and zebras and elephants and lakes in abundance. When I think…
By Tolu Ogunlesi At a beer parlour, patiently waiting for Nigeria to put Argentina on the flight back to Buenos Aires; loud discussions on everything from ash clouds to Diego’s immortal hand of Goddamit! The TV proudly wears dark glasses, drawing technicolour mockery from the crowd, booze swirling in our brains like a million Messi…
By Tolu Ogunlesi A few weeks ago Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie wrote a piece for Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper, titled: A new Nigerian-ness is infusing the nation. In it she tells of Nigeria’s recent past, during which “[t]he future was a vision of impossibilities” and “the only thing to aspire to was a…
By Tolu Ogunlesi Every time I find myself at Lagos’ Murtala Mohammed International Airport, a glance at the foreigners’ queue makes me wonder how many of those sweating Caucasians are there on a mission to spill ink on Africa’s endless fires. It is of course an open secret that the continent teems with ‘anonymous’ white…
By Tolu Ogunlesi Lamenting the presence of Nigeria on the US government’s list of “countries of interest” (in the war on terror), Nigerian writer and first African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka told British journalist Tunku Varadarajan, at the Jaipur Literary Festival in January: “[Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab] did not get radicalized in Nigeria. It happened in…
'Tings dey happen' Written and performed by Dan HoyleNigeria Tour – October 2009 *** American Dan Hoyle lived in Nigeria for ten months in 2005/2006. During that time he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s restive delta region, the source of most of country’s wealth – and turmoil. He…
By Tolu Ogunlesi On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America * I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University…
Tolu Ogunlesi summarizes the ‘Big Ideas’ arising from discussions at the two-day African Media Leaders Forum 2009, which took place in Lagos, Nigeria, in November. THE CENT AND THE CONTENT Monetising content – especially in the Age of the Internet – will remain one of the media’s biggest challenges. It was the recurring…
by Tolu Ogunlesi To the outside world, we are all “Africans”. ‘Africa’, that continent of “colourful emergencies” (a term coined by novelist Helen Oyeyemi in a 2005 essay); ‘African’, that oversized brush dripping a paint handy for tarring every living thing found within a thousand-mile radius of the Sahara desert. As Africans – and by…
by Tolu Ogunlesi She was the only woman on the frontlines during Gulf War 1, surrounded by 43,000 men. So how did she cope with doing that thing that men can do in public but women can’t? “Nudity is tolerable, using the loo in front of other people isn’t,” she explained to a wine-sipping group…