RETROSPECTIVE

Nigeria ! HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY 

As you kukere and skelewu all week, here are a few interesting facts about this wonderful country and people.

Most populous country in Africa.

Ile-Ife, in present day Osun State, was paved as early as 1000AD, with decorations that originated from Ancient America suggesting there might have been contact between the Yorubas and the Ancient Americans half a millenium before Columbus ‘discovered’ America.

The Walls of Benin (800-1400AD), in present day Edo State, are the longest ancient earthworks in the world, and probably the largest man-made structure on earth.

 Sarki Muhammad Kanta The Great of Kebbi, was the only ruler who resisted control by Songhai, West Africa’s greatest empire at that time.

NEW TRAILER: OCTOBER 1ST by Kunle Afolayan

It’s September 1960, and with Nigeria on the verge of independence from British colonial rule, a northern Nigerian Police Detective, DAN WAZIRI, is urgently despatched by the Colonial Government to the trading post town of Akote in the Western Region of Nigeria to solve a series of female murders that have struck horror in the hearts and minds of the local community. On getting to Akote, more murders are committed, and with local tension high and volatile, Waziri has a race on his hands to solve the case before even more local women are killed.

STYLE ICON: Patti Boulaye

Nigerian-British entertainer, Patti Boulaye was born born Patricia Ngozi Ebigwe on 3 May 1954 in mid-western Nigeria. As a teenager, she witnessed the horrors of the Biafran war in the country and her family later emigrated to the United Kingdom.

Raised in a strict Catholic household, Boulaye initially had hopes of becoming a nun. However, after mistakenly auditioning and for and successfully gaining a part in the musical Hair (she had thought the line was a queue for Madame Tussaud’s), Boulaye stepped into the world of entertainment and never looked back.

Hair braiding

Igbo soldier during the Nigerian Civil War, November, 1968