Book Title: More Tales of A Troubadour: A Collection of Travel Stories
Author: Wale Okediran, PhD
Year of Publication: 2024
Publisher: Accessible Publishers Ltd
No of Pages: 172
Reviewer: Alexander Ekemenah
The Review
This is a pocket-size travelogue of a troubadour or an intellectual itinerant journeyman called Wale Okediran that takes us to twenty cities around the world. With this travelogue, Wale Okediran clearly show-cased himself as a modern prototype of a Vasco da Gama, a Christopher Columbus, who took us round the world during their times.
In this travelogue, the journey started from Houston, Texas in the United States and ended at Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State in Nigeria. One would have thought the reverse should be the case!
Dr Wale Okediran may not be regarded as a Chronicler of Froissart. But what he has successfully done in this book is to be a master chronicler of travels that leave indelible impressions on one’s mind.
In this book, Okediran-powered Eagle-plane sweeps you down to twenty different cities around in breath-taking speed of Light. You have to hold on tight to the feathers of his Eagle-plane lest you fall off at the highest cruising height. At that height, you are now on auto-piloting with a complete panoramic view of the planet Earth rotating on its axis below you. It’s an exhilarating and enchanting view.
After landing and disembarking, you as a reader now have to hop on his back like a Parrot to follow him to all places, first of all to exit the airports, enter taxis and lodge in hotel rooms. In the hotel rooms, you hop down from his shoulder for him to have his showers and change of dress after which he comes out for breakfast, lunch or dinner at the appropriate time including having snacks on the streets. But most important of all the chores is when he settles down to pen the impressions that he had gathered and punch them into his laptop. You must be able to see him banging away on the keyboard, rotating the cursor back and forth for corrections until the final draft is produced.
The Eagle first landed at Houston, Texas, in far-away United States – God’s own country! Houston, the always bubbling effervescent metropolitan city in the southern United States! Okediran took his readers to one of the universities in Texas – he did not mention the name of the university where he witnessed and participated in his friend’s honorary investiture. He did not also mention this friend’s name.
From Houston, Okediran took us on his Eagle-plane to Istanbul (I like to call it Constantinople, the old name by which this city was called, or Byzantium) – one of the enchanting cities in Turkey (or Turkiye). This is the city named after Emperor Constantine, the founder of the Roman Catholic Church and where many battles were fought for the Christendom. This is also the city where Christianity took root and where many historical events took place. The First and Second Council of Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) while the First and Second Council of Constantinople took place in Constantinople (now Istanbul). For the historians of Christianity, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was the foundation of Christianity wrapped up by Emperor Justinian to ease tensions between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian faction of the Church then. Today, Turkey spread its two hands wide – one to the Western world (Europe) and one to the East (Asia Minor) and that has not been easy for Turkey till date because of its straddling two opposite worldviews and civilisations.
Istanbul (Constantinople or Byzantium) is a fascinating city from all accounts that I have read about the city. Turkey as a country itself has also grown into an above-medium power economically and militarily. No one trifles anymore with Turkey militarily. Turkey some years back (2016 I think) shot down Russian jet fighter(s) and Russia could only gnash its teeth.
One day, I will visit the city especially for its historical importance in the history of Europe and the advent of Christianity.
A take-away lesson from Okediran’s account of his visit to the city is how a country with an acknowledged progressive, secular and democratic past turned, within two generations or thereabout, i.e. from Ataturk to Erdogan, into something previously unimaginable opposite, an Islamic State – with blood-shedding of military officers trying to intervene in the political process. Take note that Turkey, like Iran, is not an Arab nation but only adhere to Islamic religion. Turkey, however, like Nigeria, is sharply divided between Christianity and Islam that often serves as a recipe for religious dissension and conflict.
Off we go to Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Oh! Kigali, the Land of a Thousand Hills! Modern Rwanda is the heart-breaking stories of genocide (man’s inhumanity to man where neighbours take the cudgel against one another) in the early 90s. But this is now the same Rwanda, the heart-warming story conveyed to us through the eyes and stylus of Okediran. The latter is a story of transformation from its gory or sordid past into a glorious paradisiacal present – showing what a determined leadership could do to change lot of things around it by transforming Old Reality to New Reality.
Again, Rwanda straddles Central and East Africa, bounded by Uganda, Burundi and Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. Uganda, Burundi and DRC have also gone through their own upheavals and bloody pasts. Tanzania has been largely spared but not without its own humbling economic travails.
Okediran’s visit to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, no doubt was an emotional turmoil for him. Remember the two famous films: Sometimes in April and Hotel Rwanda? These two films partly capture and show the horrendous pogroms committed during the Rwanda Civil War. Former President Bill Clinton of the United States acknowledged that one of his greatest regrets while in the White House was to do little to stop the genocide.
But the Rwandan genocide also reminds one of what is going on Nigeria today as acknowledged by Dr Okediran’s friend, Professor Chris Ekong. What is currently going on in Nigeria is a slow-motion version of Rwanda went through. In Nigeria, we have witnessed the campaign of terror against the Nigerian State by the Boko Haram terrorist and insurgent group. Today, we are still witnessing ongoing banditry, kidnapping for ransom involving loss of lives and destruction of properties. Nigeria has lost thousands of lives to insecurity since 2009 when Boko Haram started its gruesome killings of innocent people across board. The killings have not stopped till date. Hardly a day or week passes without reports from the media about military encounters with the bandits, terrorists and other groups of criminals resulting in deaths. Lakaruwa (or what was it called?) has also come to join the fray tormenting people in the North-western part of the country.
The only prayer here is that Nigeria should not go the Rwandan way! Amen.
From Kigali, we take off to the United States again – this time around to Alabama. And it was during Fall, when Mother Nature bestow its beauty on the people. Okediran takes us to the “American Magic City” of Birmingham, founded in 1871 and the longest city in the state.
For those who are conversant with the history of the United States, especially the fateful encounters of the Native or Indigenous Americans with the European settlers and colonisers, it is not strange that the name “Alabama” itself is of Indian origin, i.e. the native Americans living in this part of the country before their encounter with the white settlers and colonisers who came from the European continent. In short, what happened in the United States is also not fundamentally different from what happened in Africa before or shortly after the Europeans set their foot in the new world alleged “discovered” by Christopher Columbus. And he who is also familiar with the accounts of what these so-called “discoverers” did wherever they set their foot would be reticent and demure in praising them. President Joe Biden recently went to one of the Indian communities to profusely apologise for what the “white Americans” did to the Natives saying that there was simply no excuse whatsoever for what they did to the Natives.
Okediran renders us stories of colourful encounters with various people during his forty-day stay in the United States, He took us through various countryside landscapes; and colourful were his accounts of the various rivers that he encountered during his stay.
Chapter Five takes us back to Africa, this time around to Libya, the land of Muammar Ghadaffi, now of blessed memory, whose life came to an end during the bloody civil war ignited by the Western powers. Again and again, we see the footprints of predatory modern imperialism in the destruction of a developing country that dared to raise its voice and assert its independence in the truest sense of it.
History of Libya takes us back to the era of city-state of Carthage and the Carthaginians who fought two brutal wars with the Romans in the First and Second Punic War. We are all familiar with the famous exploits of Hannibal!
In this chapter, Okediran came face-to-face with the contradictions more-often-than-not harboured by all dictators of Ghadaffi’s typology. This type of stupefying dictatorship often ends in disaster – exactly the way it did in Libya. Democracy and regular elections help to keep societies in checks and balances while advancing socioeconomic development. This is not to say that democracy does not have its own peculiar in-built problems. But it has proven to be an enduring system of government till date.
Space would not allow this reviewer to take the readers through the rest of the chapters and the various socio-political issues brought out and highlighted by Okediran in this beautiful book that serve as a tour-guide to many cities or countries of the world. Therein lies the strength of this book which offers executive summaries, though couched in literary languages, of the contemporary issues confronted each of the countries and cities visited by this “Ajala” of a man called Wale Okediran.
On the literary plane, Dr Wale Okediran is a master of Word-weaving making a very colourful tapestry like Aso Oke. Take for instance the first paragraph of chapter two of the book. Read it again, slowly, to see the use of figures of speech in an effortless manner. It penetrates the membrane of the mind and streams through the blood cells! The word-crafting gives you not just an impression of a master story-teller but also of sublime poesy to boot!
The fundamental basis of this review is to regard and accept Dr Wale Okediran as a modern prototype of a Ferdinand Magellan, a Vasco da Gama, a Christopher Columbus or better still, our own Ajala, who takes you on his spread Eagle-wing to places, nay cities, around the world – through this book that fits perfectly into one’s trouser pocket or a woman’s handbag. His Eagle-wing is much more comfortable when you perched on it than being inside supersonic Concorde jet or a Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet.
I highly recommend this book to all secondary school students and university undergraduates including what I will call “post-university” adults for the various lessons that can be garnered from the book. It is very rich not only in the simple yet endearing literary prose but also as a glimpse into the histories and socio-political environments of the cities visited and documented by the author.