I looked at my Twitter feed this morning and saw this tweet. An early birthday present? How sweet! I love Nigeria and Nigeria loves me… so much, they’ve made me a celebrity. I am thrilled to have my butoh-vocal theatre work recognized. Love and blessings to all.

#DidYouKnow that @edoheart is the 1st performer to combine Japanese Butoh with singing,talking & experimental vocalizations #CelebsFacts9ja

— 9ja Celebrity Facts (@CelebsFacts9ja) April 8, 2013

Dear Friends, I’ve got a new EP out, a SICK new music video, an ART/TREK NYC single, a remix contest with Akwaaba Music, was just on a TV show; am planning an EP release party, new artistic collaborations and works in visual art and dance… Amen! But something pressing on my mind at the moment is Nigeria’s oil-subsidy and Boko Haram wahala, the Arab Spring movements liberating the globe, our escalating misunderstanding with Iran and the Occupy movement. If you’ve ever shared one plate of eba and okro soup with Mama, bros, some visiting ogas and the area pikins, you know the short-limbed or thoughtful will leave the table hungry. It’s time to DO SOMETHING. I want to ask you a question: is the status quo sustainable and if not, what must change? Must we forever break our heads over history’s unequal partitioning of power? I present an article from a website whose listserve I’m on- Otedo.com. It forwards me scholarly writings by Africans (mostly Edo-oid). Consider this surprising proposition about how to FIKS AFRIKA:

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Give Africa back to its traditional rulers!

The post colonial leaders in Africa have been a disgusting assortment of military coconut-heads, Swiss bank socialists, quack revolutionaries, crocodile liberators, briefcase bandits, kamikaze looters, vampire elites, and crackpot democrats. They only know how to do 3 things very well:

1. Loot the treasury.
2. Brutalize and squelch all dissent and opposition to their misrule,
3. Perpetuate themselves in office.

Ask them to develop their countries and they will develop their pockets. Ask them to seek “foreign investment” and they will invest their loot in a foreign country.

Name me just 10 African leaders who do not fit this bill.

Give Africa back to its traditional rulers. In traditional Africa, chiefs and kings are chosen; they do not choose and impose themselves or stupid alien ideologies on their people. Further, chiefs and kings are held accountable at all times for their actions and are removed if they do not govern according to will of the people.

Go back and re-read the history of the Oyo Kingdom, Benin Empire and the Ashanti Empire, which was governed with an elaborate system of checks and balances in the 17th Century — well before the U.S. became a nation. The modern leadership is a despicable disgrace to black Africa. They are a far cry from the traditional leadership Africa has known for centuries.

And get this, Lil Joe. Africa has not just a traditional political culture and heritage based upon consensus but also an economic heritage of free village markets, free enterprise and free trade. Challenge this. Marxism was never part of indigenous African economic heritage. Get that straight.

I am fed up with quack revolutionaries and crackpot intellectuals who seek to impose alien ideologies and systems on the African people. There is nothing wrong with Africa’s own indigenous institutions; nor does Africa have to reject them in order to develop. The Japanese, Koreans and other Asians did not have to reject their culture in order to develop. Only educated zombies think Africa has to. The continent is littered with the putrid carcasses of failed imported systems. Now we are being told to go Chinese! Such stupidity.

Africa’s salvation lies in returning to and building upon its own indigenous institutions. Africa’s salvation does NOT lie in the corridors of the World Bank, the inner sanctum of the Chinese politburo. Nor does Africa’s salvation lie in the steamy sex antics of cockroaches on Jupiter!

George Ayittey,
Washington, DC

(Culled from yahoo internet conversation)

Direct Link: http://ihuanedo.ning.com/group/owaafrica/forum/topics/give-africa-back-to-its-traditional-rulers?xg_source=msg_mes_network

You Must Be Born in Africa

A polemic prose poem by Edoheart

If you are not born in Africa, you cannot be African. Your mother must be poorly educated, must have walked miles barefoot selling pepper, must dream of America, where nobody gives a fuck about real Africans and cares only for African decorations, be they musics, fabrics or fashion models. If you are African, you must be born to an African mother in Africa who can only afford to eat peanuts and drink bottles of warm Coca-Cola. She is descended from an ancient royal family but Europe and America have desecrated and confused this into meaninglessness and abject poverty so that your 80-year old grandmother walks everywhere even in monsoons. Your growth in this womb to term, on a diet of peanuts and Coca-Cola, on a exercise regimen of 14-hour, 110 degrees Fahrenheit market days is the first improbable miracle that forms the destiny of your African-ness. You must be born in Africa to be African. You must be descended from the continent where Europe and America come to steal shit, fuck shit up and give nothing back. You must be born here. Pesticides, insecticides and vaccines not fit for use anywhere else on Earth must be sprayed on or around or injected into your mother, so that the extreme multiple intelligences with which you are nevertheless born is a testament to the superiority of your African gene pool. But you will most probably be of small stature. You might be born premature; regardless, you must be born in Africa to be African. The hospital in which you are born must be dark and desperate because there is never any electricity or running water, understaffed due to brain drain, without the most basic of medical supplies, so that your very survival of this second passage through the birth canal deserves a Nobel prize for perseverance. After this, to be African, your first breaths must be of air choked with kerosene or gasoline exhaust. Because there is never any electricity or running water, your first lullabies, if you are lucky, must be of generators spewing kerosene at 120 decibels into the bedroom you share with several relatives because Christianity or Islam colonized you and now your mother practices no birth control and thus you sleep with several brothers and/or sisters on mats on the cold ground. When you see computers or clothes, they are always castoff American items; they are missing lots of buttons but somehow you manage to convince a gullible American to send you money through the Internet. This is due to your superior intellect and desperation. The members of your government, installed and propped up by Europe or America, are stealing all the money your country makes and spending it in Europe or America. Europe or America will send you billions in aid at the next famine but this is of course a tiny percentage of the trillions that the members of your government have lost to Europe and America in diamonds, oil, precious metals, rare earths and slaves since they made each other’s acquaintance. In fact, the famine is partially due to Europe and America’s refusal to grant you equal trade powers but they will blame you for your poor accounting methods. You must develop asthma. You must almost die of malaria; viruses must attack your blood so often the viruses become afraid of your blood for failure’s sake. Note that if you are lucky enough to leave Africa for America, Americans will also be afraid of your blood. You will not be able to donate blood nor will anyone who has ever fucked you be able to donate blood; your blood becomes unfit for human consumption by virtue of having been born-in-Africa. This is the most important reason you must be born in Africa to be African. Why, if they let you give your blood, you might start selling it, you might have a little money left over after sending money back home to Africa; with the money you saved from selling your blood, you might have time to organize your thoughts; you might have time to consider the unconscionable and lasting disadvantages of having been born in Africa where your educational textbooks were castoff, obsolete, nonlinear, falling-apart, with misspelled words. You might employ your superior intellect in changing the world. This cannot be. Why, what would the world be without poor African souls born in Africa, their blood bearing Africa? Hungry, I imagine.

Dear friends,

It’s been a long time since I updated this blog. Thanks to you all who are following! Things have been wild and surprising since my last post.

I was accepted to NYU – Tisch’s Performance Studies Master’s program and have been reading all sorts of beautiful, inspiring and complicated theories about the ways we humans perform ourselves and our identities and how we structure society and experience…

I made a trip to Nigeria in which I narrowly missed being in Abuja on the same day of a bombing that claimed many lives.

I’ve also gotten into a television series that will premiere on channel 25 here in NYC but that’s another story for another time.

Before I began my studies at NYU, I collaborated with some friends on a new and I think, final, installment in my Fire Butoh Series that began in 2007.

I have been very emotionally affected by fire all my life. The basement of of our first house in America caught on fire once… and I’m a fire sign. Fire keeps us warm, lights our way in the dark, cooks our food and dances. I hoped to be that magical and have given much consideration to this living organism, fire.

Without further ado, I present to you, “Fire Butoh 4!”

Thanks to Mikhail Torich, Teddy Bonsu, Kristen Bacino and Bryant Keller for all their help on this shoot! Lots of love!! -E.