At first I was amused. It isn't everyday that your country's biggest star's husband goes on instagram and says that she's slept with Don Jazzy, 2Face, and Dr Sid. The ideas were turning in my head. I planned to write an article where I'd joke shamelessly about the conversation that they'd have that night. I stayed aware of the affair as it sent Nigerian twitter into a frenzy. We're all piranhas there, unified only by the scent of blood in the water. I didn't talk about it. I decided that I would only write about it if we all learned that it wasn't true. It's one thing to make fiction with real characters, and it is another to use real tragedies as fodder for your humour.

Tee Billz created what he called a temporary twitter account  and claimed that he had been hacked. That was my call to action. Operation banter atop the head of Tiwa and Tee Billz was a go. I toyed with the idea, pulling it this way and that. I committed nothing to paper and continued to monitor the commentary on twitter. And then it happened: the whisper of a suicide attempt. He stood on the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge with the intention of finding a watery death. Operation dance azonto with the gist died a quick death. I will joke about many things but I will not joke about mental health.

Mental health illnesses are dangerously common, but even more dangerously silent. You may never notice it in another, but it'll be there all the same, lurking. There may be a trigger, or they may not be. They say that one in four of us will suffer from one. I have been the one in the four. At the time I believed that I was alone, but I wasn't. Friends came through in ways I didn't think possible and my mother hauled ass on my behalf. I'd always heard that it took a village to raise a child, I did not know then that it also took a village to save one. The therapist, the GP, the friends, the family, and everyone else in between, all working to see this one through.

I cannot say that what worked for me will work for you or your friend, or your mother, or your father. All that matters is that you find something that works because there's nothing worse than losing someone with the knowledge that you did not try. Even now the village tries.

They no longer greet me with how are you doings. When they ask me how I'm doing, they don't want to hear fine. They want to know where I am in relation to the 'D'.

When I saw the posts by some of his contemporaries on Instagram I was surprised and then I was disappointed. I suppose it would have been fine if there was no stigma attached to suicide and mental illness, but you can't change the fact that there is. If you cannot reach out to people that you claim to be close to with sensitivity when they're suicidal, then maybe you shouldn't at all. It is already hard enough dealing with it in private, how much more difficult is it when your friends are the ones fueling twitter's curiosity?

You must understand that the person who tries to die by their own hand does not do so because he or she is so forlorn that death suddenly seems appealing. It is because their invisible pain has reached a height that is unendurable. The fear of death doesn't disappear, it is that the terror of life is greater.

It is similar to the way one man jumped out of the twin towers during the 9/11 attacks. He was probably just as scared of jumping as anyone would be but there was a building collapsing around him. It was a terror so great that it exceeded the fear of falling.

You may look at him or her and say don't. But you cannot understand it. You'd have to have walked through his fire and his flames to - and maybe not even then.

I showed up on time. I was turning 26. At 26 you may not have your entire life figured out, but you must have the qualities that speak to a better future than your present. The bank of mum and dad grates, and moving back home to live with your parents feels like a curse.

I was happy about being on time. There is a confidence that only punctuality can bring. A few minutes on the right side of time make for a readiness that words cannot describe. My newfound awareness of time proved to be unnecessary on the day because Sleame was late.

Sleame is a new addition to my realm of friends. He is somewhere between acquaintance and friend. The promotion from acquaintance to friend isn't something that is easily achieved. I regard my friends as treasures gifted by life. There is a friend for every occasion and then there are the friends for the end. It is my brothers and sisters for the end that I regard most highly. It is they that hold you when everything else fails.

We were meant to be jumping on trampolines at the Oxygen in Acton. He showed up two hours late with excuses and apologies scattered in a way that only the tardy can be. I didn't mind too much. I'm not one to sit around idle and count the minutes. There was a novel I'd been putting off. If he had been on time, I may never have started it.

The trampolines were a regression to childhood. It turned out that jumping from trampoline to trampoline, bouncing off the walls, spinning from right to left and left to right, touching heels and toes, all in mid air were all I could ever ask for. There was a purity to my joy. Chicken soup for my soul.

#theweekof26

A video posted by D.A.O (@troambyafam) on Apr 20, 2016 at 10:45am PDT

Mid front flip, I discovered that some of the keys to the future lie in moments lived before. Some times to be 26, you must first remember what it felt like to be seven.

Happy Days,
Afam

One of the best things about being Nigerian is how we speak. We don't speak Nigerian, but our English is truly spectacular. We use words like crinkum-crankum and discombobulate and then we colour them with expressions like kpoto-kpoto, and aboki. Some of the best Nigerian writing isn't found in our books, it's on twitter and some of it is on this blog called zikoko.com.

Zikoko isn't profound or anything like that, but everything that they put up is worth at least a chuckle.

The Nigeria expression I'm crazy about at the moment is borropose. It's a marriage of borrow and pose, and it happens when you lend something to a friend and he or she rocks it like it's theirs. Say you've worked your arse off for a Land Rover Discovery 4, and a friend of yours borrows it for a night. In the morning, you wake up to an instagram feed filled with pictures of your friend sitting on the roof with a bottle of Champagne and captions like God is good and #blessed. The nerve!

As silly as I think the practice is I am not above it. Last week, I sent my only jacket to the dry cleaners. I had worn it for about six months, and it smelled like a homeless person. It was a necessary move because I have never known eau de homeless to do anything good for anyone, but it meant that I had nothing that could cope with the icy nights head.

I went to my neighbour for assistance. A few weeks before, I'd seen him in this thick too cool for school number. It was the sort of jacket that I'd look at with longing but never buy. When I buy clothes, I think of the future. If I can't see myself wearing it in five years, then I turn my eyes from it and get something else. This coat was one of those, perfect for 25 but useless for 28.

When I put it on it was like a spirit descended upon me. I felt bolder, younger and wiser. I didn't need anyone to tell me that I looked cool, I knew it in my heart of hearts. It wouldn't have mattered very much if I actually looked like an idiot because I was immune.

Typically before I get dressed I ask myself WWED. That is what would Erkel do. When you're black and you're short and you wear glasses and your idea of a good afternoon is one spent in Waterstones, you don't have many style icons to choose from. No matter what you wear the Erkel will shine through.

And that's how I went to the cool kids capital. Strutting like a deranged Ostrich, and starting dance battles I couldn't finish. When the night was over, I returned the jacket. Spirit animals shouldn't be so casually displayed. They lack home training.

When people say that they do not like Beyonce, there is only one question to ask.

When did your fave ever?

If you do not like her work, then you cannot like work. If you do not like what she does, then you cannot like popular music. Her performances are singularly stellar. She sounds as good live as she does on her records, and she's probably the only singer alive today that can sustain a full belt through an incredibly intense dance break.

In Hold Up she sings, "what's worse being jealous or crazy?" And then she answers that she'd rather be crazy. That's clear because only a crazy person would release an album on the weekend that Prince died. Anyway you think about it that is something that most people know not to do. We only have room for so much. This weekend I only had room for Prince. I only wanted his extra time and his kisses. Everything else and everyone else was irrelevant. In the thick of my youtube Prince education, I forgot about the HBO promo that she'd made a week before.

I'm a tangential member of the Beyhive. I'm the prodigal Bee. Some of you live there all year round, in years of bounty and in years of drought. I only come round when there's new material. As a result it is no surprise that I wasn't among the first to write, but I'm fairly sure that I won't be the last.

There's an essay on the Daily Mail where Piers Morgan writes that he believes that Beyonce's a born again black woman using her new found blackness for commercial purposes. This opinion isn't just wrong, it's racist. For as long as there has been music, musicians have farmed their personal experiences for material. Some have formed entire careers off the premise that they've been shot nine times. Rags to riches stories are as common as the discovery of sex or a new found love of the powers of marijuana. Why should stories of blackness be treated any differently?

I can all but guarantee that if Beyonce had began her solo career by wearing her blackness on her sleeve she wouldn't be as huge as she is. At best she'd be Azealia Banks and at worst her career would be a gravestone in the realm of the hasbeens and the no longer relevant. Instead she hid her black girl magic in very catchy but relateable riffs about being crazy in love. Themes so relateable that her race was invisible. You may ask why she's chosen 2016 to come out with it, but the truth is you wouldn't have listened if she'd done it in 2003. In 2003 you could have ignored her, now you can't.

There is no one in this generation that could have done it as well as she. No one can tell stories about the black woman like the black woman. It is unfortunate that there are so few mouthpieces left with as much reach. When she speaks she turns the world into her echo chamber. You'll see the black power symbol at the Superbowl, and stop shooting us will find your eyes on MTV. On HBO you'll hear "if it's truly what you want, I can wear her hair over mine, her skin over mine, her hands as gloves, and her teeth as confetti."

In that you'll get a glimpse into what black girls the world round think before every job interview, as they think about the weave they'll have to wear, or the perm they'll have to get. It's what the girl that wrote to Lupita thought about while she considered buying Dencia's Whitenicious bleaching cream.
Maybe now that she's revealed her black heart, other people won't try so hard to hide theirs.

There are two ways to enjoy Lemonade. You can watch the hour long film with its black girl magic and pride, or you can listen to the songs in isolation. Both offer different experiences. When you listen to the music on its own, it's a similar Beyonce to the one you've always known. Her voice is still impeccable, her range is still breathtaking. You will be surprised that its the most genreless album she's ever made. There's rock, country, reggae, pop and R&B. It makes sense. One as gifted as she should not have to exist in boxes.

When you watch the film, you see it for what it is. Stories that touch from a black woman to the world.

"You're blacker than I remember." A friend said. I would be lying if I didn't admit to knowing what he meant. He met me when I lived in Nigeria. You're never blacker than when your blackness is challenged. There were no challenges to my skin there. Every face was as dark as mine.

I walked into the Hawksmoor on Air Street with Obi. The Hawksmoor is one of those places that you go to spite your wallet. It doesn't matter that you lose the battle in the end. All that matters is that you rebelled. There was something that said that you could not, and you showed it that you could.

We walked in off the street, without a reservation. Our reception was hesitant, maybe even cold. We said two for drinks and they said they'd see if they had room. Moments like that are dangerous when you're black. You may never say it, but you'll surely always think it. You'll ask yourself if it's because you don't look like the vast majority of their customers, and then the words of your parents will come back to haunt you. "Dress the way you'd like to be addressed." I wonder why I didn't wear a blazer and a shirt. My distressed jacket is more Shoreditch than Piccadilly.

We were taken up and the bar was empty. Obi whispered, "racism."

I didn't think it before he said it, but the moment he did, I considered it.

"No they can't possibly be racist!" I said.

"Do you ever use your inside voice?" Obi asked.

Two minutes later, our ten minute wait for someone to take our order came to an end. The waiter was so friendly that I was uncomfortable. I thought that it had to be because I'd said the R word. It had to be. What else could lead to a change in attitude so profound that I thought that it seemed like they had been arrested by the Holy Ghost?

R word or no I'll return. There's really no better place for an Esspresso Martini, and their steaks are divine. Is that wrong?

To be Nigerian is to share a bed with tragedy. You wake up with it. You work with it, and you sleep with it. I do not like to talk about being Nigerian because when I do I sound like a wife battered within an inch of her life by her abusive husband. You will tell me, "Terrible things happened in your relationship." And I'll say, "I know, but I believe he can change." You will tell me that he's hurt me in every way that a person can be hurt, and I'll say, "I can't give up on him. There is good in there somewhere." Then you'll look at me like I'm an idiot and I'll smile and say, "I'm in love with him, and even if I wasn't I don't have anywhere else to go. He is my home."

Like I said, it sounds like an abusive relationship.

I could go on about my tragedies, and all the ways I think my country has failed me. The list would be long. To a person with first world problems, my stories would inspire shock and awe. They may even move you to tears. Most people learn that life can be dark through singular catastrophes. I learned through fire trucks that couldn't put out fires, and friends burnt beyond recognition. But for a lot of my countrymen, my stories are the first world of the third world.

Last week CNN showed the first images of the Chibok girls in two years. I remember when it happened. I was in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital. At first we were not sure what happened. The numbers started at 85. Over the weekend, the military said that over a hundred of them had been rescued. And then the following week, it was revealed that none of them had been rescued and that the true figures were somewhere around 250. Even then, we were mostly silent.

I do not believe that our silence was borne of a lack of empathy. It may have been the shock of it. Some times it takes a little longer than the 24 hour news cycle for a news story to really hit home. Saratu the team leader of the Testimonial Archive Project - an organisation that documents the testimonies of those who survive the violence in North Eastern Nigeria said in the Guardian: "This is not the first time abductions have happened. This has been going on for half a decade. Boko Haram have had radical elements, which grew in prominence – and boldness – over the past three years, and it has been abducting girls ever since. I'm sure our government knew this has been happening for years. So my guess is they figured: 'What's one more?' They probably thought it would blow over."

I cannot say that this was why it took two weeks for our then President Goodluck Jonathan to speak about it, but it seemed that way at the time. And even when our government did speak, they seemed as ill informed and unprepared for it as we were. When the president's wife wailed about it, her crocodile tears were too little to late. Performed with great pomp and circumstance and no action. Her husband didn't even have the balls to visit the site of the devil's rapture.

There were protests in Abuja and Lagos. For weeks it was all anyone would talk about on twitter. Our government said that it was doing all that it could to bring them back, but only an idiot would have believed them. The last governments legacy will be its public devotion to the God, and its even larger devotion to cash. They weren't even sensitive enough to use the efficacy of Panama. This is why when the Brits rallied against David Cameron and called for him to resign, I laughed and thought, "I'll trade you our Goodluck for your David."

After a while, the noise died, and it was business as usual. You would hear one day that girls had been rescued, and you would think that they were the ones from Chibok. You would hear the next day that they weren't. It is difficult to deal with this sort of media rollercoaster while queueing 5 hours for petrol so you can get to work the next day, and going home to the fumes of melting candle wax.

Even now that new footage of them has emerged, we will talk about them for a week, while we queue for petrol and fight for dollars. Our government will dance a merry jig, and the rest of us will dance some version of the Lagos hustle.

If you are Nigerian you have been hurt. Someone somewhere has made a decision that has wounded you. With every act of corruption and every misplaced dollar someone has died. Politics isn't a game that the powerful play. It is the sword by which our lives are decided. When the sword hangs above us, slicing at will decade after decade you forget that it is there. It becomes a natural disaster when it really isn't. Your so called heavenly calamity is Bukola Saraki's million dollar house on 17 McDonald in Ikoyi, one of Lagos' pockets of wealth.

So why aren't you angry? Have you become so numb that the kidnapping of 200 teenage girls is not even worth a week of nightly tweets?

When the acclaimed directors Joel and Ethan Coen, were asked about the lack of diversity in their newest film Hail Caesar, they were defensive. Ethan said, "It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity -- or it might not." And Joel said, “It’s an absolute, absurd misunderstanding of how things get made to single out any particular story and say, ‘Why isn’t this, that or the other thing [included]?’”

For the most part I agree. The most important part of any film is the story that it tells, and more frequently than not, stories do not come with the thought that every race must be represented in their telling. However, it is one thing to make a film where all the characters with speaking roles are white, and it is another to build a world where people of colour simply do not exist.

This is the case in Hail Caesar. It is set in the 1950s in Hollywood. If the world they depicted is to be believed, the only people who were not white in Hollywood at the time were two Asians who worked in a Chinese restaurant.

I was slow to come to this conclusion. I had gone through about three quarters of the film before I realised that there was no one that looked like me in it. It would not have bothered me if the film was one of those dramas with only four characters and one location, but this was not the case. Of the 231 people that were featured in the film, only two did not appear to be white.

When people argue for diversity in film, there are always some quick to warn against the dangers of tokenism. Some skip the tokenism argument in its entirety and say, "well we looked, and we didn't find any that were suitable." If we were to consider these points as reasons why films aren't diverse then we would have to consider the following.

• There were no people of colour in Hollywood in the 1950s.
• There were no extras of colour available at the time. 

The very suggestion that those two are true is ridiculous. It's like you turning up to a class at university to find that your lecturer is a goat who believes that the world is flat.

This is one of the weird ones without any conclusion because I'm still stunned that I didn't see a single black face in two hours. Usually, there's a pimp, a prostitute, a drug dealer, a waiter, or a corrupt African junta from a fictional African country with a South African accent even when we know that the fictional country is somewhere between Gambia and Cameroon. So today I thank the Coen brothers for teaching me that there is something worse than being typecast and misrepresented and that's not being represented at all.

Happy Days,
Afam

There comes a time in the life of every blogger (by every blogger I mean me), when he must write about something that he may not have written about otherwise. This is one of those times. Now this one isn't for blatant profiteering. It's for something a lot more valuable: the bonds of the friendship contract. This particular contract allows for the sharing of favours.

I send Obi a lot of my material before it sees the light of day and he gives his feedback at all hours of the day. Obi in turn demands that I send him all invitations and press passes that find their way into my inbox.

This one is about Ferona. Ferona's a couturier that's recently opened up shop in Lagos. Their shop's on Karimu Kotun in Victoria Island.

According to their website, they are renowned for relevant couture that offers versatility, function, and wearability.

 A handy thing if you ask me, a dress that only lives for a day is a waste of money. I'm an expert in the versatility of clothes. You can ask my 3 pairs of jeans, 15 shirts and four pairs of shoes about this. I'm sure they'll agree

The clothes look like this.
And have this sort of vibe



If I were ever in need of a dress I would probably look there.

This is a thing that could actually happen. There's nothing I won't do for a good costume party. I don't think my costume leanings will ever transition to a full blown lifestyle change but who knows? All I can say at this point is that I quite enjoy manliness and the fact that walking in high heeled shoes isn't a skill that I ever forsee being required of me.

Every piece they make is created using traditional haute couture embroidery techniques and extraordinary age old couture secrets. I don't know what those are, but they certainly do sound impressive. If my tailor ever said those words to me, my eyes would become starry, and I'll squeal like a pig while my wallet weeps tears of blood and sings, "You will never ever ever... Get out of debt."

What can I say, it's what happens when Champagne sensibilities meet Cider realities.

Happy Days,
Afam

I must apologise to the lot of you for disappearing. It's something that I do rather well. I'd like to complain about my lot, and give you some deep unmeaningful excuse about the ways that all the stars needed to align before I wrote something, but you don't care about all of that. You want the blogs regular, and to a certain standard. And I want my links retweeted, and my greatness praised. I'm well aware that I may not be that great, but that's not the issue. Egos must be stroked and compliments must be fished. My self esteem is a truly fragile thing.

So I'm sorry. And back to regular programming. If I take another leave of absence, it won't be without an explanation.

Happy Days,
Afam