Peoples’ Planet
Stockholm,
Sweden ( where we’ve just had an election)
Friday, 25th September, 2026
On the brighter side : Al Green : Look What You Done for Me
On the lighter side : Iranian Comedian Djalili : Nigerian Accents
Don Corleone et alia,
With regard to “Truth is stranger than fiction” I rest my case with “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
The idea that “In the beginning there was no word until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world” must be a comforting thought that fulfils a deep psychological need in Don Agozino, bearing in mind the various competing claims being made about Tamil being the oldest language in the world, about Sanskrit as the Language of the Gods, and of course, rabbinically speaking Lashon Hakodesh - the Holy Tongue - and therefrom arising practitioners such as Abraham Abulafia…
Nor should we be unmindful of Arabic - as the Language of the Quran
When the recent miracle of Hebrew (which relatively speaking had fallen into desuetude during the galut) was being resurrected as the national language of Israel in some cases the philologists had to research the etymology of certain words in Arabic…
The way that we see ourselves
and the way that others
see us,
self-critique,
remarkable
some of
our critical selves:
“The change in the day that makes
them rant and rave Black Power!
Black Power! And the change that
comes over them at night, as they
N.B: Let this always be our good starting point:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
As for me,
still black
now that I’m back
at my non-dystopian,
non-humanoid desktop
and knowing what
to do in freedom
(and peace
God forbid,
not concocting
any inane,
AI-aided
stories,
here are the relevant
links to my last post :
Esperanto translation of the Holy Quran
Taking it as for granted that
“The Apparel oft proclaims the man”
and due to the continuing effects of
the trauma known as colonialism
it should really come as no surprise
that highly, or not so highly educated,
dress-to-impress Big Grammar Nigerians 
for whom everything is a coronation or ojare damnation
whose main aim is usually to fancy-dress up
their already Majestic English in order to impress -
shock & awe dazzling form usually more important
than content, ceremoniously announcing the most innocent
of contentions in the gaudiest grab possible - but mostly
only succeeding in obfuscating even the most simple intentions,
and although you were not there, ye Bible Thumpers remember
that they sent a delegation to John the Baptiser to ask him,
“Are you the Messiah? Speak to us plainly “ - in other words,
NO BIG GRAMMAR!
Baba Sho’s village schoolmaster Adekunle
is a classical introduction of a lowly educated fool
attempting to empty the Shorter English Dictionary
all to comic effect actually…
I also take it as for granted that in a linguistically Igbo village the first word that the new born urchin gurgles, is “ Ma-Ma “ whilst the boy-urchin crows “ Pa-Pa “ - two plosives - two syllables. Cornelius Ignoramus doesn’t know how many morphemes would be registered by the tax collector’s meter in Biko Agozino’s Word Bank, but in the highly or lowly educated language community in the dystopian, post-colonial entity we have ( always) the mostly self-appointed & anointed, chest-beating grammar police constables like Kperogi talking about
“infelicities” not to mention what the howlers he deems are featured in “Mangled Trumpian Grammar”
This is a uniquely peculiar phenomenon, particular to Nigeria and it needs to be examined by the indigenes both at home and in the diaspora .
It calls for critical self-examination.
Somewhere along the way, highfalutin corrections of language “infelicities" being committed by highly placed politicians and their wives can be misappropriated by some corrupt, God-forsaken critics - to the extent that Wole Soyinka was falsely accused of criticizing First Lady Patience Jonathan's English - as if those jerks don’t know that Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is not that kind of guy / goy
For some people with temperament,
and here I’m thinking of Shakespeare's Caliban and cursing, this sort of thing could morph into other versions of the advanced word game known as “The Dozens”
and here I’m thinking of straight-shooting Fela Kuti, plain talking about that which he describes as a “wonderful material property" in Army Arrangement ( Part 2)
N.B. 2 specifically to Don Biko Agozino :
my “ Kperogiist thesis “ on Dogo Argentino
will not be Kperogistic in tone or texture,
hopefully, instead of any kind of wannabe trite &
arrogant, high Gradgrindian seriousness
it will be laced and informed with a sense
Don Agozino:
Many thanks for the background information .
BTW, Baba Kadiri has asked me to get him a copy of THE WORD BANK, which means that I’m going to get two copies. Baba Kadiri is a voracious reader. He is currently reading Gowon’s 800 page memoirs!
Me? All I can tell you is that a few decades ago I read an Esperanto translation of the Holy Quran…
Unlike the Big Grammar Nigerians, I really don’t have any respect for the English Language. It is mine of course ( my slave) and I do with it as I please…which does not mean to say that I have no interest in etymology, Greek myths etc, the theatre of the absurd, even poetry…
Circa September ’65 El Rabbino could not quite get syntactic structures around his little head, and apparently, nor could the lecturer in question, one Newman Smart, but we did our duty, we crammed and vomited the formulae and so , sailed through , swimmingly.
Not too long thereafter , Chomsky himself abandoned the syntactic structures project.
And by the way, where is he now?
You shouldn’t have to worry too much about readers such as yours truly because temper-mentally, ” negative capability” is my default position.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on the 8th of October.
Keep your modern, post-colonial fingers crossedThis is being sent from my IPhone ( hence no links)
Cheers
On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 at 09:23, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--Gracias el Rabbi,
I appreciate your interest in my made up story, The Word Bank. Indeed, no one was born with a dictionary sticking in the mouth. It is indubitable that in the beginning there was no word. Verbalism came later, then quickly followed by forbidden words, censorship, and sedition trials. Stolen words are also contested in court as intellectual property, but Castro told doubting journalis that no one has a copyright over the alphabets, and so he has every right to copy medical textbooks to train doctors for free without paying royalties that are so paltry they should be called peasantries.
Realismo is stranger than fictionaliusmo. It was Prophet Edward Said who revealed to us in Orientalismo that when Philology concluded that all human languages, just like all human beings earlier, evolved from a single mother tongue in Africa about 150,000 years ago, the French empire banned the teaching of philology in 1850. The ban was only broken by Noam Chomsky in 1950 with his general theory of linguistics, showing that it is ridiculous to believe that there is a language with no connection to the original word.
Rabbi, you are growing lazy o. It is only a novella. You should read the short thing before critiquing it. I hope that you will read before you complain, it no cost muchas denario.
Thanks for the flattery of comparing my imagination to those of great writers like Kafka.
Biko
On Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 10:51:24 GMT-4, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Don Agozino
( I almost wrote Don Ago-zion)
Freedom , freedom O freedom
( including freedom of speech) yes,
about the beginningless beginning, yes,
therefore, please permit me this little
pedantic extravaganza
Enjoy , yes,
but this is very elementary,
dear Watson:
and exactly what do you mean by
“In the beginning there was no word” ? -
(“ until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world.”) ?
Perish the thought !
Is that kind of ahistorical & fictional Afrocentric thinking
not sheer blasphemy and heresy?
Is it not written in the New Testament - so called , in John 1.1,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ?
So exactly where are you coming from with the preposterous idea , quite a tall claim, that “In the beginning there was no word until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world.” ?
And exactly where was the Tower of Babel?
Do you not risk being charged by the ecclesiastical powers that be, with “impiety and corrupting the youth”?
Sticking to the historical narrative, as Sis Gloria would gladly like to attest, the Ancient Egyptians developed papyrus, and according to AI (higher intelligence Trump’s SI) when it comes to the first alphabet “Semetic-speaking turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula (around Serabit el-Khadim) created the earliest known alphabetic script, known as Proto-Sinaitic, around 1800 BC. “
Anyway,
Kudos ! Mazel Tov ! Turu ugo !
Once upon a time there was
Oliver Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
then Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose
followed by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
followed by Philip Roth waxing erotic with The Breast
followed by Onwubiko Agozino’s The Word Bank
As far as I can remember, I have always wanted to recommend this book to Chidi ( Opara) : Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry by W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis
Since The Word Bank is all of 116 pages , it’s still too early to imagine the full trajectory of whatever given intentions are at its foundations, after having only read the opening pages generously available in the free sample , but since it’s ostensibly about Nigeria a veritable complex microcosm of the post-colonial English Language Empire and its politics, I suppose that in the final analysis, the moral of that latest novel "The World Bank” is likely to be“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men stay silent”
--On Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 13:34:29 UTC+2 Biko Agozino wrote:
In the beginning there was no word until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world. But if it was up to some, words would be owned only by the rich and the rest of us will need copyright permissions to use the alphabets that have already been patented. Years to come children will be laughing at us and wondering how we were made to buy words, save words, invest words, and struggle over words. It is a dystopian Sankofa Futurism. Enjoy.
A new novel published is not always the first written. There is more where that came from.
Biko
On Tuesday, 22 September 2026 at 21:17:27 GMT-4, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Don Agozino:
Great Big & Mighty Congratulations !
It’s entirely wonderful news
“My new fiction” implied two things to Yours Truly:
It’s not some lousy old fiction ( like some uniquely 21st century born-again Africans writing as if Ralph Elllison had never existed) on the contrary, it’s an entirely new direction
You have an earlier publication - an earlier novel - perhaps less revolutionary and therefore merely (old fiction) - in tune with “ What good can come out of Galilee?”
At first my eyes deceived me, because, perhaps out of anticipation, the title that I read was
“THE WORLD BANK” which - spontaneous combustion - got me to react OMG - well, I’ll be darned - - daggers drawn, what to expect but some dire revolutionary brimstone & fire polemic in the name of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Biafra, Walter Rodeny, REPARATIONS, and all the passionate advocates for reparations ( “reparative justice” ) Biko has certainly taken aloof us by surprise, is now going all the way, has now taken off his gloves and with cudgel in hand is going directly for the jugular : THE WORLD BANK (for the reparations & reparative justice cheques)
The sample read is certainly encouraging even if somewhat didactic ( I have never read anything quite like that before) and let this truth be said : The first novel from a professor of sociology and criminology, should always be something to look forward to -
if it’s your very first novel , can we safely assume that there are certain elements of a fictional autobiography in the telling of your story?
BTW - Back then , I hanged my pan after reading Wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood…
On Monday, 21 September 2026 at 13:28:42 UTC+2 Biko Agozino wrote:
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