Pepper market at Oja Oba, ilorin, kwara state. Nigeria.
Day of anticipation , day of give-and-take;
day that lights the community as one flame
Welcomes strangers to our midst, welcomes even our dead now constumed in alien habits.
On market eves spirit hold a large fair to prepare for daylight display of wares.
In this market I can no longer get my needs, the same market that filled my forebears.
Where is the home-grown bean dish that sat living, dead, and tortoise yo consort with greed?
Where is the palm oil red in its aroma that led spirits by the nose to swim in the bottle?
Where is the outlay of fabrics from home cotton that constumed the chameleon chieftain of fashion?
O market god , conjurer god of the milling place, god of colours, god of flavours and the hand-made,
fill the market with the items that tales passes to us but we now find beyond our means in distant places:
snails men shunned as women's food till they tasted the delicacy and always asked for them to round up;
Porcupine meat that bristles covered till cooked for the salivating mouth to devour in banga soup!
Fresh fish that with lemon leaves for dinner cut short children's play outside before elders consumed all,
Yams and beans that knocked out every adult and laid them flat to daydream in a world that is gone;
cherries and mangoes earned children their first coins; left them constipated from leftovers of their secret feast.........
O god of gathering places, watchful but distracted eyes, sever yourself from new gods that cut you down
from pre-eminent status to a wandering beggar .
Are you not the fabled spirit of abundance?
Welcome strangers as always- they enrich us- but take out preachers, arsonists, and robbers;
bring back produce and products of our hands; fill sheds with what stories credits you with pride:
What the soil brings forth through tendering, the game and fish that sustain healthy ones.
Let all the cardinal points bring buyers and sellers, let nearby and distant ones come to marvel.
at the original wealth, the song of abundance : a collision of colours, the spectacle of good life. . . . . . .
