Public memory of the Ogoni struggle centres on Ken Saro-Wiwa and the men of MOSOP, with the executions of the Ogoni Nine marking its climax. Lost in this framing are the women whose labour and strategies carried the movement in less visible but equally vital ways. Their story shows that resistance was never only about defiance in public squares but also about the quiet, radical work of survival.

Erasing the Women of Ogoni

The story of Ogoni resistance, like many activist histories, has too often been framed through the lives and actions of men, sidelining the women whose struggles and defiance are its unacknowledged core. The women who carried that struggle in different registers, whose lives bore the sharpest weight of oil exploitation and state repression, remain in the shadows of public memory. Their names are rarely remembered, their labour rarely acknowledged, their grief rarely given political weight. To speak of Ogoni resistance as if it belongs only to men is to narrate the history of a wound while ignoring the flesh that absorbed most of the pain.

This erasure is not accidental. In Nigeria's collective memory, the highest form of resistance is often equated with martyrdom, the willingness to die for the cause. Such narratives elevate public sacrifice and execution, images of male heroism, while relegating women's survival work to the margins. Yet this very survival, expressed in daily acts of care, rebuilding, nonviolent protest, and the teaching of younger generations, was what allowed the struggle to continue after the hangings. By glorifying only the spectacle of death, society forgets the endurance that made ongoing resistance possible. To take women seriously, then, is to broaden the meaning of political action beyond martyrdom, to recognize that sustaining life in the face of annihilation is itself a radical form of defiance.

Even decades later, women still describe the devastation in language that echoes both loss and endurance. In Barabeedom, 65-year-old farmer Taagaalo Christina Dimkpa Nkoo said, "The oil came down and destroyed everything. The oil doesn't allow yams or anything to grow. We cannot live well anymore." In nearby Kegbara Dere, widow and mother of seven Barine Ateni lamented, "We have no hope for our children in this community." These voices remind us that the struggle was not only about who died for the land, but about who stayed behind to live in its aftermath.

Oil politics in women's lives

For Ogoni women, the politics of oil was not an abstraction. It was not simply a matter of state policy, or multinational greed debated in conferences or printed in communiqués. It was soil under fingernails that would no longer yield yam. It was rivers too blackened to fish from, water that reeked of crude oil, children coughing through the night, miscarriages that could not be explained, harvests that shrank with each passing season. As one Ogoni woman described the devastation in an interview, "We are hungry and we plant and nothing comes of it, because they have drawn all the oil from us. If you plant cassava, it does not grow. You will not harvest yam that will amount to any type of yam that you can eat because the oil has polluted everything." In Bodo, women describe how this pollution seeps into their bodies as well as their soil. Eunice Goni said, "Since we started having oil spillage here, my sight has been affected. I cannot see well again. I have chest pain because they said the polluted environment has also affected my lungs." She recalled losing a baby who was born deformed and died after three days. Another woman, Janet Baakem, said, "My period is not coming again. I was seeing it before but the thing stopped. I went to hospital, and after the test, the doctor told me that something is wrong with my body system. He said the problem is from crude oil spill." Her neighbour, Easter Barisi Berebon, added, "I am affected too. I have the same problem, which many women in this community are having."

To be a woman in Ogoniland during the years of relentless oil extraction was to live at the edge of scarcity and anxiety. They were the ones expected to turn barren farmland into food, to soothe hungry children when the plantain could no longer grow, to tend to the sick when illness spread through contaminated streams. The destruction of the environment was also the destruction of women's economic power, their autonomy, their dignity. What is often recorded in reports as "environmental degradation" was experienced in kitchens and farms as the daily erosion of life itself.

The human rights abuses in the Delta are starkly gendered, revealing oil politics as a form of patriarchal warfare. During the 1990s military crackdowns, soldiers deployed to protect oil interests turned women's bodies into battlegrounds. Rape was wielded as a weapon to humiliate and fracture communities, with women assaulted in their homes, fields, and during protests. Homes were razed, leaving women to rebuild families from rubble. In the aftermath, many became sole providers, stretching meagre resources to feed children on land that no longer gave. The chaos of petro-conflict also fuelled human trafficking, with young Ogoni girls lured into exploitation under false promises of urban jobs, a grim echo of colonial plunder where women's bodies are just another resource to extract. These atrocities expose the complicity of a patriarchal state, its male elites brokering deals with foreign corporations while women bear the human cost. The trauma of these experiences is not easily recorded in the language of political history, yet it lingers in the silences of survivors, in the hesitations of daughters who inherit unspoken fear. When we speak of "human rights abuses" in Ogoni communities, we often catalogue deaths, detentions, executions. But the quiet devastation of women's lives, the humiliations, the assaults, the psychological scars, remains harder to archive, and therefore easier to ignore. And yet these are as central to the story of the Ogoni struggle as Saro-Wiwa's execution. As Esther Kiobel, widow of executed leader Barinem Kiobel, reflects on the ongoing pollution, "All the land, and water that we use for fishing, it is all polluted. People are dying; young people, the old, children."

Women's resistance and organizing

The Ogoni women carried a double burden: the violence of the oil economy and the silence of patriarchal erasure. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP, is rightly remembered as one of the most significant grassroots mobilisations in Nigerian history. Its rallies drew tens of thousands. Its Ogoni Bill of Rights articulated demands for self-determination and environmental justice in language that reverberated around the world. Yet the public archive predominantly captures male leaders like Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barinem Kiobel, and Ledum Mitee, their images and voices overshadowing the women who were equally vital to the struggle. The women were present in those rallies, in those moments, but their visibility was quickly dissolved into the collective. When histories are written, women often appear as "the crowd," as "wives" or "mothers of," never as strategists, thinkers, or organisers in their own right. Their forms of political labour, which often happened away from the spectacle of mass protest, are too easily dismissed as peripheral.

Resistance was never only in the streets. In the early 1990s, thousands of women organised under groups like the Federation of Ogoni Women's Associations, an arm of MOSOP, to confront oil companies head-on. Their protests were not marked by violence but by the moral weight of their presence. As Karalole, a FOWA member, recounted their defiance against Shell, "They were ready to take the oil, and we told them they would no longer take the oil. Even in Dere, they packed up and left." In 2002, Ogoni women staged a radical act of defiance, threatening to strip naked before Shell's facilities, a cultural taboo that could invoke ancestral curses and force temporary shutdowns. This was no mere spectacle, it was a feminist reclaiming of their bodies as instruments of power, a declaration that the land's desecration was their desecration. FOWA's resolution captured this resolve: "It is resolved that Shell cannot and must not be allowed in Ogoni...we say no to Shell as it remains Persona non grata in Ogoni." Women like Esther Kiobel, whose husband Barinem Kiobel was executed alongside Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995, stood resilient to the violence of oil politics.

Esther, along with Victoria Bera, Blessing Eawo, and Charity Levula, widows of other executed Ogoni leaders, carried the struggle beyond the protests, pursuing justice against Shell for its alleged complicity in their husbands' deaths. As Esther explains her loss, "My husband was killed because his God gave oil to his land." Their legal battles transformed grief into a public demand for accountability, amplifying the Ogoni cause on international stages. Yet their efforts were part of a wider tapestry of women's resistance. Ogoni women organised around markets, creating informal networks of support when families lost income to polluted farmland. They performed mourning rituals that carried both grief and defiance, transforming funerals into public indictments of the state. They passed stories from one generation to the next, making sure that even when newspapers distorted or suppressed the truth, memory would survive in the mouths of women. These forms of action rarely made headlines, but they sustained the movement in ways that were crucial. Survival itself became political. To keep a household fed in a time of ruin, to keep memory alive when silence was safer, to continue planting in oil-soaked land, was to declare that the Ogoni would not be erased.

Ogoni women are indigenous, poor, and marginalised within their own communities, their voices often drowned by male-dominated narratives. Still, their resistance offers a model of justice: pragmatic, collective, and rooted in cultural wisdom. They have organised clean-up campaigns, documented abuses for international audiences, and advocated for policies that prioritise women's health and economic needs. As Glory Basi, part of a mangrove restoration project led by the Lokiaka Community Development Centre, explained, "We didn't even have fish, periwinkles or crabs in our rivers. But now, because Lokiaka trained us how to plant mangroves and restore them back, all these things have been restored." Their work challenges the superficial "femocracy" of state-sponsored gender initiatives, which offer token representation while ignoring the structural violence of oil extraction. Even within resistance movements, women's contributions are often sidelined, their non-violent strategies overshadowed by the louder drums of militancy. But their persistence redefines resistance itself. Sometimes it is a woman washing oil off her child's skin and refusing to let the child believe that this is normal. Sometimes it is a grandmother planting cassava again and again in soil that refuses to yield, because she cannot accept a future where there is no food. Sometimes it is a widow telling her daughter the story of how her husband was taken, making sure that silence does not triumph. These gestures are small only if one refuses to see the magnitude of what they resist.

Persistence and remembrance

Even after the executions of the Ogoni Nine, when international outrage briefly focused attention on Nigeria, the structural violence endured by women continued. The oil spills did not stop. Gas flaring continued. Women were left to rebuild in the ruins. Dr. Patience Osaroejiji from Eleme said, "There are a lot of dangers that are happening to us the Ogoni women in our land. There is so much hunger, there is poverty and the worst of it is that men do not have any livelihood here, our children finished school no job for them. So the women who take care of the home, they don't have the livelihood again." Chief Mrs. Augustina Biebie, a community women leader, added, "The spill brought crude oil into the houses of many of our people. The thick smell of crude oil has affected our health."

They formed cooperatives to pool resources. They exchanged seedlings and knowledge about which crops might still survive in tainted soil. They organised in small associations to demand clean water, to petition for health care, to find markets for their goods. These acts were rarely called political, but they were, because they insisted on life in the face of death.

Their persistence stretched beyond Nigeria's borders. In the diaspora, Ogoni women carried the struggle into new contexts, determined to ensure that memory did not fade. As Sunata, a member of FOWA in Arizona, explained in an interview: "I go to the meetings so my children will grow up and take it up. Keep the dream going." Her words capture what many Ogoni women have always known: that resistance is not only for the present moment but also for the generations to come.

Nearly thirty years after Saro-Wiwa's death, Ogoni women are still in the struggle. The clean-up of their land, promised after a landmark UN report in 2011, has moved slowly, unevenly, and with little transparency. Women, once again, are at the forefront of adaptation. They create livelihood projects, they teach each other new skills, they speak at local and international forums to demand accountability. Today, as clean-up efforts falter and gas flares continue to scar the sky, Ogoni women mentor a new generation, blending ancestral songs with digital activism to amplify their demands for clean water, restored land, and representation. The story of Ogoni resistance is not a closed chapter; women are writing it with their labour, their grief, and their resilience.

It is tempting to treat these forms of endurance as background to the "real" political struggle. But the mistake is assuming that politics must look like speeches and rallies to count as politics. In truth, the labour of Ogoni women challenges us to rethink what resistance looks like. Their persistence redefines the very meaning of justice, showing that it is not only won in courtrooms or protests but in the quiet, relentless acts of survival that refuse erasure.

If Ken Saro-Wiwa Week is to have meaning beyond memorial ritual, it must be an opportunity to tell the story differently. To keep centering only the male martyr is to rehearse the same erasures that made women invisible in the first place. A true remembrance would ask: who else carried this struggle? Whose names have we forgotten? Whose labour has gone unacknowledged? It would make visible the women who suffered most from the oil economy, who endured the violence of militarisation, who held families together in the aftermath, who even now continue to demand justice.

Justice in Ogoniland has always been narrated as something owed: owed by Shell, owed by the Nigerian state, owed by the international community. But justice is also something that must be narrated differently. If we continue to tell the story of Ogoni resistance as though it belongs only to men, our demand for justice becomes partial. To do justice is to tell the truth, and the truth is that Ogoni women were and remain central to this struggle. Their lives, their suffering, and their acts of endurance are not peripheral details. They are the core of what it means to survive and resist in a landscape poisoned by greed.

As we mark another year since Saro-Wiwa's death, perhaps the most radical act of remembrance is not to repeat his words but to listen for the voices that have long been silenced. The voices of women washing oil from their hands at dusk. The voices of mothers remembering children lost to illness. The voices of widows who turned mourning into protest. The voices of young women who refuse to inherit silence. These voices do not speak in the language of martyrdom, but in the language of persistence. And in that persistence lies the true measure of resistance. To write them into history is not simply to honour them. It is to tell the story of Ogoniland more fully, more honestly, and with the kind of depth that justice demands. For without them, we are left with only half a story, and half a story has never been enough to change the world.

Nigeria just turned sixty-five and nobody clapped. Nobody danced, nobody sang, nobody cared. The public holiday came and went and most people didn't even remember why they weren't at work. Independence Day has become just another day off, another excuse for traffic to reduce by half, another background date on the calendar that nobody wants to touch. The government made their speeches, maybe cut a ribbon somewhere, and the rest of us went about our lives as if nothing happened.

The truth is people are tired. There's resignation in the air, like smoke you can't get rid of. Everywhere you turn, people have quietly given up. Nobody believes in this country anymore, and those who still shout "patriotism" look like clowns performing for free in a circus that already burnt down. To wave the Nigerian flag with pride right now is not a symbol of hope, it's a sign that you've lost touch with reality. Being a patriotic citizen in Nigeria today is less about love for country and more about public stupidity. Everyone else has checked out.

There's a strange sickness in this country. It's not malaria or typhoid, although those too will happily drag you into their cycle. This one is worse. It's the sickness of adjustment. We can live with anything. Light goes, no problem, we buy fuel. Fuel finishes, no wahala, we trek. Water stops running, we buy pure water. They ban bikes, we jump keke. They ban keke, we squeeze into buses. They raise the bus fare, we squeeze tighter. Everything that should be a collective outrage just turns into a new form of logistics.

Other countries protest. They riot. They refuse. They burn things down. Us? We simply adapt. If the government told us tomorrow that oxygen will be rationed, we would quietly learn how to breathe once every two minutes. It's not strength, it's not resilience, it's resignation. We take pride in how fast we can bend without breaking, but we forget that bending is also a kind of breaking. Slowly, silently, invisibly.

Look at Independence Day again. There should have been outrage in the streets. Why are we celebrating freedom when our daily lives are caged? Why are we clapping for leaders who loot us blind? Instead we laughed, scrolled through memes, and turned the day into a joke. We no longer believe in this country, but we also don't resist it. We just keep moving. We treat dysfunction like normal weather.

And it's not only the government that has failed us. Even the people themselves are not taking life seriously. We are suffering every single day, and yet it feels like we don't even value our own existence. Thousands of Christians are being killed in the north and even in the south, whole communities wiped out, and it barely makes the news. Entire families slaughtered, but our collective reaction is silence. But let one American personality die, and suddenly Nigerian social media is in full mourning. When Charlie Kirk died, the whole media space in Nigeria lit up with commentary, tributes, reposts. Thousands of Nigerians die quietly every year, but for a stranger abroad we gather candles. The churches too; they will post statements for America, but when their own members are massacred, they stay quiet. How do you explain that? What is wrong with this country that we cannot even cry properly for our own?

Sometimes it feels like Nigeria is allergic to dignity. We embarrass ourselves daily. Our priorities are upside down. Our leaders do not lead, our institutions do not function, and our people have accepted chaos as a way of life. Abroad, things that are basic are considered rights. Here, they are luxuries. Constant electricity is luxury. Clean water is luxury. Roads that don't flood every rainy season are luxury. Functioning hospitals are luxury. A working police system is luxury. Abroad, you can call an ambulance and it comes. Here, you will die before they even pick the call. Everything here is upside down.

And still, we adapt. We make jokes about our suffering, we give God the glory for small scraps, we turn pain into memes. It's funny, but it's not funny. Because the more we laugh, the more they know they can keep killing us slowly.

The truth is Nigeria has only one true export, only one thing we've given the world without shame: our music. Afrobeats is the only functioning institution in this country. It's the only thing that works on time. It's the only thing that delivers results. Artists go on stage and do what presidents cannot do: unite us, make us proud, give us joy. But should music be the only thing we hold onto as evidence of our humanity? Should beats and melodies be our substitute for working hospitals, safe roads, functioning schools?

We laugh about "Nigerian resilience" as if it's a gift. It is not a gift. It is a trap. We should not be proud that we can queue six hours for petrol without fighting. We should not celebrate the ability to keep living after salaries vanish, after entire generations are massacred, after kidnappers demand ransom, after children learn under broken ceilings. That is not strength. That is survival. That is trauma disguised as personality.

The government knows we will adapt. That's why they keep pressing. They know we will adjust to anything. They can ban, increase, reduce, restrict, inflate, and we will sigh and say "it is well." We are complicit in our own suffering because we refuse to stop bending.

When did resignation become our culture? When did we decide that Nigeria is an unchangeable sentence? Nobody even dreams of protest anymore. The dream now is to leave. To take our resilience, package it into a visa application, and fly. And who can blame anyone? It's hard to fight for a country that has already given up on itself.

But adaptation cannot save us forever. There is a point where bending turns into collapse. Maybe we have already crossed it. Maybe our silence on Independence Day is proof that the collapse has already happened. A country that cannot celebrate its own birth is a country that has stopped breathing. And we are just learning how to live without oxygen.

There are days when I wonder if beauty has ever belonged to me. Not beauty as a compliment or a passing glance, not beauty as a verdict handed down by someone else, but beauty as something I could carry privately, without fear it would be taken away. I want to believe that kind of beauty exists, something rooted deep beneath the skin, humming quietly even when no one is looking. But most of the time, beauty has felt like a loan, like something borrowed under strict conditions, always ready to be recalled.

When I was a girl, I learned quickly that beauty was about being seen, and being seen was about being safe.

What I did not understand then was that beauty was never mine to define. People say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I learned it was really in the eyes of men. The boys in school who whispered loudly about which girls were fine and which ones were not, as if their opinions were declarations from the gods. The strangers on the street who felt entitled to measure your worth out loud, in full daylight, while you were simply trying to get home. The uncles whose gazes lingered a second too long, the fathers who gave compliments like currency, withholding or bestowing depending on how well you fit into their idea of a daughter. Beauty was never private. It was public property, a performance you staged every day under someone else's spotlight.

Beauty is about how we learned to measure ourselves against each other with unspoken precision. I remember girls in the hostel who would sit in front of the mirror for hours, tilting their heads, stretching their legs out, pulling their hair this way and that, waiting for a revelation that never quite came. I remember the soft cruelties we inflicted on one another when our insecurities grew too heavy to carry alone. A girl might laugh at another girl's nose, her weight, her complexion, not because she truly cared but because she needed to remind herself that she was still in the running. That maybe she was closer to the finish line of beauty than someone else. I sometimes think this is what beauty has always been: a race no one signed up for, but everyone is forced to run.

And yet, beauty has never been just cruelty. There were also moments when it felt almost sacred. My younger sister oiling her skin slowly, deliberately, as though her body was a text worth lingering over. My mother laughing so hard that her whole face opened, every line and tooth and crease alive, more beautiful than any staged photo. A friend braiding my hair one afternoon and telling me I looked like myself, not like a magazine or an advertisement, but like myself. These were the moments when beauty was not about approval, not about surveillance, but about presence. A kind of arrival. A kind of fullness.

The paradox of beauty is that it is at once the most shallow and the most profound thing. Shallow, because it can be faked, bought, sculpted, and destroyed with ease. Profound, because it determines so much: how people treat you, how you treat yourself, how entire societies rank and arrange their hierarchies. The girl with symmetrical features and luminous skin is not just a girl with symmetrical features and luminous skin. She is the girl who will be offered a seat, the girl whose jokes will be laughed at, the girl whose voice will carry further.

Sometimes I resent beauty itself. Not the women who are deemed beautiful, but the system that turns beauty into a weapon, into a currency that can be traded or hoarded or denied. We live in a world where beauty opens doors. People will insist otherwise, but watch closely. Watch who gets chosen. Watch who is remembered. Watch whose mistakes are forgiven. Beauty has teeth, and it bites quietly, invisibly, but deeply.

And still, I do not want to spend my life chasing it. I do not want to wake up every day calculating how to arrange my face, how to hide the flaws, how to earn the permission of strangers. I want to step outside of it. I want to live as though my worth is not bound to the symmetry of my face or the flatness of my stomach. But stepping outside of beauty feels like stepping outside of power. It feels like refusing to learn the language everyone else speaks fluently. And who can afford to do that?

There are days when I feel exhausted by the rituals. The scrubs and serums and creams lined up on my table like tiny soldiers, the endless advice about water intake, exfoliation, collagen. There are nights when I pick and scrub my face until it is red and raw and still feel like I have not done enough. Beauty promises wholeness but delivers hunger. It is a hunger that does not end. Once you satisfy one demand, another rises. Once you fit into one dress, the fashion changes. Once you clear one blemish, another appears. Beauty is a moving target, and the chase can last a lifetime.

But then there are mornings when I catch myself in the mirror, hair messy, eyes swollen from sleep, and I see something that startles me. Not beauty in the way magazines have taught me, not beauty that would earn approval on the street, but beauty in the way of being alive, being here, being mine. And I wonder if this is what I have been missing: the possibility that beauty might not be about performance at all, but about witnessing. About seeing myself not as an object under review, but as a body that carries me through this world, a body that has survived and endured.

Perhaps beauty is not a possession. It is an atmosphere, something that flickers and surrounds, something that appears in moments when we are most ourselves.

Still, I am not naive. I know the world will not change because I have decided to redefine beauty for myself. The world will still hand out rewards and punishments based on the surface of things. There will still be people who are chosen before others because of the way their faces are arranged. There will still be entire industries built on our insecurities, entire cultures organized around the hierarchy of appearances. Beauty will still matter. It always has. It probably always will.

But the point is not to escape it entirely, because that might be impossible. The point is to reclaim it, to loosen its grip, to make it ours in ways that are small but meaningful. To wear the lipstick because it delights you, not because you need approval. To take the picture because you want to remember yourself, not because you need evidence for the world. To look at your reflection and say not "I am beautiful," but simply, "I am here."

I do not know if I will ever stop wanting to be beautiful. Desire does not disappear simply because you have dissected it. But I want to want it differently. I want to want it without desperation. I want to want it without forgetting that I am more than the wanting itself. Because at the end of the day, beauty is not salvation. It cannot hold you at night. It cannot forgive you. It cannot teach you how to live. It can only offer flashes of light, glimpses of power, moments of relief. The rest, the real work of being human, lies elsewhere.

And so this is what I am learning: beauty will always matter, but it does not have to define me. It can circle around me, it can pass through me, it can touch me and leave. But beneath it all, there is something steadier, something no mirror can show, something no stranger can name or take away. And perhaps that is what I have been searching for all along.

The first time I realized adults were just children pretending, I was nine years old, sitting cross-legged on the cold tile of our living room floor, watching my mother laugh so hard she had to wipe her eyes with the edge of her wrapper. It wasn't the small, measured laughter I was used to, the kind that came with a shake of the head and a tired, you children will not kill me today. No, this was different. This was laughter that cracked something open, that took up space, that made her forget, if only for a moment, that she had foodstuff to worry about and a household to run.

And in that moment, she didn't look like a mother. She didn't look like someone who knew how to ration meat so it lasted the week or haggle with market women until the price of rice bent to her will. She looked young. Unburdened.

That was the first time I thought, maybe you don't actually grow up. Maybe you just get better at pretending.

That thought has never left me.

Even now, I watch older people and wonder, do they truly feel like adults, or are they just committed to the bit? When they sit in traffic, gripping the steering wheel with that faraway look in their eyes, when they shake their heads at the news and say things like this country will frustrate somebody, do they really believe they are as old as they are? Or are they just waiting for someone to pull them aside and whisper, hey, we know you're faking it too?

And they keep waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them they're free to run outside and play. That it was never that serious. That they never had to leave that part of themselves behind.

I don't think I was ever a child in the way people talk about childhood, wild, free, untethered. I was a child in the sense that I was small and had no money, but my mind has always felt like an old house, filled with rooms I had no business entering yet. While other children ran under the sun until their skins smelled of sweat and dust, I sat alone with my thoughts, wondering about things too big for my little hands to hold.

But even then, my soul was still becoming. It stretched, it shifted, it swayed with the current of time.

And then, one day, it stopped.

I think I was seventeen. That was the last time I remember feeling like I was changing, like something inside me was growing towards the light. After that, it was as if my body kept aging, my responsibilities increased, but my soul remained frozen in place. The same thoughts, the same fears, the same emotional responses, just rearranged in different patterns.

I wonder if other people feel this way too. If at thirty, forty, fifty, they still feel like teenagers wearing masks. If they, too, have to remind themselves to act their age, to respond correctly when people talk about investments and long-term goals. Or if, somewhere between twenty-five and forty, something clicks and you actually become an adult.

Or maybe it never happens.

People talk about maturity like it's inevitable, like if you go through enough life, enough pain, enough responsibility, it will settle into your bones. But I have seen people who have been through the worst and still hold onto softness like a secret they refuse to give up. And I have seen people who have barely lived, yet walk around hardened, as if they have already decided the world is something to endure, not to experience.

So what is it, then? What makes a soul old? Is it pain? Is it wisdom? Is it learning to swallow words because you know speaking will change nothing?

I think my soul is still young because it refuses to be anything else. I have been hurt. I have lost people. I have made mistakes so embarrassing they make me want to shrink into myself. But despite it all, I still believe in things that should have been beaten out of me by now.

I still believe people can change.

I still believe good things happen for no reason at all.

I still believe that life is not just about surviving it.

And that is the thing, isn't it? The world tries so hard to convince us that we have to harden, that we have to shed our wonder, our softness, our dreams, in order to be real adults. But I do not want that. I do not want to reach a point where I stop believing in kindness, in possibility, in the idea that love, real, unselfish, transformative love, can change a person.

I do not want to become one of those people who think vulnerability is a weakness.

So I still stop to watch the way sunlight moves through leaves. I still listen to music in a way that makes my chest ache. Sometimes, when it rains, I let it touch my face just to remember what it felt like to be five years old, playing in the rain in Karu, believing the world existed solely for my wonder.

But life has tried. Oh, it has tried to make me forget.

Some people do not have the luxury of keeping their souls young. Some people have to grow up at ten, learning how to carry burdens that were never meant to be theirs. Some people are forced to make peace with disappointment too early. Some people unlearn joy because life teaches them that hope is foolish.

I think my soul is still young because it still hopes. Because it does not know how to give up. Because no matter how much the world tries to tell me otherwise, I still believe that being a person, an actual, living, breathing person, is about more than bills and deadlines and practical choices.

Some people wear their age like a heavy coat, wrapped tightly around them, letting it weigh them down. But I think there is another way. I think you can let your age be something you carry lightly, something that sits on your skin rather than seeps into your bones. I think you can hold onto the parts of yourself that time has not touched, the parts that still want to run in the rain, that still believe in magic, that still find comfort in a song you loved at thirteen.

Because the truth is, you do not have to let go of those parts of yourself.

You do not have to trade them in for something duller, something more "realistic."

You do not have to let yourself become old in the way the world expects.

Not yet.

Not ever.

I refuse to let my soul age before its time.

And if I ever start to, if I ever catch myself becoming a version of me that feels less like me, I hope I fight my way back. I hope I claw my way out of whatever mold the world tries to put me in.

Because I do not want to be someone who forgets.

I do not want to be someone who lets go of who they are just because it is easier.

So I will hold onto my soul.

Despite the years.

Despite the world's insistence.

Despite, despite, despite.

We watched episode 14 of Love Death & Robots a few days ago. Zima Blue. I did not want to watch it at first. My friend insisted it was his favorite episode, so I went along, though I expected it to be boring.

The episode is about a machine. Literally, a machine created to clean a swimming pool. At first, it's just this little robot people use to scrub the pool tiles and move water around. Nothing glamorous, nothing dramatic. Just a simple piece of metal doing its job.

But over time, its owners keep upgrading it. Bigger parts, smarter software, new abilities. And as it evolves it becomes something extraordinary. It becomes conscious. Self aware. It starts creating art. Huge murals painted in a specific shade of blue. People come from all over to see its work. It becomes famous, revered, no longer a mere machine but an artist with a name, a mythology, a legacy.

Yet somewhere beneath all those layers of upgrades and acclaim, something starts to fracture. The more it evolves, the harder it becomes to remember what it once was, that humble pool cleaner with a single, clear purpose. And the harder it becomes to understand what it has now become, this vast, celebrated intelligence adrift in its own complexity. After existing for a thousand years, achieving everything a sentient being could dream of, it realizes the search for meaning has only led it further from itself.

In the end, it chooses to reverse everything. Not as a metaphor or a gesture, but literally. It dismantles the upgrades, sheds the fame, strips away every addition until only the original form remains, the simple pool cleaner it began as. And then, as its final art piece, it slips back into that first pool in front of a large crowd and resumes scrubbing tiles.

The first pool it ever knew.

It made me laugh at first because the premise sounds ridiculous. A robot whose whole life arc ends with rewinding to pool cleaning? But we ended up talking about it for like thirty minutes after the episode ended. We talked about what it meant. And then we unpacked it. Really unpacked it. We argued. We laughed. We paused. We asked stupid questions. We asked serious questions. And we realized, all of us, that the search for meaning is funny because it keeps bringing us back to realizing that life is probably not as profound as we think, and that perhaps that is exactly the point.

That hangout made me happy in a way I did not expect. It reminded me why I do what I do. Why I write, why I think, why I stay awake thinking about the way the world moves, why I try to understand myself. It reminded me that life is a mix of ridiculousness and clarity, often in the same breath, often in the same hour.

The weird part is how much that conversation stuck with me. Not because the story was profound in a cliché way, but because it forced me to notice what I'm actually doing with my own life. Not some big answers. Just noticing.

I keep thinking about how quickly meaning slips through our fingers once we think we've caught it. One moment you're convinced you understand something. Yourself. Your direction. Your purpose. And then life shifts slightly, barely noticeable at first, and everything rearranges. The thing you were so sure about starts to feel thin. Temporary. Almost fictional. It's unsettling, but also honest. Meaning doesn't arrive fully formed and stay put. It flickers. It changes its mind. Sometimes it disappears entirely and leaves you sitting with questions instead of answers.

That's the part we don't like to admit. We want meaning to be solid. To be permanent. We want it to behave. But life doesn't. Life is very fickle. There's this sudden realization that nothing you're holding is guaranteed to last. That what feels important today might feel distant tomorrow. That even the things we build carefully, patiently, lovingly can be undone without warning.

A few days ago, I saw a video an actress posted. She was singing, smiling, declaring with certainty that she would see the end of the year. (In the name of Jesus I will see the end of this year...) A small act of faith. Of reassurance. Then the next day, the news came out that she had passed away. Just like that. No buildup. Nothing. Just the blunt reminder that life does not negotiate with our confidence.

That's what makes the search for meaning feel almost ironic. We spend so much time trying to decode life, trying to assign weight and intention to everything, while life itself remains unpredictable and indifferent. Kind of cruel actually and unconcerned with our timelines. Our plans. Our affirmations. I think that's why the search keeps looping back on itself. Because the moment we think we've arrived at something definitive, life shifts again and asks us to look closer.

In that way, it starts to feel a lot like that machine from Love, Death & Robots, from the episode Zima Blue. All that evolution. All that expansion. Only to arrive at a quieter understanding. Not that nothing matters, but that not everything has to. That meaning isn't always about becoming more complex, more impressive, more visible. And that sometimes it's about returning to what feels honest. What feels clear. What feels enough.

I don't think the answer is to stop searching. I think the search itself is part of being alive. But I do think it helps to loosen our grip a little. To accept that meaning can be temporary and still be real. That clarity can come and go and still be valuable. That life can be absurd and fragile and beautiful all at once.

Lately, I've been trying to let myself just notice. Not rush to conclusions. Not force significance where there might only be experience. To sit with the fact that everything is moving, everything is unstable, and somehow we are still here, still talking, still laughing, still asking questions. I don't think that's a failure of meaning. I think that's exactly what it is supposed to look like.

I wonder if this is what the end of the world looks like. Not loud, not cinematic, not one big event that sends us all packing at once. Just this. Just a constant spiral of things happening. Things piling. Things refusing to stop.

Everything is happening. All at once. At the same time. Simultaneously.

I know it's always been like this. The world has always been chaotic, wars have always existed, people have always been broke. But there's something about now that feels... louder. Faster. Closer. Like the group chat of the world is on fire and we are all in it, watching the messages pour in, unable to leave, unable to mute it, unable to log out.

One minute Iran and Israel are staring each other down. The next minute, America is peeking through the window like, "Hey, what's going on here? Can I join?"

America always wants to join. Even when it's not their fight. Even when nobody invited them. Even when the house is already burning. They just pull up with their fireworks and their microphones and their need to remind everyone that they're still here. Just so you know. We're available. It's always giving unsolicited energy.

And while we're watching countries square up on the global stage, people are dying in Benue. People are dying in other places too, but nobody's cameras are there. You scroll past headlines about massacres like you're skipping through Spotify songs. Next. Next. Next.

It's almost like we've trained ourselves to keep moving. To not feel too deeply. Because if we start to feel every single thing happening in the world right now, we will just sit down and never get up. We will melt into the floor and stay there permanently.

And yet, even while all this is happening, we're still here. Still doing life. Still waiting for Cardi B to drop an album. Still joining Twitter Spaces about Lana Del Rey with people we've never met, still laughing and arguing and vibing for two whole hours like we're not inside the mouth of the apocalypse.

Because that's what the world is now. It's this strange, chaotic split-screen experience where one half is burning and the other half is planning a listening party. One side is war, the other side is concert tickets. One side is people cannot afford bread, the other side is 'omg Beyoncé just announced a tour'.

And that's what makes it all feel so dystopian. The fact that we're attending shows and tweeting "OMGGG she ATE" while somewhere else someone is literally attending their own funeral.

It's not even shade. It's just weird.

Because what are we supposed to do?

Pause our lives? Stop listening to music? Shut everything down?

I don't know.

Nobody really knows. So we just carry it all at the same time.

We carry the wars. We carry the mass shootings. We carry the headlines. We carry the Spotify playlists. We carry the waiting. The Cardi album anticipation. The food price complaints. The brokenness. The concerts. The grief. The memes. The protests. The Love Island discourse. The artist beef. The famine. The TikToks. The soft life posts. The rising suicide rates. The Stanley cups. The Labubus. The breaking news. The Lana Del Rey Twitter Spaces.

All. At. Once.

It's kind of sick.

But it's also kind of what it means to be alive right now.

Even the way we consume things now feels rushed. Cardi B announces that she's about to announce something. It's giving announcement inception. The announcement of the announcement. You can't even just drop an album anymore. You must give a pre-announcement, you must shake the table in advance, because the internet moves so fast that if you don't start the countdown, we might scroll past you like you're an ad. And if the album is not good after seven years? Oh, the Nicki stans will cook her. The timeline will not forgive her. It's a dangerous game.

People are broke. Proper, soft, suffocating broke.

The kind of broke where you start calculating things you used to buy without thinking.

The kind of broke where food is no longer 'food,' it's now a luxury item.

Eggs are doing like they're made of gold. Bread is moving like it's a designer bag.

Nobody can afford life but somehow we are still here being chronically online, joining Twitter Spaces, arguing about pop stars, and adding albums to our 'Anticipating' lists like we're not budgeting whether to buy food or pay for data.

The world is ending. But it's ending slowly. Softly. Casually. Not in one big explosion. Just in small, sharp moments. The killings. The wars. The inflation. The disappearing middle class. The floods. The fires. The rising heat. The notifications that we now swipe away like they don't mean anything. The way we say "another one" when something tragic happens, like we're counting down to the next thing.

But even while it's ending, we're still here. Planning brunch. Waiting for albums. Debating TikTok trends. Laughing at funny tweets. Buying overpriced data. Loving life.

It's a strange way to exist.

To live in a world where people are dying, and you're still here planning your next hairstyle.

Where some people are fighting for their lives, and some people are fighting for front-row tickets.

Where one timeline is war, and the next timeline is "who wore it better".

It's not guilt. It's just strange.

It's a weird duality.

To know and still scroll. To care and still attend concerts.

To see the fire and still ask, but when is Cardi dropping?

But this is what it is.

The world is spiraling. Everything is happening.

And somehow, we are still here.

Still showing up. Still waiting. Still laughing. Still pressing play.

Still holding it all at once.

Life is still happening, even when it feels like everything else is ending.

There's a particular kind of excitement that comes from hearing "based on Nigerian boarding school folklore" as the premise for a horror film. You imagine cold dormitory floors, whispered threats about Madam Koi Koi, and torchlight stories that make sleep impossible. You imagine suspense built from silence. Tension that grows in the corners of a corridor. A teacher whose footsteps are just a bit too quiet to be normal. When Ms. Kanyin opened with a stern French teacher and a boarding school in the 90s, it felt like someone had finally decided to make the movie we'd been collectively imagining since JSS2.

Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't last very long.

Directed by Jerry Ossai, Ms. Kanyin begins with promise. Temi Otedola plays Amara, a hyper-driven student whose greatest ambition is to attend Harvard. But that ambition is derailed by one thing: a C in French. Her teacher, Ms. Kanyin, played by Michelle Dede, is elegant, strict, mysterious, and entirely unbothered by Amara's academic anxiety. So, in a leap that feels both rushed and under-motivated, Amara and her clique decide to break into the teacher's chalet and steal the exam paper. There is blood. It touches the roots of a large tree on the school compound. The camera lingers, and suddenly, we are in full-blown supernatural territory. Spirits, curses, exploding bodies. The usual.

The problem is that the film never quite decides what it wants to be. It wants to be horror, yes, but it also wants to be a story about ambition, trauma, revenge, intergenerational silence, and friendship. It wants to be a boarding school nostalgia piece, a spiritual thriller, and sometimes a sports drama. What it ends up being is a film with too many parts that don't connect and too many ideas that don't land.

There are moments when Ms. Kanyin looks like it's going somewhere. The cinematography is often striking, especially in the night scenes. The makeup and costume departments clearly understood the assignment. Gore is used generously, and surprisingly, the effects are decent. There are severed limbs and bloodied school uniforms, but these shocking images arrive before the film has taken time to build tension or explain the stakes. Horror works best when it feels earned. Here, it feels like a performance.

The supernatural elements, when they appear, are not scary so much as confusing. At one point, Ms. Kanyin levitates and manipulates objects with invisible force. At another, a teenage boy nearly stops her with nothing but a door. If her powers follow any rules, we are never told what they are. The story suggests that her spirit is linked to a mysterious tree on the school compound, but that connection is barely developed. We are told it was planted during the founding of the school and that it has something to do with ancestral spirits, but none of it adds up. The myth behind the haunting is treated like a loose sketch rather than the spine of the story.

The film also cannot seem to decide whether Ms. Kanyin is alive, dead, possessed, resurrected, or simply multitasking across the spiritual and physical realms. One moment she is speaking calmly in the staff room. The next, she is flipping a car with her mind. No one reacts like they are in a horror film. Students scream, but they don't ask real questions. Teachers seem disturbed, but not in the way you would expect after a girl explodes into a puddle of blood on campus.

And that's part of the larger issue. The reactions don't match the stakes. It's like the characters know they are in a horror film, but not a particularly scary one. Which might be accurate.

Even the central character, Ms. Kanyin herself, is never fully explored. The film gives us flashbacks, suggestions of trauma, a hinted past relationship with Mr. Mustapha, played by Ademola Adedoyin, and even a backstory involving sexual assault, but none of it is given time to breathe. For a film named after her, we leave knowing surprisingly little about her. She floats between vengeful spirit, misunderstood victim, and school administrator with stylish shoes, but never settles into a clear role.

And then there are the odd detours. Like Uti, played by Natse Jemide, who is apparently training for a 100-meter swim. In a school pool. With no coach, no competition, and no connection to the rest of the story. It's played entirely seriously, as if we are meant to find meaning in it. Instead, it just makes you wonder if the film's left hand knows what the right is doing. Maybe the spirit possessed the script halfway through.

The dialogue is another hurdle. Most conversations sound like the characters are reading scene summaries to each other. "I know you're worried about Harvard." "She's hiding something from her past." That kind of thing. Temi Otedola, who showed early promise in Citation, feels a bit boxed in here. There's not much emotional texture for her to work with. Michelle Dede, on the other hand, gives Ms. Kanyin enough quiet power to remain interesting, even when the script doesn't help her. Kalu Ikeagwu does well with what he's given. Toluwani George brings some light to her scenes. And Ademola Adedoyin tries very hard to carry emotional weight with limited tools. His accent does wander a little, but so does the plot.

And then the film makes a choice that's hard to ignore. It includes a sexual assault scene between Ms. Kanyin and a male parent. There is no lead-up. No emotional consequence. It's simply used to justify her transformation into something vengeful. It is a deeply careless handling of a serious issue, and it makes you wonder if the writers understood how important that moment should have been. The answer, clearly, is no.

On a technical level, the film struggles too. A student's diary says 2024, but this is a story set in the 90s. Boom mics dip into scenes. These are the kind of details that should not slip through, and when they do, they tell you that the film was rushed or under-directed. Even the editing feels awkward. Transitions are sharp when they should be smooth. Scenes cut before they have landed. It feels like the movie kept running before the script was finished.

That's the real pity. Because somewhere in Ms. Kanyin, buried under all the distractions and subplots, is a genuinely compelling idea. The setting is rich. The potential for dread is real. Boarding school itself is already a kind of psychological thriller. One where rules are strict, punishment is random, and authority figures are often too powerful to question. Add folklore to that and you don't even need flying bodies to scare us. A shadow in the corridor is enough.

But Ms. Kanyin wants to do everything at once. It wants to impress you with its visuals, throw in a love story, touch on trauma, add some blood, build a myth, explore schoolgirl loyalty, and give you a spirit tree origin story. In the process, it ends up doing none of it particularly well.

In the end, Ms. Kanyin reflects both the potential and the ongoing challenges of Nollywood horror. The ideas are bold. The visuals are getting sharper. But the storytelling still needs discipline. With more time, a tighter script, and a clearer sense of tone, this could have been a haunting experience. Instead, it leaves you with unanswered questions and the frustrating sense that something important got lost along the way.

Rating: 2 out of 5