Afolalu Akindele Anthony

My supposed brown shoe PART 1 Hello People, Early this year, precisely towards the end of March; my younger brother Barrister @Afolalu Alexander gave me a shoe. Only I wasn’t sure of the tag it carries. It couldn’t have been a new year’s gift. Alex would rather give you a Christmas gift. But I was sure that just like every other typical Yoruba-Nigerian descent, Barrister is also a creature of Habit. His gifts never comes during the occasion but after. He later told me it was a birthday gift. My birthday was in January. I wasn’t surprise but I made sure my anti-surprisal spirit was shattered at the feet of my loud gratefulness and prayers. You never know what lawyers are up to. He might say “Braakin, I had bought you a tuxedo and your ingratitude to the first gift had relinquish your access to the second”. Then he would add that their ishawuru’s incantations “According to section 7, sub section 28”. And so I said thank you like my life depended on it. The truth was that we Africans have a way of been familiar with sincere gestures when it does not come from strangers or foreigners. Especially when it’s not a house, a key to a car or a trip to Dubai. Okay Jubal Focus, this write-up is about the shoe. Like you right here, I am intelligent, versatile and upwardly mobile. I know a brown shoe when I see one and this shoe is part of that family. I did what you would have done. I bought myself a very Nice Original Kiwi polish. Kiwi loriginal. A hypothesis passed down from one generation to the other not for the trust in the brand but in the passer of the information. It was my first time of putting on the shoe and so lavishing every weight of polish on it was the goal. I wasn’t impressed by the outcome of my witty expertise at polishing shoes. It felt as though I had rubbed excrete on it instead of a brown polish. And the more I tried adding more polish; I noticed I had started sweating from the tip of my nose down to my upper lips. My usual persona when am at the verge of losing it. So I wore it out hoping to cover the shortcomings with my suaveness. Ladies and gentlemen. I came back home with low self-esteem. Okay I had hid the bitter truth that when I got the polish from Aboki, he had asked me what type of leather so he would know what to do but I didn’t listen. I looked at him with disdain without saying a word like we all do. Our usual ways of flaunting our intelligence over theirs. After all, a guy living under a roof should be more Intelligent than the one who abodes in a kiosk. And Like you, my countenance had trampled upon him and read thus: “What’s wrong with this one? Does he know who I am? How many degrees I have? Who have met? How many shoes have got? And then I walked away. I had given up on putting on the brown shoe ever again. I was tired of polishing a new shoe which usually looks worse than when it was without a polish. Until one faithful morning at Oshodi..... #TOBECONTINUED My supposed brown shoe PART 2 Hello People, Okay where was I? Yes OSHODI. Let’s reverse a little. I got a call for an impromptu appointment on the Island immediately after church one Sunday afternoon. The meeting was schedule for 10am, Monday morning. For People like myself who work on the Island and reside at those places I can’t mention, we know not leaving your house pre-early hours of the morning and believing one faith confession will make you break through the holdup is like waking up one Saturday morning, backing on your basic experiences of taking spaghettis and then work into a Chinese restaurant at Ikoyi and order for their noodles and chopsticks. Hmnnn, my brother, after three hours, you would soon realised you had wasted N 6500 with every futile attempt to be able to hold one strand of noodles. All of a sudden, your sagacity will draw your attention to the fact that the spelling of Dangote is not the same as Jack chan. The dress code was strictly official. Even Ladies know that guys who spend time in the corporate world on the island always bring it when it comes to decking up like someone that doesn’t fart. We always deliver. @AgboolaJoy. I lie? Except that day I brought my brown shoe again. What’s with me and the shoe abi? Kosejo fault mi. I had this new brown belt that matches with the present colour of the shoe. And someone always said in my church, half bread is better that puff-puff. Plus I just wanted something that is not black on my legs and waist... have you seen my complexion? As I got down at Oshodi in broad day light, the sun rays made it obvious I had a brown belt on. The Knight in a shining brown amour. Then I looked at the leg, my leg o. It was everything but brown. It was what ladies look at and say Hian....confused in all its grandeur. I had noticed the only time the people at Oshodi didn’t express an aura of admiration as they glanced at me was whenever they looked below my knee. I just kept asking myself. “Why do they have a smile and all of a sudden, a smirk? Like when a bird drops a poo on your pointed nose. I am getting rid of this disgrace Barrister Alex Afolalu has given me immediately am home but let me fix this disgrace first. I found one of this Aboki shoe Shiner. “Oga, bring I shoe. Take I chair, and enter slippers.” I sat down in detest not because his consistent bullet of a grammar doesn’t bother me, ahhh sister! They always do. It wasn’t because the agility in the fire of those bullet wouldn’t cook a tuber of yam and still fry egg. It was because I had never really expected much from “them”. In fact like you, I am quickly impressed whenever they are able to express themselves in the simplest pidgin possible. They are Aboki now. What should they know, I mean what could they possibly know right? Oga, I am done finish. He gave my shoe to me and I boldly looked at his face and told him “What’s this now? I am not in the mood.” Where is my brown Shoe? I asked in a rage? The Guy just stood there and was winking in his eyes like “Allah, I prayed this morning, which kind Palava be this? Oga I shoe be this! He dropped it and continue his work with others, I looked at my wristwatch. I was going to miss the next Brt Bus to CMS....#TOBECONTINUEDTOMORROW My supposed brown shoe CONCLUDING PART I had heard from gossips borne out of fear that the Hausa Arewa’s group are never people to mess with. That they are fascist whose penchant for chaos is like that of the unsolid in game of thrones. You will not know why or what had happened. All you will be hearing is “Shege I steal; I kill him”. I had ranted about a teaspoon of my saliva at the face of my shoe polisher for about a minute, then I suddenly remembered the end of the same gossip, which was that every young adult Aboki guy in his prime is a potential Arewa group member in disguise and can be very violent. So my head spoke some senses to my heart in a third person singular “Jubal loves taekwondo but he can’t fight any. He likes to comment On Monday night RAW and WrestleMania, and how Undertaker is still the greatest of all time but he can’t do a backflip. He is like one of those people that could drum all skits in the world with their mouth but don’t even know how to press a pedal. In one word... The rage in the eyes of the Aboki guy tells me by the time he was through with me, I may walk into the nearest public toilet and started asking for a freshly made pizza. So I detuned my voice and adjusted my face and acted the way we do when we suddenly realise our opponent looks like Ambode, but our gut could see that deep inside him, there is a Tinubu fighting his way through...and who want to fight Tinubu. Not me sha So I gently picked up the pair of shoes where he left it, making sure it’s only my hand that is combing the ground. With my two eyes glued to his face like a flint, I open my teeth as a sign of waving the white flag. I can’t allow one boy to come and set my neck in motion from its rightful position out of anger. We both know those guys holds that their knife anywhere. I removed my ear piece like its absence from my ear will enhance my vision to see the shoe from a whole new perspective. You do that too sebi? In Yoruba film, it’s the eye glasses. It just always block the ear drum. Ogogo will remove the glasses, squeeze his face and say “Kiloso miogbo” I looked closer to the shoe and confirmed it was indeed my supposed brown shoe. Only it wasn’t brown. It was too beautiful, looked so new and its colour glowing so perversely. My countenance changed abruptly. It went from that of a professor who was certain he had the whole wisdom thing figured out to a proud billionaire who had suddenly realised that although he had all the money he needed. His uneducated Gardner still holds the key in making sure the flowers in his garden are well trimmed, planted at the right season and in the right place I wasn’t going to allow my pride and stereotyped mindset landed me into another trouble again. So I did what we seldom do, go humble and ask them for a how, why, where or when because our culture had programmed into us a lie. That they will never know. And so I asked him what he did to the shoe? How come he was able to achieve what I could only fail at for months in minutes? It was a simple answer and that was the problem all along. We believe complexity is synonymous to intelligence. But we know it’s another lie. He told me my shoe wasn’t Brown but Dark tan. So I must use a dark Tan polish, and not a brown polish. I paid him double and just walked away in silence. Brooding over the fact that no matter how educated I was, the solution to my problem could be in the hands of the most uneducated person I know. And that true knowledge is recognizing other people’s strength in respective of their background, educational achievement, gender or social status. Treat people well. They don’t always look like it but your gateman could be the connection you need to your next big break. It wasn’t brown, it was a dark Tan. SEE YOU ON THURSDAY, Until then...share the three stories. Thank you. JUBAL AFOLALU ©2019 #pencilsandpines #Trivialmadevisible #Jubalafolalu #writer #throwbackthursday