Ẹ káàbọ̀ — Yorùbá — you are welcome
Nigeria —— the name Odetoro, said correctly
ROOTS
The door in the family name.
JapanCities
- Lagos The noise, the hustle, the music leaking out of everything, all the time.
- Ibadan Red earth and rust rooftops to the horizon; deep Yorùbá country.
- Abeokuta 'Under the rock' — the Ẹgbá homeland the family name grew up near.
The table
- Jollof rice Ours, thank you. The Frames wing frames a plate of it and means it.
- Pounded yam & egusi The stretch and the melon-seed stew; a Sunday that fills the whole house.
- Suya The late-night, pepper-and-smoke skewer off a roadside grill.
- Àmàlà with ewédú and gbẹ̀gìrì The Yorùbá table, properly set — dark, green, and gold in the bowl.
Saved pins
- Nike Art Gallery, Lagos Four floors of Nigerian art run by a legend; ask and she'll tell you the stories.
- The New Afrika Shrine Fela's house of Afrobeat, still loud, especially come Felabration.
From the register
Odetoro is a Yorùbá name, and this door was always going to hang in the museum. Its chime is an agogô — the double bell that keeps time under so much of the music this wing’s neighbours dance to — and the door itself is carved the way the old doors are carved: geometry that means something to the people who cut it.
By day I build AI language tools for under-resourced African languages; that sentence starts here, with a name that outsiders keep trying to shorten. The cities, the table, and the saved pins below belong to family stories — set down here carefully, and still being added to.