Round Time News

By Festus Adedayo  Words are sacred sovereign objects. This sacredness makes them very essential to democratic freedom. In his poem, The Word Is An Egg, great Nigerian poet and dramatist, Niyi Osundare demonstrated the primacy of the word, whether written or spoken. To show the uniqueness of the word, Osundare’s Yoruba people say, like the broken egg, when you break the shell of the word by uttering it, it dissolves into nothingness. Both the one who utters it and the word itself are then never the same. Believing that the word is sacred, Yoruba transfer that sacredness to the African giant pouched rat (Okete). Whatever this giant rat tells the earth when it is digging its hole, it must comply, they believe. The Yoruba chant this belief in incantations that decree abidance to their command. Thus, drawing largely from the cosmology of his people, Osundare said the word predated man and even the world. “In the beginning was not the word/In the word was the beginning” he wrote. In the...