Sweet Medicine

For my final guest episode, I’m with the researcher and designer Oluwakemi Agbato who lives by the question: “How can we make good things to live with?” And explores that question through her research and design studio, Studio GB and her jewellery brand RENIKEJI. This conversation was full of passion on both sides for how history continues to live with us in the objects around us. 🍲 04:41 James B...

Today’s conversation is with Mobolaji Otuyelu, the founder of two startups—a kitchenware company AGBO ILÉ and Ọjà Wellness Foods, a beverage company. As an entrepreneur focused on black innovation and social change, Mobolaji is also deeply involved with the Federation of Informal Workers’ Organisations of Nigeria (FIWON), where she collaborates on member-led initiatives to provide tangible support...

I've spent the past seven weeks discussing why social healing, why the humanities when people are starving, what do we do with History, what are Nigerian nervous conditions, what kind of society is Nigeria and why was Nigeria made in the first place. I set up these questions to give a sense of what the problem is, and how the centuries before now led us here. With all this information, how can we...

In this episode, Tobiloba and I talked about transformative environmental justice in Nigeria, Lekki as prime example of land dispossession in Lagos in the name of capitalist modernism, the challenges that come up in translating and applying current popular Western frameworks of social justice in Nigeria, and why we need more Nigerians, individuals and institutions alike, to fund social research.&n...

In this episode, I speak with Gbope Onigbanjo, a researcher and consultant working in the fields of international affairs, peace studies, and political economy with a geographical focus on Africa. Our conversation centred around Nigeria’s role as Big Brother in West Africa and how that has bred skepticism among other states in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). This is a uniqu...

This episode is six years in the making. Many of us know the Berlin Conference of 1884, otherwise known as the scramble for Africa which was where European leaders decided how to share Africa like moi moi among themselves. But a lesser-known but equally important conference was the 1890 Brussels conference that King Leopold II organised as an anti-slavery conference. The agreements made at the con...

In this episode, I speak with Obayomi Anthony, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist. Our conversation began with a discussion about his background and journey to becoming an artist, with a focus on the project that put him in the limelight: Bonafide Squatters . Then we went on to talk about his recent research project on Nigeria’s colonial origins where he went i...

In this episode, I speak with Mr Israel Meriomame Wekpe, an all-round theatre practitioner. He is a lecturer in Theatre Arts at the University of Benin and directed a play I was a part of in secondary school in memory of the 60 students that died in the 2005 Sosoliso plane crash.  This was a conversation about the challenges of teaching in Nigerian universities today, the art and spirituality...

This episode is best summarised with the following quote from an essay by adrienne maree brown in YES! Magazine : "The way I think of it now is in the framework of the imagination battle: there is a war going on for the future—it is cultural, ideological, economic, and spiritual. And, as in any war, there is a front line, a place where the action is urgent, where the battle will be won or lost. Th...

In this episode, I speak with psychotherapist Gbemi Adekoya ( @gbemisoke on X) to explore the complexities of trauma, healing, and personal responsibility in interpersonal relationships. I consider this essential Sweet Medicine listening because all social change begins with the individual and this is the one episode in this project that focuses exclusively on the individual. We discussed Nig...

Didi Cheeka is a filmmaker, archivist and critic. In this profound conversation, we explored shared values as the glue for true belonging, Nigerians’ collective trauma, engaging history and archival studies with a psychoanalytic lens, one problem with the concept of ‘post-colonialism’, and much more. There’s a place where he says: “Each tear that is shed, that could have been avoided, is an accusa...

In this episode, I spoke with Aaliyah O. Ibrahim, a multidisciplinary artist and international development practitioner about the complexity of Nigerian identity, resilience as a practice of change and unity and freedom as practices of difference. Anchoring our conversation was Professor Bedour Alagraa’s concept of ‘ The Interminable Catastrophe ’.  🍲 01:19 Exploring the Interminable Catastr...

I can trace the kernel of this chapter to February last year when I was asked this question by The Republic for their  First Draft series : “ The bulk of your work (as a writer, researcher, and visual artist) explores how Africans are making a living. Why is this important to you? ”  And I replied: “ It is important because life can be very hard and a lot of us get really tired. I’d like...

Adefolatomiwa Toye is a PhD student researching how the architectures of Nigeria’s first universities reveal the politics of nation building in our early post-Independence era. This was a fun conversation on the optimistic spirit of the Nigerian ‘60s, ethnic and class divides in Nigeria, challenges faced in accessing educational resources, the disconnect between universities and their surroun...

Amarachi Iheke is a doctoral researcher at Kings College London writing a dissertation on Azanian (South African) resistance anthems. This Saturday, I bring you a really powerful conversation I had with her that lasted four hours and meandered through many issues from standards of beauty, to corporal punishment, gerontocracy in Nigeria, the civil war, class and the Nigerian spirit world. It was my...

Often I hear young people say, “Thank God our generation is documenting now. Thank God we are only just starting to appreciate archives.” Unfortunately, we are not the first. As Mrs Kudirat Ayoola, the lead archivist at the National Film, Visual and Sound Archive (NFVSA) in Jos, said to me in an interview about the economics of running a public archive in Nigeria: “better soup, na money kill am.”...

This Sunday, I bring you a conversation I had with six people who joined the Studio Styles text club meeting on July 6, 2024. This was our third week of discussing Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed . As with all our club meetings, the conversation moved from the text and into our everyday lives to explore how we can apply the ideas to action in our lives, what changes we’d like to see in th...

This Saturday, I bring you my conversation with Fr Anselm Adodo, the founder of Nigeria’s leading plant medicine research laboratory, Pax Herbals. Fr Anselm is a Benedictine priest at the Ewu monastery in Edo State and his work exeplifies a wide range of expertise spanning education, environmentalism, social work. Fr Adodo’s unwavering commitment is to inspire individuals and promote collabor...

In 2020, Nigeria's president Muhammadu Buhari comforted kidnapped and released school boys in Kankara, Katsina State by telling them that "You children are very lucky. I hope you will be very careful your success in the future depends not on subjects like History and English but Technology." This derision for the humanities (and the idea that one can study only one or the other, and when faced wit...

This episode brings snippets from the 14 conversations I had with guests working in the humanities and social sciences and oriented towards social healing in Nigeria. In these conversations, we discussed the ideas that animate their research, their career journeys and how they use their work to make tangible impact in their communities. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction to Sweet Medicine Podcast 01:1...

This is the introductory episode to the Sweet Medicine podcast. Here I share my understanding of social healing an orientation towards life-affirming relations with ourselves, with all beings around us, and with the world that we are all co creating. By social healing, I also mean an exercise in integrity and integration, an exercise in the kind of connection we can achieve only by accepting...