One Tone Mark Separates Àṣà From Aṣa; She Crossed That Line And Blew Smoke On It

By Bamidele Ademola-Olateju

Let me begin with a linguistics lesson, because Nigeria has refused to let me rest. Yorùbá is a tonal language. Tone is not a small thing, in Yorùbá, the difference between a word that means culture and a word that means waywardness is not a dictionary, not a sentence, not even a full syllable. It is one tone mark. One tiny, humble, load-bearing diacritic. Àṣà. With the grave accent standing sentinel, it means culture, tradition, the sacred inheritance of a people. Remove the tone, adjust your delivery, and you have Aṣa; wayward, reckless, a cautionary tale in progress.

She came to Ojúde Ọba and illustrated the distinction between àṣà and aṣa, in real time. She wanted to trend. She wanted to outshine Farooq Oreagba, who has made cigar-at-festivals something of a personal brand. She wanted steeze; that ineffable, unforced cool that cannot be purchased, rehearsed, or smoke-signalled into existence. And Nigeria, ever generous with its gaze, looked. Oh, how we looked. But I looked too, and I must give you my honest report. I did not see glamour. I saw ambition dressed in the wrong costume. I saw nails so long and architectural they deserved their own building permit. Talons that could shred a legal brief, harvest a cassava farm, or conduct a full orchestral symphony simultaneously. I saw makeup applied with the philosophy that more is always more foundation, contour, liner, drama, and then more drama on top of the drama. I saw a woman in the glorious setting of Ojúde Ọba, wrapped in the regal blues and yellows of our heritage, blowing cigar smoke into the Ijebu afternoon like she was the opening act of a crime thriller on Netflix.

And then came the defenders. Our great-grandmothers chewed tobacco! they cried. Our foremothers sniffed àṣáà! Yes. They smoked pipe. Yes they did. Our great-grandmothers also had no electricity, fetched water from wells at 4am, and buried children without hospitals. We do not romanticise those either. Defence by ancestry is the laziest argument in the republic, and we must retire it with honors. A cigar can be a prop.

Unconventional can be elegant. But glamour is not noise, and steeze, real steeze never tries this hard. Ojúde Ọba is a canvas of extraordinary Yorùbá beauty, a festival where culture breathes, where Àṣà puts on its finest regalia and reminds the world who we are. It did not need to be turned into a personal trending strategy.

The Yorùbá woman is by birthright, a masterpiece. She does not need smoke to be fire. She does not need performance to command a room. She simply needs to understand the difference between Àṣà and Aṣa, and guard that tone mark with her life. One accent, one decision, and one very public cloud of smoke. The ancestors saw everything.