Nigeria, Sept. 27 -- Once upon a time, there was a girl.

One day she bought a book titled "How to Communicate with Fools." She skipped the preface and immediately started reading.

And it's a pity she skipped it. Because in the preface, it says that you might not need to communicate with fools at all.

There is something painfully Nigerian about that little joke. We are often so eager to get to the loud part that we skip the preface. We want the concert but not the culture that produced the rhythm; the costume but not the cosmology; the tourist photograph but not the history; the trending word but not the mother tongue in which our grandparents once explained the world.

Then Baba died.

Baba was the famous tortoise at the palace of th...