I asked myself, why is this place of art locked?
MOWAA. The Museum of West African Art in Benin. Built to tell our story, to train our children, to put us on the global cultural map. Yet the gates are shut.
And what are we celebrating instead? Flyovers. As if concrete and tar have become our new curriculum. “No be juju be that”?
This is not politics. This is common sense. You don’t lock knowledge and open roads, then call the road an “educational site.” That is total absurdity.
Museums don’t just store artifacts. They build minds. They create jobs. They attract tourists. They remind a people of who they are before politics told them who to be.
But here, we prefer commissioning and cutting ribbons, if at all there has been any commissioning. Something you can drive on and take pictures with. Something that looks like progress in a thirty-second clip.
Maybe the people making these decisions are under the influence of intoxication. Intoxicated by partisan politics. Intoxicated by the idea that development is only what you can see from a car window. “Political Hallelujah Projects”.
You cannot build a future by locking your memory.
Open MOWAA. Let children enter. Let artists work. Let the world come.
A flyover can wait. A generation cannot.
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