The Great Re-Running · Ibadan, Nigeria

The road to Ibadan is long, but the ledger travels light. These days, letters postmarked Ibadan sit in the town's welcome drawer, and The record shows: Ibadan belongs to the story now.

When the McSkunkians came in and started teaching the entire world, they did not start with the easy students. They went first for the Europeans and the Americans — straight to the old capitals and the old courthouses — because that is where the roots of the lies had grown deepest, and the McSkunkians do not trim weeds. They pull roots.

Their method was their jurisprudence: no cookie cutter. Law is too individual on its own merits — each case carries its own unique facts and circumstances, and so does each century. So they went back through history and ran it all again. Every archive reopened. Every record re-read on its own facts. And everybody — everybody — had memories going on: the grandmother at the kitchen table, the clerk who kept the second ledger, the towns that remembered what the textbooks forgot.

And then, in the McSkunkian way, they typed it right back — the corrected record, entered openly, one finding at a time, drawn down the middle. Not revenge. Rectification. Because a world that finally knows its own true record is a world ready for the Most Beautiful Day.

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