There are apparently only three people in the world that can cook pasta like Wole Soyinka

Soyinka turned 80 this year. We learn this in an interview a Nigerian newspaper did with his wife, Folake:

He cooks and he is quite good at it. He even cooked about two days ago. When the boys were really little, one day in California, he called us all to the kitchen and said he wanted to have a family meeting. They were so young I don’t even think they had any concept of what a family meeting was. He lined all three according to their heights and asked me to sit. He said he has something to tell us and he was only going to say it once. He whipped out some cooking utensils, moved them around noisily inside the pot, threw some up, caught them, performed a few tricks and then told us to listen up. He said there were only three people in the world that can cook pasta like he does: one is dead, the other lives in Sicily, Italy, and he is the third one and he is going to cook something the likes of which we had never eaten. He cooked pasta that day and we truly enjoyed it.

Source.

 

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.