history – Simply O

Istanbul – The City That Made Its Case

Five days ago, I wrote that first impressions are not conclusions. They are invitations.

Istanbul had five days to make its case.

It began, appropriately enough, with scale. Everything seemed bigger here. The airport appeared endless. The roads were enormous. Bridges stretched across water as though connecting continents were an entirely ordinary municipal undertaking. Even the traffic seemed determined to impress me.

I come from Lagos. I know traffic.

But Istanbul made a respectable effort.

Then the city began revealing its layers.

From the Bosphorus, Europe sat on one side and Asia on the other. Ferries crossed between them while tankers moved through a natural waterway that had carried armies, merchants, fishermen and ambitions for centuries. Ottoman palaces lined the shore. Old yalıs faced the water. Fortresses reminded us that beautiful places have not always had peaceful histories.

And everywhere, the call to prayer floated above the noise of the city.

Istanbul seemed comfortable holding contradictions that elsewhere might appear impossible. Christian and Muslim. European and Asian. Ancient and modern. Sacred and commercial.

At Hagia Sophia, those contradictions occupy the same building.

Nearly fifteen centuries of faith, conquest, earthquakes and human ambition are written into its walls and floors. Christian mosaics were covered when the building became a mosque; centuries later some were uncovered again. The building itself shifted and cracked, yet somehow survived.

Standing there, I found myself thinking less about which faith had possessed the building at any particular moment and more about something simpler.

With all the churches, mosques, temples and synagogues humanity has built, one might have expected us to have learned a little more kindness by now.

Perhaps buildings are easier to construct than compassion.

Then came Topkapı.

There were diamonds and jeweled weapons, magnificent rooms and the accumulated treasures of empire. The Spoonmaker’s Diamond glittered behind glass—86 carats surrounded by dozens more diamonds, as though 86 were somehow insufficient.

But the palace became more interesting to me when we moved away from the treasures.

There were the quarters of the halberdiers. Bedding cupboards. Fountains. Baths. Inscriptions recording money left to buy candles for men who became sick. Prayers requested for people long dead.

And suddenly the Ottoman Empire was no longer merely sultans and conquests.

People slept here.

They worked here.

They became ill here.

They worried about money, said their prayers, tried to keep warm and eventually died here.

Earlier in the trip I had encountered the bent figure of the Istanbul porter—the hamal—carrying an enormous burden on his back. I jokingly called him the human camel. But perhaps he and the palace servants were telling the same story.

Great civilizations leave monuments to the powerful.

Look carefully enough, though, and you eventually find the people who carried the load.

Today Istanbul required less interpretation.

We wandered through streets filled with shops, spices, sweets and people. Turkish delight sat in great colorful piles. Sausages hung over market stalls. The Galata Tower appeared above the city in the distance. There were gulls overhead and crowds everywhere.

And there was food.

Cooking has long been part of my life in Tallahassee, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that markets and spices fascinate me. Here, ingredients I had known in the kitchen seemed to acquire biographies of their own. Even saffron—those tiny red threads—became another lesson in how much human labor can hide inside something beautiful.

Eventually, after several days of Istanbul walking, we arrived at Çukurcuma Hamamı.

My feet had already lodged a formal grievance.

Inside, the city became quiet. Marble replaced cobblestones. Heat, water and steam replaced traffic and crowds. Light entered from above and scattered across the marble floor.

Then came scrubbing and massage.

For once, someone appeared to take my feet’s complaint seriously.

We emerged considerably cleaner and considerably more willing to continue walking.

There was ice cream.

Three scoops.

History is important, but one must maintain perspective.

And tonight we ended beneath the brick vaults of Sarnıç, surrounded by enormous circles of light. We ate well. Very well. And dessert arrived looking less like something one should eat than a small piece of contemporary architecture.

Somewhere during dinner, I realized Istanbul had answered the question I posed when we arrived.

The city had made its case.

Not because of any single mosque, palace, diamond, market or meal. And not because five days is remotely enough to understand a city that has been reinventing itself for thousands of years.

It was something about the accumulation.

The airport and the old telephone.

Sultans and porters.

Christian mosaics and Islamic calligraphy.

Diamonds and bedding cupboards.

The Bosphorus and the back streets.

Saffron and ice cream.

The call to prayer and the noise of traffic.

History and ordinary life continuing beside one another as though neither finds the other particularly remarkable.

Perhaps that is what I will remember most about Istanbul.

It doesn’t seem to discard its previous lives.

It carries them.

Tomorrow we leave for Antalya.

Five days ago, Istanbul was an invitation.

Tonight, it feels more like a conversation we have only just begun.

Simply O

Istanbul – Behind the Palace Walls

Every palace has a front door through which history likes to enter. But perhaps we understand power better when we wander through the rooms behind it.

Today took us to Topkapı Palace, and somewhere along the way Istanbul became less about buildings and more about the people who once inhabited them.

The palace is magnificent. Courtyards open into other courtyards. Domes, gardens, fountains and chambers unfold one after another. From its elevated position, the Bosphorus appears almost as part of the estate. It is easy to imagine the Ottoman sultans looking across the water and believing that the world belonged to them.

But palaces are designed to impress. Their beauty tells only part of the story.

Behind the ceremonial rooms were other lives: wives and concubines, servants, guards, officials and eunuchs. People whose lives existed within an elaborate hierarchy built around one man and the continuation of a dynasty.

And then I read the words Black eunuchs.

My thoughts immediately returned to slavery.

How can any human being think it is right to enslave another?

Perhaps the distance of centuries makes it easier to discuss slavery as history: trade routes, empires, laws, economics and customs. Standing in the place where enslaved people actually lived makes that abstraction much harder.

To enslave another human being is already to deny something fundamental about his humanity. But to take an enslaved boy or man and mutilate his body through castration so that he could occupy a role designed for him by others seems to me an even deeper act of dehumanization. His freedom had already been taken. Now something irreversible was being taken from his body as well.

And when those men were Black Africans, transported far from the places of their birth, the history became impossible for me to regard dispassionately.

Some eventually rose to extraordinary positions within the Ottoman court. They could become powerful, influential and trusted, sometimes operating remarkably close to the center of imperial authority.

There is a terrible irony in that.

A man could become privileged within the very institution that had first stripped him of his freedom.

Privilege did not undo enslavement. Influence could not restore what had been taken from him. Proximity to the Sultan did not somehow make the original violation humane.

And yet, somewhere among all those thoughts, I saw yellow.

A bed of yellow flowers growing quietly in the palace grounds.

I smiled.

I have been learning to see yellow—not because yellow makes difficult things disappear, but because beauty and darkness somehow continue to occupy the same world.

Here I was, walking through a place that had confronted me with slavery, castration, power and the extraordinary contradictions of religion, and there, completely indifferent to my troubled thoughts, were these small yellow flowers.

They explained nothing.

They excused nothing.

They were simply beautiful.

Perhaps seeing yellow was never about looking away from what is difficult.

Perhaps it is about refusing to let what is difficult become all that we see.

My thoughts returned to religion.

Elsewhere within the same palace were reminders of faith.

Abraham. John the Baptist. Jesus. Muhammad.

Names separated by centuries, yet connected by a remarkable spiritual genealogy.

It struck me that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not strangers who happened to encounter one another across history. They belong to the Abrahamic family. Their theologies diverge, sometimes profoundly, but their stories repeatedly intersect. Abraham stands within all three traditions. Christianity emerged from Judaism. Islam came centuries later acknowledging Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist and Jesus among the prophets who preceded Muhammad.

Standing there, the family resemblance was difficult to ignore.

And perhaps that makes the history of religious conflict even more bewildering.

Human beings have fought, conquered and killed one another over religions whose sacred histories contain many of the same people.

Perhaps we have spent too much time emphasizing where the branches separate and too little remembering that some of the roots are shared.

And then, amid all these contradictions, I encountered something else that stopped me: the charity stone.

Those who had enough could leave money. Those who needed it could quietly take what they required.

No audience. No applause. No photograph of the giver presenting something to the recipient. No requirement that poverty perform its gratitude.

Just one human being leaving something for another.

I loved that.

Perhaps this was religion expressing itself in its simplest and most beautiful form—not through power, conquest or magnificent buildings, but through compassion.

There was dignity built into the arrangement. The person who left the money did not know who would receive it. The person in need did not have to stand before the giver and explain their poverty.

One gave without recognition.

The other received without humiliation.

Perhaps that is what faith was always supposed to look like.

And suddenly the contradiction of Topkapı became even more profound.

Within the same civilization were systems capable of enslaving human beings and traditions capable of protecting the dignity of a stranger. One diminished humanity. The other quietly restored it.

The problem was never that humanity did not know what goodness looked like.

We knew.

We simply did not always choose it.

Yesterday, walking through the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, I found myself wondering how a world containing so many churches, mosques, temples and synagogues could still contain so much cruelty. With so many places built in honor of God, one might expect us to have become considerably better at being kind to one another.

Today the question followed me into the palace.

Religious traditions have existed alongside slavery throughout much of human history. People found ways to regulate it, justify it and live comfortably beside it. Others would eventually draw upon those same traditions to argue for human dignity and abolition.

Perhaps that is where the uncomfortable question lies.

Not simply in what religion teaches, but in the remarkable ability of human beings to reconcile what we profess to believe with what we are prepared to do to one another.

We can construct magnificent houses for God while sometimes treating God’s children abominably.

Perhaps the great contradiction of religion has never been what we profess to believe.

Perhaps it is what we permit ourselves to do to one another while believing it.

Eventually we left the palace.

And Istanbul did what Istanbul seems particularly good at doing.

It changed the subject.

We found ourselves back among ordinary streets and shops. Cobbled pavement beneath our feet. Cats wandering around as though they owned the neighborhood. Jewelry shops. Restaurants. People talking. People shopping.

And then we wandered into a shop filled with handmade cosmetics.

Bright walls. Rows of colorful soaps. Creams and scrubs. Felted soaps in almost every imaginable fragrance. And, apparently, something called Turkish Delight Soap.

After sultans, harems, slavery, eunuchs and several centuries of Ottoman history, we were shopping for soap.

I had to smile.

History can be unbearably heavy.

And five minutes later, someone is deciding between lavender and Turkish Delight.

Perhaps that, too, is travel.

You move between the monumental and the mundane, between things that trouble the soul and things that simply make you smile. Neither experience cancels the other. Somehow they occupy the same day.

As we walked back through Istanbul, I kept thinking about the palace we had left behind.

The empire is gone.

The sultans are gone.

The people who once competed desperately to stand closest to power are gone.

Topkapı remains, but now ordinary people walk through its gates carrying cameras and water bottles, listening to stories about people who once believed their world would last forever.

Outside, Istanbul continues.

A cat crosses a cobbled street.

A shopkeeper waits for the next customer.

Yemi examines another bar of soap.

And perhaps history offers its quietest lesson there.

Power seeks to be remembered. Kindness does not require it.

Power passes.

Humanity is what remains.

Simply O

Shoes by the Danube:

There are monuments that command attention, and there are monuments that whisper.

The Shoes on the Danube whispered.

At first glance, they appear almost ordinary—pairs of worn shoes scattered along the riverbank. Some are work boots. Some are dress shoes. One looks small enough to belong to a child. They sit quietly facing the water as though their owners might return at any moment.

But they never will.

During the winter of 1944–1945, thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to this very riverbank by members of the Arrow Cross militia. Before they were executed, they were ordered to remove their shoes. In a time of scarcity, shoes were valuable. The victims were lined up at the edge of the Danube, shot, and their bodies fell into the river.

The shoes remained.

Standing there in the evening light, with Budapest reflected in the water and the city carrying on around us, I found myself thinking about how easily human beings can become capable of extraordinary cruelty.

History often records numbers.

Six million.

Hundreds of thousands.

Millions more displaced, imprisoned, or forgotten.

But numbers can create distance.

Shoes do not.

Shoes remind us that every number was a person.

Someone who laughed.

Someone who worried about their children.

Someone who planned for tomorrow.

Someone who believed they would see another sunrise.

And yet, as I looked across the Danube toward the beauty of Budapest, another thought emerged.

Human history is not only the story of cruelty.

It is also the story of remembrance.

Someone chose to build this memorial.

Someone decided that these lives would not disappear into the current of history.

Someone believed memory matters.

Throughout our travels, I was struck by how often this tension appeared. Again and again we encountered evidence of humanity at its worst—and evidence of humanity at its best. Tyranny and courage. Hatred and sacrifice. Destruction and rebuilding.

The same species capable of creating death camps is capable of creating memorials.

The same hands that once pulled triggers can, generations later, place flowers.

The same world that wounds can also heal.

Perhaps that is why places like this matter.

They remind us that civilization is more fragile than we like to believe and more resilient than we sometimes fear.

As the sun settled over the Danube, the empty shoes cast long shadows across the stone.

The river kept moving, as rivers always do.

But memory remained.

And perhaps that is redemption—not the erasure of evil, but the refusal to forget those who suffered because of it.

For as long as the shoes remain on the riverbank, their owners are not entirely gone.

And as long as we remember, history still has something to teach us.

Simply O.

Reflections Along the Rivers of Europe

There is something about slow travel that changes not only what one sees, but how one sees.

Over these past days, the rivers of Europe have carried us through landscapes of extraordinary beauty — canals lined with leaning houses, vineyards flowing down hillsides, medieval towns suspended in time, soaring cathedrals, castles perched above the Rhine, and streets still marked by centuries of footsteps. Yet beneath the beauty lies something deeper: memory.

Europe seems to preserve memory differently than anywhere else I have traveled.

Wars are not hidden here. They are engraved into bridges, memorial lights, rebuilt cities, plaques, and silence. Faith is not merely spoken of here. It rises in stone through Romanesque walls, Gothic arches, stained glass, and Baroque ceilings that once attempted to pull human eyes toward heaven. Even wine becomes memory — soil, climate, tradition, and centuries bottled together and passed from one generation to another.

What has struck me most is how often beauty and contradiction coexist side by side.

Cities that produced magnificent cathedrals also witnessed unimaginable cruelty. Places nearly destroyed by war were rebuilt not only through governments, but through ordinary people who refused to let memory disappear. Medieval streets that now charm tourists were once walked by people struggling simply to survive plague, hunger, cold, and uncertainty.

And perhaps that is the deeper lesson these rivers quietly teach.

Civilization is fragile.

Yet human beings continue building anyway:
cathedrals that take centuries,
bridges rebuilt after war,
music that survives hatred,
stories that outlive empires,
and small acts of beauty that refuse to disappear.

As I move further eastward toward Budapest, I realize this journey is becoming less about destinations and more about attention — learning to notice the layers beneath places, beneath history, and perhaps even beneath oneself.

The rivers continue flowing.

So does memory.

And somewhere between the locks, castles, cathedrals, vineyards, and conversations, I sense that travel at its best does not merely show us the world.

It slowly teaches us how to see it.

Simply O.

On Tribalism, Racism, and the Struggle to Understand

I am quintessentially African.

I grew up in Nigeria, in a society where identity mattered deeply. We did not call it racism. We called it tribalism. Politics was often shaped by region, language, and ancestry. A government official might give a job to someone from his own region even if that person was less qualified. It was unfair. It was frustrating. But it was also understandable within its context.

Our tribalism was rooted more in familiarity and survival than in metaphysical hatred. In a young post-colonial nation, where institutions were fragile and trust was local, people leaned toward “their own.” It was proximity bias. It was patronage. It was human nature amplified by insecurity.

What it was not, at least in my experience, was a doctrine that another tribe was inherently less human.

Ironically, Nigeria had very few white people when I was growing up, and those who were present were often treated better than natives. That reality complicates simplistic narratives about power and identity. Human beings form in-groups wherever they are. The categories change. The instinct does not.

I then spent a decade living and training in the United Kingdom. That experience added another layer. The UK carried its own history — empire, immigration, class stratification. There, I encountered a society more subtle in its expressions of difference. Identity was shaped not only by race, but by class, accent, schooling, postcode. You could feel the gradations. Some of it was overt; much of it was understated.

Living in both Nigeria and the UK allowed me to see that group identification is universal. It is expressed differently across cultures, but it persists. Tribe. Class. Region. Race. Nation.

Now I live in America — a country that has long described itself as a “shining city on a hill.” That phrase carries moral aspiration. It suggests a society that strives not merely for prosperity, but for example. A nation that understands its diversity as strength, not threat.

Yet I find myself disappointed.

Not angry. Disappointed.

There seems to be an innate human tendency toward group identification. That much I accept. I have seen it in Nigeria. I have seen it in the United Kingdom. I see it here. But what troubles me is not the existence of group identity. It is the elevation of that identity into hierarchy — into the belief that one human being is intrinsically superior to another.

That is where tribal preference crosses into something darker.

As a man of faith, I struggle with the sins of racism because they strike at something sacred. If every human being bears divine image, then to diminish another person’s worth on the basis of race is not merely a social flaw — it is a moral contradiction.

I am not a descendant of American slaves. My lineage is African in a direct and uninterrupted sense. And yet racism still cuts deep. It cuts because it attempts to assign lesser value to people who look like me. It cuts because it suggests that history’s ugliest hierarchies are not as buried as we hoped. It cuts because it forces one to ask how a society so educated, so powerful, so globally influential can still wrestle so publicly with basic human equality.

Perhaps group bias is universal. But dehumanization is not inevitable.

Nations can discipline their worst instincts. Leaders can elevate rather than inflame. Citizens can choose moral maturity over tribal reflex. That is what I had hoped America — with its resources, its history of civil rights struggle, and its global example — would embody more consistently.

Disappointment implies expectation.

I expected better. Not perfection. Not the erasure of human bias. But progress — visible, steady, undeniable progress toward seeing one another fully.

The shining city on a hill was always aspirational. It was never flawless. But aspiration requires maintenance. It requires courage. It requires truthfulness about our impulses and restraint in how we wield them.

I do not hate this country. I have built my life here. I have raised my daughters here. I have contributed to its institutions. I believe in its promise.

But belief does not prevent disappointment when the promise feels dimmed.

And perhaps this is why it matters so much to me. My daughters are growing up in this country. They will inherit not only its opportunities, but its tensions. I want them to live in an America that sees them fully — not as categories, not as demographic abstractions, but as complete human beings endowed with dignity. I want them to engage the world with confidence, not defensiveness; with moral clarity, not bitterness.

The deeper question I continue to wrestle with is this: How does one human being come to see another as less?

History offers explanations — fear, scarcity, political manipulation, inherited prejudice. Psychology offers mechanisms — in-group bias, threat perception, social conditioning. But explanation does not equal justification.

The moral line remains clear.

Group identity may be human.
Hierarchy of human worth is not.

And perhaps the true measure of a shining city is not whether it avoids tension, but whether it resists the temptation to sanctify its divisions — for the sake of the next generation.

Hope, after all, is a discipline.

SimplyO

A Rupturing World: On Power, Legitimacy, and What Travel Reveals.

Ancient ruins showcasing the remnants of a historical structure against a blue sky.

“The past explains how we arrived here. It does not decide what comes next.”

I have come to believe that travel is not only about seeing places, but about seeing systems—how they rise, how they fracture, and how fragile they truly are. That belief frames how I see the world today, a world that is not merely changing, but rupturing.

The language of continuity—of transition, reform, or rebalancing—no longer describes our moment. What is breaking is not only the geopolitical order, but the moral scaffolding that once made that order appear coherent. Questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and power—once politely deferred—are now being asked openly, and once asked, they refuse easy answers.

It is in this context that claims about territory and historical entitlement take on renewed urgency. Recent assertions that Denmark has no legitimate claim to Greenland because Europeans arrived there “only” five centuries ago expose a deeper contradiction. By that logic, the same question rebounds onto the United States and other settler societies. How long ago did Europeans arrive in North America to make it their own? Four hundred years? Five hundred? And what of the Indigenous peoples who lived on, governed, and cultivated the land for thousands of years before colonization began?

If temporal priority alone determines legitimacy, then much of the modern world collapses under its own weight.

Modern states were not born of moral clarity. They emerged through conquest, coercion, and unequal power, later stabilized by laws and institutions that transformed force into permanence. International norms did not erase these origins; they normalized them. Over time, repetition became legitimacy, and legitimacy became assumed. This is why appeals to history, when used selectively, are so dangerous. They are rarely about justice. More often, they are about leverage.

This tension—between how nations came into being and how they justify themselves today—is not abstract for me. It is one of the reasons I travel. To move through the world is to see, firsthand, how fragile governance really is, how contingent borders are, and how deeply history lives in the present. In ancient cities, colonial capitals, and post-conflict societies, the past is not a chapter—it is architecture, memory, grievance, and silence.

Travel strips away the illusion that governance is permanent or inevitable. It reveals how quickly order can fracture, how easily institutions fail, and how much of what we call stability rests on collective belief rather than unshakable truth. Standing in places shaped by empire, revolution, or collapse, one learns that sovereignty is less a fixed fact than a negotiated condition—renewed or eroded with every generation.

This understanding reframes the question of legitimacy. Modern states cannot justify themselves solely by how they came into being, because few would survive that reckoning. Legitimacy today must flow forward, not backward. It must rest on present consent, self-determination, and the agency of the people who live within those borders now. The past explains how we arrived here; it does not, by itself, determine who decides what comes next.

Greenland illustrates this distinction clearly. The question is not whether Denmark once claimed or administered the territory, but whether the people who live there now possess genuine agency over their future. Modern legitimacy depends not on the age of a claim, but on the reality of self-determination.

Applied honestly, this same standard exposes America’s unresolved contradiction. The United States exists as a sovereign state, yet its foundations rest on the dispossession of Indigenous nations who never truly consented to that loss. Tribal sovereignty persists, but uneasily. Land acknowledgments multiply, but restitution remains limited. Reconciliation is spoken of more often than it is achieved. America’s legitimacy today rests not on its origins, but on whether it continues to confront its history and expand justice in the present. That work remains incomplete.

These are not lessons learned from textbooks alone. They are learned by walking through cities where borders have shifted, by listening to people whose lives have been shaped by decisions made far away, long ago, and by witnessing how fragile peace and governance can be when trust erodes. Travel becomes, in this sense, a moral education. It reveals the cost of pretending that power is neutral, that history is settled, or that injustice fades on its own.

In a rupturing world, history is being reopened not to heal old wounds, but to justify new ones. Ancient grievances are revived selectively, pressed into service of modern domination. Moral language is stripped of consistency and used as strategy. That path leads not to justice, but to fragmentation and fear.

The only defensible response is an honest one: to acknowledge past injustice without allowing it to become a tool of opportunism; to reject nostalgia for an order that never fully lived up to its ideals; and to ground sovereignty not in conquest or myth, but in present agency and shared responsibility.

Travel has taught me that the world is held together not by inevitability, but by choice. The past explains how we arrived here. What matters now is whether we have the courage to see the world as it is—and to decide, together, what comes next. And whether this fracture becomes a collapse, or an opportunity to build something more honest, depends on whether we are willing to apply the principles we already accept, consistently and without exception.

Simply O