Agboole: The Security System We Abandoned
There is a particular kind of safety that cannot be purchased. Not installed. Not outsourced to a uniformed guard at a gate. Not captured on CCTV or tracked by a mobile app. It is the kind of safety that exists only when people know each other well enough to notice when something is wrong, and care enough to say so. I grew up inside that kind of safety. Most Nigerians of my generation did, whether they remember it clearly or not. In the Yoruba community I was raised in, the unwritten rules were clear and consistent. The elderly knew the children by name, and the children knew which elder's compound they could not run through without consequences. Strangers did not pass unnoticed. Not because anyone was stationed at a post watching, but because the community itself was always watching, not out of suspicion, but out of the natural attentiveness of people who were genuinely connected to one another. That social arrangement had a name. The Yoruba called it " Agboole ...