Aregbesola, political treachery and the Ijebu-Jesa sermon, By Festus Adedayo
Chinua Achebe’s tortoise folktale in his highly celebrated Things Fall Apart, among other motifs, excoriates an act of betrayal as evil. In having Ekwefi, one of his characters, narrate the proverbial cunning and treachery of the Tortoise to her daughter Ezinma, Achebe attempted to paint a moral canvass suggestive of the fact that traitors always take fatal leaps that eventually lead to their unraveling. Like the tortoise, they break their shell carapace. This is Ekwefi’s narration: There once lived Rauf Aregbesola a very avaricious Tortoise whose greed knew no bounds and which eventually became its tragic flaw. One day, with the general awareness that birds were planning a huge feast in the sky, Tortoise met the Chief of Birds and pleaded with him to get his bird colleagues to make him partake of the feast. But the wings with which he would fly became a challenge. After pleading passionately with them, reluctantly, the birds agreed to each donate feathers to him so that he could be
