Share Wole Soyinka, last week, wrote about mad cows and madder narratives. Where else do cows, what they eat, how they eat, and where they eat dominate discourses in the 21st century if not in a kingdom of fools? And, again, last week in Ibadan, Nigeria, rotten tomatoes and how they were disposed of claimed lives and properties in horrendous proportions. Things that rule Nigeria’s nights and our days are incredible. They occur daily, and they are many. They sound unbelievably dark – like the sad tales from D.O. Fagunwa’s Irinkerindo. Foolishness and idiocy are synonyms. Idiocy and madness are relatives – they are first cousins; psychiatrists, in fact, say one is a form of the other. Fools are dangerous people; they are the more dangerous when they are made king over a people. As king, they can be as life-threatening and as unpredictable as death. The elements you find in avarice, thirst for impossible power, excessive self-love, nepotism and irascibility all cohere in the foolish king. When their kingdom is in turmoil, they throw a feast and pronounce themselves the best thing to have happened to their land. I go with John Locke’s position that idiots are ‘worse’ than madmen; they are people ‘deprived of reason’ – incapable of rational thinking and decisions.