15-Year-Old Faith Odunsi Wins Global Open

15-YearOld Faith Odunsi Wins Global Open Mathmatics Competition

By Cedric 'BIG CED' Thornton

A YOUNG NIGERIAN TEENAGER HAS

recently beat out contestants from around the globe in a mathematics competition.

According to AfroTech, Nigerian student, Faith Odunsi, 15, took part in the Global Open Mathematics competition and emerged victorious as she beat competitors from China, the UK, the US, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia in a global math competition. As the winner of this competition, Odunsi not only walked away with the title, but she has also secured the top prize of $1,000.

The 15-year-old Odunsi is currently in her fi nal year as a high school student as she is attending the Ambassadors School, Ota Ogun State. Her father is a doctor and her mother is a businesswoman and she attributes her math skills to her father, which she thanks him for.

In an exclusive interview with Punch magazine, Odunsi mentions that she has taken part in numerous competitions that have, in part, prepared her for this latest one. She also spoke of the medals she has won in previous competitions.

“Yes. I have been taking part in the national Olympiad since I was in JSS2. I have also taken part in Kangourou Sans Frontieres, South African mathematics Olympiad, American Mathematics Competition, and Pan-African mathematics Olympiad. For the national Olympiad, I was made the Queen of Mathematics from JSS3 to SS2. For the South African Mathematics Olympiad, I got medals. I got a silver medal in the Pan-African mathematics Olympiad in 2019. I was also made an ambassador of my school.”

She also stated she wants to study abroad.

“I would like to study outside Nigeria because the facilities are better abroad and the experience is better. I don’t think I will be limited in Nigeria; I just think the opportunities will be better abroad.”

www.blackenterprise.com/15-year-old-nigeriangirl-wins-global-open-mathematics-competition Image credit: Instagram

Now Online: A Free Library Devoted to West Africa’s Food Heritage

By Vonnie Williams

IN A YOUTUBE VIDEO, entitled "A Tale of Two Fritters" (www.youtube.com/

watch?v=uU12OsFQB1c&feature=emb_logo), Ozoz Sokoh is in her kitchen making both akara, a Nigerian bean fritter, and acarajé, the Brazilian equivalent. As she reviews the ingredients and aromatics—black-eyed peas, Thai and Scotch bonnet peppers for heat, tomatoes, ginger, and orange-red palm oil, it’s easy to see that the two dishes, though from diff erent continents, are obviously related.

Sokoh, a food historian born in Nigeria and currently living in Canada, is an expert at making connections between diff erent food cultures. To share her research, she recently launched Feast Afrique (www.feastafrique.com), an online library of free digital books that explore the infl uence of West African foods on culinary cultures around the world. The texts she’s chosen, both cookbooks full of recipes or tomes that touch only briefl y on food, speak to the enormous reach and richness of the region’s culinary traditions.

Though Sokoh has had a long career as a food historian and a blogger at Kitchen Butterfl y (www. kitchenbutterfl y.com), her current love of food was hard-won. As a child growing up in Nigeria, she hated eating, and often had to be hospitalized due to malnutrition. Only a trip to Edinburgh with her family, when she was nine, changed that. “I guess it was a combination of exertion from the walking, and we were in this other place that opened me up to eating,” Sokoh says, remembering how she scarfed down food during that trip.

This acquired love for food followed Sokoh throughout school and adulthood, all the way across the world, after she relocated to the Netherlands for her work. Homesick and in a new country, she felt isolated. “I was bordering on being depressed. I didn’t feel like I was succeeding in my career as a geologist,” Sokoh says. However, an unexpected connection with a Brazilian coworker found them bonding over on acarajé—and discovering how similar it was to akara. It was a foreshadowing of the connections she’d make between West African food and the African diaspora, a link created by the transatlantic slave trade.

In 2009, Sokoh created her blog, Kitchen Butterfl y, to document how Nigerian and West African dishes spread around the world. Many of the dishes she discovered, from countries like Brazil, Haiti, and Jamaica, were protected and preserved by enslaved cooks. “The goals for them and I were to feel the same: to fi nd comfort, to pay homage, to document history,” says Sokoh. “As a Nigerian, it was shocking to discover that Nigerian cuisine—which I had always taken for granted— existed in this exalted, celebrated form abroad and had endured all sorts of tragedy and trauma, but still stood supreme.”

While Kitchen Butterfl y served as a place to post her thoughts, Sokoh wanted to create a more academically robust resource for her food fi ndings, in order to “share them with a wider audience, with more of a rigorous, research-based eye,” Sokoh says. She decided to launch a print journal, Feast Afrique, which was due to debut in 2013. However, the death of the planned editor, a close friend of Sokoh’s, put the project on hold indefi nitely.

But last year, another friend gifted her Toni Tipton Martin’s groundbreaking works on AfricanAmerican cookbooks, Jubilee and The Jemima Code. Soon, Sokoh found herself looking online for the texts referenced in Martin’s work. “I found myself not going to sleep. By the end of the fi rst week, I had about 40, 50 books,” Sokoh says. “I wasn’t only doing The Jemima Code. I was also looking at Nigerian books, other books I liked, and literature books that had food in cultural

“My artistic practice has a lot to do with cooking, but also documenting. What you don’t know, you can’t reference and what you can’t reference, you can’t use to shape future plans,” Sokoh says. “It’s important to show people that we do have a food history that stretches back centuries, and documentation that stretches back as well.” Feast Afrique is an opportunity for Sokoh’s primary audience—Africans and Black diasporans—to know and own their rich culinary history, and give a voice to little-known narratives that are often erased and appropriated. “People don’t ascribe the same sophistication to French cuisine as West African cuisine, and foods of Black association tend to be ridiculed and kind of bucketed in this ethnic class,” Sokoh says. “I’m an eater fi rst. And I’ve eaten food around the world and very little of it comes close to the amazingness of West African cuisine. I’m not going to sit around and let people continue to dumb us down, but we have to have that knowledge.” To Sokoh, food is far more than just fuel. “It’s a vehicle for exploring history—personal history, contexts and symbols. By October, I had 190.” group history, and how memory can be resistance,”

In early January, Sokoh fi nally launched Feast she says. “Everything that we see on the plate says Afrique, but as an online archive instead of a print something about history, culture, trade, lineage, journal. The website contains almost 250 links strength, and survival. Food on a plate tells the to online books, covering West African, African- story of life.” American, and African diasporic culinary history. With texts dating back to 1828, many of these books contain some of the earliest documented histories www.atlasobscura.com/articles/west-africancookbooks of West African cooking. For example,

Practical West African Cookery

(https://archive.org/details/b28132762/ page/n7/mode/2up), published in 1910, has the fi rst documented recipe for jollof rice (and is the fi rst book in Feast Afrique’s monthly reading challenge). Other books, like Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit (https://archive.org/ details/pigtailsnbreadfr00aust), a culinary memoir of traditional Bajan foods from his childhood, provides readers with a culinary map of slavery’s eff ect on the foods of the Caribbean.

However, the collection is ultimately a celebration of the infl uence and history of West African cuisines on the world. Rufus Estes's 1911 cookbook is included in Sokoh's digital library. PUBLIC DOMAIN

Simone Biles was seen practicing a Yurchenko double pike — a vault never attempted in competition by a wo

SIMONE BILES ALREADY HAS many unprecedented feats under her belt, but her latest stunt may be the most ambitious and most impressive yet.

The 23-year-old gymnastics superstar is set to try a skill so challenging and dangerous that no woman has ever even attempted to pull it off in competition before.

Biles has her eyes set on a Yurchenko double

pike (www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Yurchenko+doub le+pike&view=detail&mid=DEEFFF5C2E499C32517CDE EFFF5C2E499C32517C&FORM=VIRE). The complex vault requires a gymnast to complete a roundoff back-handspring entry into the vaulting table, then execute two full backward rotations with legs extended before, ideally, sticking the landing.

"It's very, very challenging," one of Biles' coaches, Laurent Landi, said during a recent segment on "60 Minutes." "And what's scary, it's that people can get hurt. You do a short landing, you can hurt your ankles ... it's a very dangerous vault."

Biles certainly doesn't need to take the risk of this magnitude to fi nd success at this point in her esteemed gymnastics career. With four Olympic gold medals and more World Championship victories than any other athlete in the history of the sport, Biles could easily lean on the skills she's employed in the past to cruise to victory.

But instead, she's choosing to push herself heading into the Tokyo Olympics (www.olympic. org/tokyo-2020). Landis explained that, without that