Kola Tubosun

Twitter in Yoruba Campaign

Tubosun is known for his work in language advocacy. In 2012, he started an online campaign to demand that Twitter include Yoruba (his mother tongue) in the list of languages into which Twitter was being translated: 1 March 2012 was declared "the Tweet Yoruba Day" to call attention to the matter.^[7] The campaign involved other speakers of Yoruba online tweeting only in the language and directing their comments to the Twitter translation platform, and it eventually yielded first an acknowledgment of the protest and then a promise to act in support of the idea.

The campaign continued on 1 March 2013 and again on 1 March 2014. In August 2014, Twitter announced through a tweet that they were now adding Yoruba (along with Esperanto) to the translation platform, ending the two years of advocacy.^{[8][9][10][11]}

The Yoruba Names Project

Kola Tubosun as a Fulbright Scholar teaching Yoruba at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2010.

Tubosun founded the "Yorùbá Names Project" at YorubaName.com in March 2015 after months of crowdfunding as^[12][13] an effort to document all names in Yoruba in an accessible multimedia format while bringing together a community of interested linguists and other culture enthusiasts to document the African cultural and linguistic experience on the web. He is also involved in setting up a version for Igbo language at IgboName.com. On 8 August 2015, the project released a free Yorùbá Keyboard software for Mac and Windows to allow its users type in Yorùbá language on the internet^[14] with an update to cater for Igbo in July 2016.^[15][16]

In November 2017, the project released the first online speech synthesizer for Yoruba,^[17] created after crowdfunding and months of research^[18][19] In December 2017, in collaboration with the Orisha Image Blog, the project released a free Yoruba learning audio course.^[20][21]

Work at Google

Between October 2015 and July 2016, Tubosun worked as a Linguist at Google with the Speech team as Project Manager.^[22][23]

While at Google, he was also instrumental to changing the erstwhile inaccurate translation of Esu on Google Translate,^[24] which had hitherto caused a lot of backlash in the Yoruba language community.^[25][26]

Poetry

In September 2005, Tubosun released a chapbook of poems called Headfirst into the Meddle, to a limited audience. In 2015, he followed it with Attempted Speech & Other Fatherhood Poems,^[27] published by Saraba Magazine. It contains poems written about the experience of raising a child.

In October 2006, his poem "Here, Moving" won the Sentinel Poetry Bar Challenge.^[28]

In 2018, he announced the publication of his first full collection of poems Edwardsville by Heart (November 2018), a travelogue-memoir to be published by Wisdom's Bottom Press, UK.^[29]

Blogging and travel writing

Since 2009, Tubosun has blogged at KTravula.com to document travel, teaching, writing, and student experiences in the United States, Nigeria, and other places.

In 2010, he contributed to 234Next as a travel writer.

In October 2015, he was nominated for the CNN African Journalists Award^[30] for his travel piece Abeokuta's Living History, first published at KTravula.com. He was the first ever blogger on the award shortlist.

In September 2018, he was a tour guide to Brandon Stanton from Humans of New York while he was in Nigeria.^[31]

Editing

From 2012 to 2015, Tubosun worked as the pioneering editor of a Literary Magazine of new writing from Nigerian and Africa called NTLitMag.

In November 2015, he co-edited as well as Aké Review, the literary publication of the Aké Arts and Book Festival, with Kolade Arogundade.

From 2015–2016, while he taught as a schoolteacher, he edited two issues of The Sail, an anthology of creative works of high school students.^{[32][33][34][35][36][37]}

Literary criticism

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún at a recent book panel. Photo courtesy Ake Arts and Book Festival 2016

His work of literary criticism has appeared in the NTLitMag, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, and Enkare Review.

In 2016, he wrote the entry on Nnedi Okorafor's science fiction novel Lagoon for "Imaginary Wonderlands" (October, 2016), a collection of essays about invented worlds in literature from around the globe, from Dante to Rushdie. The book was edited by Laura Miller (writer).

Translations

Tubosun's work in localizing the predictive text input product "T9" was detailed in a memoir/ essay for Farafina Magazine in 2007 titled "Speaking the Machine".^[38]

In February 2014, he was part of the Cassava Republic Press Ankara Press Valentine Anthology, which had short stories about love by African writers translated into local languages.^[39]

In November 2016, at the Aké Arts and Book Festival, he was instrumental in translating a short story by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o into Yoruba language,^[40] part of which he read out at the festival.^[41][42]

Journalism

Tubosun was the president of the Union of Campus Journalists at University of Ibadan (2002-2004) during which time he helped institute two prizes for student journalists, as well as set up the first internship opportunities for student journalists with prominent media houses in the country. Some students from that program became full-time journalists upon graduation.

In September 2016, after the demolition of Ilojo Bar, a national monument on Lagos Island, he published a three-part investigative feature in the Nigerian Guardian about the causes, cost, and consequences of the demolition.^[43][44][45]

Writing activism and advocacy

In 2003, during a nine-month strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Tubosun created a petition online admonishing the president and minister of education in Nigeria and warning them of the dangers of a continued elongation of the industrial strike to students and the educational system.^[46][47]

In November 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, he co-wrote a petition to restate "our respect for the dignity of people of all races, faiths, creeds, classes, abilities, ancestries, gender identities, and sexual orientations" and express support for the goals of the Fulbright Program "to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship" warning that cuts to the program will jeopardize its goals.^[48] The petition was signed by about 2000 Fulbright Program grantees and alumni. The Fulbright Program has so far survived the proposed cut to the US government budget.^[49]

Tech Innovator

He has been listed in 2015 and 2016 in the YNaija list of Nigeria's innovators in technology ^[50][51]

In 2016, he was named in the Quartz African Innovator's List.^[52] He was also listed in the "40 Under 40" Innovators for 2017 by Ventures Africa.

Premio Ostana

In January 2016, he was chosen as a recipient of a Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Mother Tongue Literature (Il Premio Ostana Internazionale Scritture in Lingua Madre 2016), a prize given to any individual who has done writing and notable advocacy for the defence of an indigenous language.^{[4][5][53][54][55]} The prize ceremony was held from 2 to 5 June 2016, in the town of Ostana (Cuneo, Italy).^[6][56][57] Tubosun was the first African to be so honoured by the organisation.

Culture Summit

In April 2017, Tubosun joined "nearly 300 participants from over 80 countries around the world, including key players involved in the fields of government, arts, philanthropy, heritage preservation, education, media, science and technology" at Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, to "explore... a wide range of topics all focused on answering how cultural tools can be used to help address significant international challenges and seize emerging opportunities." It was the first edition of the Culture Summit, sponsored by Foreign Policy Magazine.^[58]

Pyeongchang Humanities Forum

Tubosun was one of the 160 writers and artists countries invited from eighteen countries around the world to participate in the "Cultural Olympics" in Seoul and Pyeongchang, preceding the 2018 Winter Olympics. The event aimed "to bring the world together through sport, writers at the event are sharing their ideas on how to tackle some of the difficulties around the world^[59][60]