Reach out to the past, and begin to get respect

Among Nigerian youths, there is a growing disconnect from cultural affiliations and ancestral roots. This disconnect, worn like a symbol of status and modernity by many, is more clearly defined when conversations swing towards cultural practices that held sway in the past and the relevance of such practices to the present.

While some of today’s youth opt to carry on like strangers from planets where such practices are unheard of, others turn up their noses up at it, consigning the discourse to the same plane they place things that conflict with the new religions, the dregs of the mind.

To them, those who advocate a reversion to ways that worked well enough in the past, are the rare breeds that hang on to notions that there is something good in a past  better consigned to the fate of the Godless people that lived then.

But my friends, many of who fall into the above category and who I try to dissuade from running away from our cultural history, are simply enigmatic, they hang on to my words, not really hearing the truth in them, but listening anyway.

What can one do but keep trying to open their eyes to the truth, to show them that there were more to our forbearers, that the rules they held sacred were for a reason, and that this reason still hold.

Being of a class of the so-called fortunate in a society of want -- a society where little work -- I have as friends, very educated individuals -- at least by western standards. These friends are likely to pander to western ideals; as such they do not buy my arguments. They only smile and call me “traditional ruler” or one who worships the Christian devil -- to whom the glorious days of our fathers are now ascribed.

For ages now, our people have been programmed by the largely misinterpreted teachings of the Christian Christ and his Semitic brother prophet, making it imperative that I keep my peace and desist from continually telling them that religion is just one aspect of culture, and is far from being wholesome.

It is not that I fear being likened to an incarnate of an entity that does not exist in the religion of my forefathers; I am however moved to silence by the realisation of the extent of the collective brainwashing that makes sure we remain second class citizens, even to our own eyes.

I find my hands tied and my tongue stopped by the sheer blindness with which our people continue to lean towards imported values. Our fathers, those ones that sold our souls for strips of coloured clothe and bits of shinny mirror, felt inadequate before the men from across the seas, that they equated them to gods.

Now, years after they proved that first observation wrong, I smile at the fact that we, their progeny, still deem it proper to worship at the feet of the white man and take his every word as proper and factual.

Years after the fall of the colonialism that made sure we gave without question -- that same one that held us hostage for years -- our youths and their blind parents still cling to the vestiges of white supremacy and turn their nose up at the laws our fathers laid to guide our doings.

Ask me again why we don’t get respect.

You watch Hollywood movies set in anywhere but Africa and you see the almost worship like reverence of local cultures. Here, the reverse is the norm, made more manifest by the stupid acquiescence of our brothers.

As I say to my friends, “we have to look back, we have to ask our ancestors, we have to look for that which worked for them, and apply this to our age and time”. Only then can we hope to truly touch the sky when we reach out.

Article originally published by bizinafrica.biz and dailytimes.com.ng