A culture and tradition bastardized and heavily wounded pt1
- by Egbufoama Chike
- 16 years ago
- 0 comments
The history of culture and tradition has revealed glaringly that any custom or tradition that lacks the zeal for reformatory rites and devoid of a force that wages war against negative external influence takes its permanent seat in the limbo of dead memories. A fact quite indubitable is that the juncture where human creativity and ingenuity has exchanged hands more-so human intelligence put to optimum use is in such genius work culminated to a society like Africa, drunk with glamorous culture and tradition charged with responsibility of preservation. The ‘technologized’ Africans as I call them have reaped the dividends of original African values but in attempt to meet up with westernization have jilted the values and headed towards dungeon of the total oblivion of cultural heritages.
Looking at history reveals that with the powers of technology the dominant culture of the West seems to have lost its Judeo-Christian matrix which lies at the base of western civilization as a way of inductive reasoning the westernized African will reach a point in his/her slavish imitation of an alien way of life heat the rock of Gibraltar.
Those heritages which communicate our cultural and traditional identities are what am crying for their reaffirmation. Those good ones that the identity of traditional African system is built upon which my grandparents nurtured in me. These values, on verge of gutters are being in continuously confronted with and affronted by the many forces of evocation in the mud of the “am a Changed African” syndrome
I write in a state of shattered spirit because my heart bleeds when I remember that almost nothing or little is left in the bank of African heritage the “bankers’ (I. e. Africans) have absconded and the bank is on its way to be “distressed” because of the present ‘liquidity squeeze” in the practice of what makes us African what individuates us.
What Igbo’s experience today as a mistaken mindset can be traced from the use of such strange western and American ideologies in an African problem of which such ideas when adopted do not solve a problem that is African endowed with African cultural predicament such a situation is what happens in the medical world where a problem that is African is being given a western approach in solution. I doff my cap to African herbal system when the western doctors confess and with a total spirit of submission say it is a true problem which demands an African solution.
We have been bran-washed and bamboozled by external and artificial beauty of the western culture. Today we see what belongs to us as barbaric’ mundane and outdated. Whatever that is west or American as modern, good and in vogue I want to drag a point home that you cannot describe or define a reality without a fore-knowledge, words like barbarism, demonic etc was brought to us by a western dictionary and I want to argue that these realities were fore- known meaning it first existed in such a locality. Worshipping of trees, stones and these were seen in such light as barbaric but what can me say to the religion of new-ageism proudly practiced in Europe now, I hope we have not fall short of memory as regard the fleet of worship Roman and Greek gods. Civilization was usurped from Africans because of this same altitude of non- chalancy towards what belongs to one. It is this same little-mindedness that led to the hijacking and adulteration of that which is African.
Notwithstanding the goodies of urbanization development, colonization I have kept wondering if it did us more harm than good. They brought us out from our shelves now they are going round again to the level of coming to prove to us that there is no need for God since they can alter nature through technology, some have gone as far as coming out to call themselves atheist. Please let me ask “where is that God they unanimously told us to follow at the expense of a condemning our African traditional religion, a heritage that worth millions. I can see this as some kind of cultural fraud as I describe it. This leaves me with a pondering of whether western culture and western religion which is Christianity has any line separating them?
Africans awake from your slumber!
How many times will something happen to us before we learn, let us go back and redeem our old roots .Let us learn from history of those who have deserted there heritage, a typical example is the children of Israel, when they deserted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob whom there ancestors handed over to them we will remember that they ended up in exile. But something striking happened when Shedrake, Meshack and Abednego and Daniel stood their ground and was ready to die for the only thing that makes them Israelites. Where are our Daniels and Abednegos etc?
Permit me to ask how many non-Anglicans, have ruled united kingdom? How many non- Moslems have ruled in the Middle East?
As the voice of the weeping dog will never fade away in the wilderness so will my voice continue to re-echo about the need for recalling our African heritages. Wake up Africans, arise and move towards the possessing of your possession by reclaiming of heritages.
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