After years of impassioned scrutiny of world history, especially in a
healthy way, you will begin to understand that culture, however it
thrives and if viewed from the perspective of at least a thousand years,
is helplessly ephemeral. You will begin to understand that culture is
like liquid colour which takes on different hues as it mixes itself with
other cultures and assumes a different look from its yesteryears. If
you learn this, you will be less likely to hold fiercely unto a piece
of land and drag it with someone until one of you is dead. For no matter
how you colonize a land, your own children or grandchildren may sell
it off. This is a land which you almost lost your life trying to retain.
World leaders are mostly migrants who escaped family ties and became
purveyors of personal cultures, yet kept in touch with their loved
ones without allowing social ties to cast a net over them. Nelson
Mandela refused to be the king of the Thembu, his hometown, because he
had higher callings for the whole of South Africa. He did not allow the
emotional pleadings from his people to pull a wool over his eyes and
circumscribe him to only the people of Thembu land. He simply passed on
the responsibility to a nephew. We must be deep. If we are meant to be
kings, we must search our souls to make sure. For if we become Kings
merely because our fathers before us were kings, then we are merely
following culture and not discovering our true selves. We must make sure
the assignment of kingship is coming from the core of our spirits.
Quite often, there is spiritual netting over culture too. If a patriarch or monarch dies and you don't kill a cow, something bad is expected to happen to you. Only wisdom will help you escape that prison. How? By asking the purveyors of that tradition what is demanded of you to do, and what you will leave out which won't bring any repercussion.
Again also, our major problem is that we worry too much about where and how we will be buried. This drives our associations and keeps many of us in social bondage. Today, Africans happen to worry about where and how they will be buried more than every other race. I say this from the light of my many readings. I discover that as people modernize, they worry less about blood bonds in birth and death ties. A man who is the first son of a Kenyan will not be buried in Kenya with full traditional rites. He will be buried in Arlington cemetery when he dies. He is Barack Obama.
Sit down and think about how you have allowed the supposed culture of your people to tie you down from making a headway in this life. You believe strongly that you will lose ties with your people if you migrate far from home. The fact is that our children and children's children are less likely to congregate in micro systems in confined villages. You may shout foul to what I just said. But look around you. Every culture in the world is pulling surreptitiously towards a unifying world culture. Read the last sentence again. Notice how people focus on their immediate environments. In my own Igbo culture, people build giant houses in the villages driven by large ego. Immediately they leave the houses for the city after each festive season, the place become overgrown with grass and ridden with rodents. Soon village burglars come and cart away valuable properties in the buildings. Does this not show you that environmental changes have powerful effects on culture?
Sometimes, what we even hold as culture may have a lot of selfish ulterior motives and personal interest embedded therein. As soon as someone comes to marry a girl, all the uncles of that girl will appear from nowhere and start giving the suitor a long list to buy this and that as prerequisites for marrying the lady. These prerequisites are quite often not in the original culture of the place where the girl originated from but borne out of isolated mercantile and selfish interests. Soon, it becomes part of the supposed culture of the people and sometimes even spiritualized to complete the bondage.
This brings us to the question of ethnic wholistic claims to one culture. I often hear my Igbo people talking about one Igbo culture. As a student of anthropology, I am aware that there is nothing like Igbo culture strictly. The Igbos are made up of many different groups coming from both autochthnous and migrant lines. They are not all of the same family. Over hundreds of years, migrants kept coming from surrounding cultures to the area loosely described as Igbo land. They also met aborigines in certain places in Igbo land and intermarried with them. This many subcultures exist in the Igbo nation. It is not how people marry in Nsukka that they marry in Afikpo. Sometimes, you find very wide differences.
Who is fooling who? Arnold Schwarzenegger left Austria and became a governor in America. He knew his roots and he still has connections with his roots. He does not worry where he will be buried. There is so much illusion in the minds of many Africans. They live and die within a culture that holds them in perpetual bondage.
Nevertheless, even as we become critical of the overbearing aspects of culture, we must understand that we should not throw away the baby with the bathwater. Only progressive aspects of culture should be condoned. This way, we become tolerant of other people's cultures and realize that only few more years will come and the way we do things will change. For it is not the way we do things now that we did it a hundred years ago.
Today, in African villages, we go to town hall meetings and find only male members of the ethnic group holding discussion for the benefit of the community. The irony is that globalization and modernization intrudes into this aspect of culture. If a female member of a community is the governor or local government chairperson, whatever the male members decide in the town hall meetings can easily be overruled by her. So what is the use of preventing women from attending town hall meetings??? Times are changing fast. Today, I suggest that every Igbo, nay African, town hall meetings should be peopled by men and women. It is not sacrilege. We emotionalize these things too much and foolishly too. There is so much ego....
If a modern road is to bisect a traditional market, why do we cry and shout that the market should be allowed to remain undisturbed. Is it not emotional? The deities can actually be appeased and made to understand that by moving the market to a new location, progress will come into the town by way of the new roads. Why are we so foolishly bound by culture?
Jeff Unaegbu,
October 22, 2016.
Quite often, there is spiritual netting over culture too. If a patriarch or monarch dies and you don't kill a cow, something bad is expected to happen to you. Only wisdom will help you escape that prison. How? By asking the purveyors of that tradition what is demanded of you to do, and what you will leave out which won't bring any repercussion.
Again also, our major problem is that we worry too much about where and how we will be buried. This drives our associations and keeps many of us in social bondage. Today, Africans happen to worry about where and how they will be buried more than every other race. I say this from the light of my many readings. I discover that as people modernize, they worry less about blood bonds in birth and death ties. A man who is the first son of a Kenyan will not be buried in Kenya with full traditional rites. He will be buried in Arlington cemetery when he dies. He is Barack Obama.
Sit down and think about how you have allowed the supposed culture of your people to tie you down from making a headway in this life. You believe strongly that you will lose ties with your people if you migrate far from home. The fact is that our children and children's children are less likely to congregate in micro systems in confined villages. You may shout foul to what I just said. But look around you. Every culture in the world is pulling surreptitiously towards a unifying world culture. Read the last sentence again. Notice how people focus on their immediate environments. In my own Igbo culture, people build giant houses in the villages driven by large ego. Immediately they leave the houses for the city after each festive season, the place become overgrown with grass and ridden with rodents. Soon village burglars come and cart away valuable properties in the buildings. Does this not show you that environmental changes have powerful effects on culture?
Sometimes, what we even hold as culture may have a lot of selfish ulterior motives and personal interest embedded therein. As soon as someone comes to marry a girl, all the uncles of that girl will appear from nowhere and start giving the suitor a long list to buy this and that as prerequisites for marrying the lady. These prerequisites are quite often not in the original culture of the place where the girl originated from but borne out of isolated mercantile and selfish interests. Soon, it becomes part of the supposed culture of the people and sometimes even spiritualized to complete the bondage.
This brings us to the question of ethnic wholistic claims to one culture. I often hear my Igbo people talking about one Igbo culture. As a student of anthropology, I am aware that there is nothing like Igbo culture strictly. The Igbos are made up of many different groups coming from both autochthnous and migrant lines. They are not all of the same family. Over hundreds of years, migrants kept coming from surrounding cultures to the area loosely described as Igbo land. They also met aborigines in certain places in Igbo land and intermarried with them. This many subcultures exist in the Igbo nation. It is not how people marry in Nsukka that they marry in Afikpo. Sometimes, you find very wide differences.
Who is fooling who? Arnold Schwarzenegger left Austria and became a governor in America. He knew his roots and he still has connections with his roots. He does not worry where he will be buried. There is so much illusion in the minds of many Africans. They live and die within a culture that holds them in perpetual bondage.
Nevertheless, even as we become critical of the overbearing aspects of culture, we must understand that we should not throw away the baby with the bathwater. Only progressive aspects of culture should be condoned. This way, we become tolerant of other people's cultures and realize that only few more years will come and the way we do things will change. For it is not the way we do things now that we did it a hundred years ago.
Today, in African villages, we go to town hall meetings and find only male members of the ethnic group holding discussion for the benefit of the community. The irony is that globalization and modernization intrudes into this aspect of culture. If a female member of a community is the governor or local government chairperson, whatever the male members decide in the town hall meetings can easily be overruled by her. So what is the use of preventing women from attending town hall meetings??? Times are changing fast. Today, I suggest that every Igbo, nay African, town hall meetings should be peopled by men and women. It is not sacrilege. We emotionalize these things too much and foolishly too. There is so much ego....
If a modern road is to bisect a traditional market, why do we cry and shout that the market should be allowed to remain undisturbed. Is it not emotional? The deities can actually be appeased and made to understand that by moving the market to a new location, progress will come into the town by way of the new roads. Why are we so foolishly bound by culture?
Jeff Unaegbu,
October 22, 2016.
