The
worse contradictions were the reactions of some Igbo Christians to the
recent conversion of an Igbo monarch to Islam, which to them was against
the culture of the Igbo – when did Christianity become the culture of
the Igbo? Amadioha must not hear this!
Ignorance
has always been a variable in interpreting contexts and concepts. We
rely on flawed and often hypocritical analyses in defining African
culture and dismissing any label we consider as foreign or alien to us.
Backhanded
defences of Africa by those who like to think of themselves as
conservatives, romanticise obvious inelegant phrases and concepts such
as “the beauty of Africa”. To these conservatives, Africa is literally a
civilisation of unrefined people dressed in caftan, adire or kampala
and living in, perhaps, mud-built huts of various exotic shapes.
In
their conservative defences, they pander to obvious contradictions.
First, what these African culturalists label fixedly as “African” are a
developing or evolving facet of a human civilisation. It’s actually an
non-progressive mind that would in this day and age consider riding on
donkeys to farm African and not what it really is – backwardness! But
among them too, there is a conflict: in their clamour for what qualifies
for the African, certain traditions of the foreigners who introduced
Abrahamic religions are assimilated. Thus, they betray their touted
aversions to influences. The main ignorance here is the inability to
tell the Western apart from the Modern. Though the West leads modern
civilisation, it’s inaccurate to lay all claim to ownership of this
world of machines to it. What we call western civilisation is an
evolution of the collective efforts of renowned scientists, explorers,
inventors and scholars from different races and continents. The white
man, for instance, did not know what paper was until the Chinese
invented it.
So
I am a child of the modern civilisation, a civilisation that replaced
the ink-pot with fountain pen. A civilisation, whose people are a
non-progressive collective that cannot manufacture an ordinary car, has
automatically lost my membership. Culture is the way we live, which is
why anything that eases the way I live must be embraced; which is why I
abandon hoes for tractors to feed a larger number of people; and which
is why camels and donkeys are abandoned for cars and aeroplanes to make
living easy. I wear clothes in the style that the billions of people on
earth, having criticised and eventually found practical, endorsed. This
is what culture is all about, a continuous intercourse of ideas,
concepts and creativities!
My
culture is anything that redeems my identity, not the primitive emblems
that reduce and mock my intellectual and artistic abilities. I am open
to influences that can redeem my humanity. I accept the education
introduced by the white man just as I accept the religion introduced to
Africa by the Arabs. I accept to learn English Language to ease my
academic pursuits in this anglophone entity just as I study Arabic
Language to understand my Islamic faith. Doing so, does not mean that I
have lost pride in my African being, it does not mean that I have lost
my pride in being a black man, it just means that they are valuable for
assimilating the evolving culture. It doesn’t make Englishmen and Arabs
more important than the black race. It doesn’t make English and Arabic
more important than my mother-tongue. Our culture is now defined by all
the things we domesticated from the zoos of alien creations!
It
is, however, unfortunate to see heavily influenced Africans screaming,
“This is not African!” in a market-square of foreign concepts. You lack
the moral rights to decide what is or is not African unless you renounce
your “foreign” religion-channelled worldviews.
The
other day a non-Muslim friend of mine saw a Muslim lady dressed in
hijab, and asked to know why she would be so dressed in that hot
afternoon. Ironically, he was a clear definition of what puzzled him,
being also dressed in three-piece suit which was way thicker!
“Why
are you dressed in suit in this heat?” I asked. “I’m just returning
from the office!” he said. I replied, “You wear yours in fear of your
boss, she wears hers in fear of her God. And she has her brains to
choose a culture or life that comforts her.”
The
worse contradictions were the reactions of some Igbo Christians to the
recent conversion of an Igbo monarch to Islam, which to them was against
the culture of the Igbo – when did Christianity become the culture of
the Igbo? Amadioha must not hear this!
Civilisation
is not built by our nostalgia and histories alone, but in our
criticisms of identified drawbacks and letting go of them. Modern
African culture must not be a romanticisation of the simply old and
dated. Certain things are more useful in museums and history books. The
irony is that even our fabrics, which we wear like testimonials of
accomplishments to international events or foreign trips, were either
produced in the countries – or with machines manufactured in the
countries – we seek to intimidate with what we mistake for our
inventions. The last time I checked, even what we refer to as African
wax was actually started in Indonesia by English and Dutch merchants.
May God save us from us!
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Read this article in the Premium Times Newspapers
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