Hi Folks, how are you, hope your weekend went well, i wanna say a special shout out to the people who come to this blog to read posts and leave their comments in their minds not on the post :).
Fortunately and unfortunately, these people are more than the people who leave comments on the post, anyways, thanks a lot but make that decision to comment today, thanks as always to those who leave their comment and help us retweet the posts, and even suggest this blog to friends.
Today’s Post wouldn’t exactly be like the regular, it isn’t gonna be about your boyfriend and how to interact with your girlfriend, getting the girl, how to enhance your sex life and all, but particularly what will happen in 60 years time. Oluwanababa wrote something of this about his life, sometime ago….lolllz mine is different tho.
Firstly, I think we will all be old that is, if we aint dead by that time, at that point you would be either a Grandpa or Grandma, telling your grand children about how life was when you were a child, how life turned out to be when you were in your youth, how you met your wife, where you had their father/mother,the boys/girls that got away, how many places you travelled to, what new culture you learnt. It will be a lot of old memories, how politics was played back when you were young and all, on the other hand, some wont even remember what they did when they were young perhaps due to selective amnesia 😀
What I am most interested in is the safely passing of our culture to these younger generations, i find it quite appalling that we find so many kids who attend the ‘poshest’ of schools and also kids who attend the ‘razziest’ of school can’t speak their native language either fluently or at all.
In as much as there are lots of indigenous names given to kids these days, especially with the Yorubas,they give the kids rather meaningful names ( and sometimes names depicting their wealth i.e Oladele, If this is your name, no offense) also the Igbo people. Hausa people have never been the ones given their white names always indigenous names or perhaps it’s because of their religion, only a few Hausas have English name, try comparing the Hausas with English name and Hausa that have indigenous names…
Kids of nowadays can only call out words in their language fluently if its their name, while I was in the secondary school,I had a friend who the only words he could pronounce fluently in Yoruba was his name, he would mumble and rumble through any other word or sentence.
This was a while back more than 10 years ago, it’s not funny at all,I look at him and i told him, how will you teach your kids how to speak your language?
Let me paint a scenario for you, take for instance that this guy marries another girl just like him, they both continue to speak english around the house, they have kids, and definitely can’t speak their native dialect to their kids, and the other alternative will be pidgin english which in some quarters is considered as ‘razz’ and not acceptable.
Meanwhile, pidgin english was created by us.
Their kids grow up and they absolutely cannot have any connection to their language, and they grow up as well to marry, by the time this goes for some more generations, I can assure you, we would have lost all semblances of our tradition. I know some of us have seen the movie ‘Jumping the broom’, if you can remember where the boy’s mother wanted the new wife to jump over a broom and she bluntly refused because she dint feel it was necessary because she felt it was her wedding and she didn’t feel the need to bow to the request of her mother-in-law.
From the mother-in-law’s point of view, it was a tradition in their family, it’s what their ancestors did back when they were slaves, although eventually, she bowed down to the pressure and jumped the broom sha. The point is in as much as we want to become the 21st century person, let’s us not forget our roots, our languages, our culture. Our people have history, how we got where we are now, how we’ve been able to achieve that and more importantly our heroes past.
I know a lot of funky youths today, they can’t converse in their local dialect and they seem proud about it, I feel its wrong. I saw a clip on Facebook of an American chic who came to Nigeria to learn Yoruba, and take note she was speaking original Yoruba not the Lagos Yoruba of ngbati ngbati, she was speaking Yoruba with proverb. I mean those kinda of mainframe movie proverb o, not the Lagos one, I felt bad that a foreigner left her country to come and learn about our language while some of us even get ashamed when someone relates to us in our native language we simply reply them with English *smh*
So, if you don’t speak your language fluently, learn it today, you might be the one to save our culture, promote your native dialect at home with your kids, kids from 5 to 8 years old (saw that somewhere on the internet :D) can learn at least 5 languages, research has proven that, you might just help save our race in the next generations to come. Most of us were born in Lagos, and we’ve not been to our hometown for some reason, the least we can do is to be able to speak our language, it’s what defines us as the people we are, our history is what makes us who we are.
The Asians believe in their culture, they drink their Ginseng, their ginger tea, they still believe in their Kungfu, Karate and all, they are also export their culture to other parts of the world, Some folks worship cow in india, they still do that till tomorrow they haven’t changed. If you ask some of our folks here to drink ‘Agbo’, they will tell you how it can make your illness worse than it is, some of us are always trying to get away from our culture as far they can to embrace another man’s culture. its sad.
Many of us don’t know what happened during the civil war, let us gather knowledge, it isn’t always about having fun, let us know our history, just as the national anthem reads “Lets not forget the labor of our heroes past” in as much as some of us don’t believe in Nigeria anymore.
Learn your native dialect, learn about your ancestors, what your surname means, lets help move our culture and tradition from generation to generation.
I am confident that we have lost some of this tradition as it is been passed down, lets make sure we move the ones we have now safely.
It’s unpardonable for us to forget where we’re coming from,the stories from the civil war, how our nation survived the dark days.
A Yoruba proverb says “If you have forgotten where you’re going, you should know where you’re coming from.”
I just always wanted to say this to you, will go back to my regular posts now :), i hope you liked this and can relate to it. I hope we can correct this soon else Future Nigerians will only be Nigerians by nationality not by culture or language, not by the things that makes us a distinctive race.
Let me stop boring you now! 😀
Keep Reppin’
‘Deolu Bubbles
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