By Mwalimu George Ngwane
In one of our monthly Christian Family Movement (C.F.M) meetings in Molyko, Buea, we discussed the decline or absence of traditional education in our homes today. From birth, marriage, death, language, music, dress code to culinary art, the ethos that identify us with our local content, context and colour seem to be fast deteriorating or simply allowed to be completely subsumed under the corrosive effects of Westernisation. For example traditional marriage or ‘contri marry’ that is supposed to lay the ancestral foundation of marital bliss continues to be downplayed in favour of high profile church weddings.
How many of us have albums, let alone pictures, of our traditional marriages adorning the walls of our sitting rooms? Another area of concern is our new maternity culture. You only need to observe the manner women are hurriedly packed from maternities after giving birth ostensibly because of poor hospital hygienic conditions or lack of bed space. You need to observe how the young husbands of today whisk their wives from the maternity to the home as if giving birth had become a calamity. Yet procreation is the greatest celebration of family life and motherhood. Birth celebration or ‘born house’ begins from the maternity where the mother and baby enter a fattening course with family and friends visiting with food and drinks and renting shouts of joy in the hospital air. It is a moment of community solidarity between the families of the wife and husband and between the couple and their neighborhood. It is a period of bonding for the new born as it enters its new world welcomed in an atmosphere of conviviality, hope and optimism. It is a time for the husband to lavish his wife and baby with both material (born house wrapper and new box) and spiritual (prayers) gifts and in reciprocity a time for the new mother to thank the husband for cooperating in the labour of love and God for sparing her life through her pangs of birth.
Then comes the day when the child and mother are leaving the hospital.-traditional songs by women exit them from the hospital compound into the home where the men are impatiently waiting to be served ‘born house’ plantains and palm wine. And then the party begins. Born houses never take anyone by surprise so poverty cannot be a justification for the lack of maternity funfare. In its stead, maternity funfare is being replaced by mortuary fanfare. The customary celebrations of born house are yielding to the epicurean exhibition or financial farewell of the dead. One is not the alternative of the other. The dead also deserve our respect as they embark on their last journey to the realm of our ancestors whose intercession we need for God’s protection. Were we to respect the testaments of the dead, or even remember our customs of yore where burial was at 4.pm of the day of death, there will be no need for protracted mortuary enclosures of the dead, expensive mortuary art translated in coffin, ‘ashwabi’ and hearse, night vigils that impoverish the family and fatigue well-intentioned mourners and subsequent post-burial family squabbles over inheritance. You only need to keep a tab on the media and notice how much is being hyped on newspaper pages and radio slots carrying announcements of obituary yet nothing on births.
Civilisation has entered through the door and customs are flying through the window.
Another area of concern is our home languages or ‘contri talk’. They are fast becoming endangered or extinct even in homes where the couple are both from the same tribe and fluent in the home language. Conversation between the children and parents is in pidgin, English or French and when ‘grandmami’ from the village visits the urban dwellers she finds herself in an isolated communication ward with her grand children. I must commend the North Westerners for insisting that their children be knowledgeable in ‘contri talk’ no matter how far away their homes are from home.
Linguists affirm that the child’s first language is acquired or learnt at home or in extreme cases in the village when we bother to send the children during holidays, against all real or imaginary fears of witchcraft, but not in school hence the name home language. Linguists also affirm that because it is called maternal language or mother tongue, it is our wives who have the primordial responsibility of tutoring our children ‘contri talk’. But one of my friends, Blasius Ngome, broke that maternal policy when he as a father undertook the exemplary feat of teaching his children ‘akose’ (Bakossi language).
The list of how our African values are being eroded and how the present generation is being disconnected from its identity and personality is legion. The advent of the traditional and now the social media that has led the present generation into a one-way consumption and imitation culture of the ubiquitous Western mode of life is having a social toll on us. The frantic exposure of our children to the Eurocentric interpretations of modernity is holding sway over our traditional values. The disconnect physically, emotionally and psychologically of parents arguably for job reasons, social life, economic pressures and share neglect from their children is a matter of grave concern.
At a time when the Catholic Church has embraced African culture, the values of Christian upbringing cannot be seen to be at variance with the virtues of traditional education. The answer therefore lies in the firm resolve for the whole family network to reclaim and reassert their traditional voices that are being lost in the wilderness of globalisation.
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