By Chuks Nwachuku
If culture is bad, we change it. Culture is not what we did but what we do and are likely to do. One of the things that agitated my mind as a secondary school boy is the effect of industrialization on culture. I found that what we called culture was built upon or around low technology or lack of it. I began to wonder if preserving our culture meant never advancing technologically.
Look at something as small as eating with the fingers. We say that it is our culture. However, everyone started out eating with their fingers. Some advanced to simple tools like chopsticks, others to more complex metal cutlery. Does it mean that we are condemned to never developing tools for something as basic as eating? Look, animals also eat with the fingers because they are incapable of developing a technology for it. What is the achievement in eating with the fingers? I don’t do it. I find it messy, except for foods like roast chicken.
I discover that this advocacy for “preserving our culture” has no component of technological advancement in it. It is all limited to advocating a return to the darkness of idolatry and demon worship. I have discovered that the root of technology is a mindset of breaking natural boundaries or adapting natural resources to solve physical challenges and improve the quality of human existence. This is a philosophy that I find missing in this resurgence of advocacy for a return to so called indigenous culture, especially in Igbo land.
There is nothing in this advocacy that addresses the need to improve our traditional food processing with indigenous technology to ease the lives of our rural farmers and increase food production and preservation. None of these advocates have told us how we can improve upon our traditional mud houses and tatch roofing to transform them to modern pieces of complex architecture that can provide better, cheaper and more comfortable housing. Even entertainment has lacked input from them. There has been no attempt to modernize and standardize our traditional sports like wrestling, archery , seed counting (Ayo), tree climbing, and etc to develop them to the point of recognition in the Olympics.
All that these advocates are interested in is that we quit the Church and return to wringing the necks of chickens with bare hands under tree groves and dancing about with scary masks. They deny us the authenticity of our Africanness which we have brought into Christian worship and Christian influence in our daily lives. The worship in the average African Church is distinctively and authentically African. Christianity might have come to us from Europe, however, it has received, in worship, an interpretation and expression that is distinctively African and that has become OUR CULTURE. It is so in our marriage, child naming, house warming, burial and other ceremonies, some of which are totally strange to the traditional European observer. I have never seen any of these culture advocates walk about bare-breasted and butt naked save for a strip of leather or even leaves to hide the privates, just to prove a point. They live in modern brick and mortar buildings, and not in mud huts with thatch roofs.
Our culture is not what we used to do but what we do and will likely do. We are proud of our culture. Someone was lamenting that Ohaneze Ndigbo, the national Igbo cultural group, recently inaugurated a new leader in the person of Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, with prayers from a Pastor or Priest, instead of with pouring libation and incantations over the Ofo. The truth is that the Pastor or Priest prayed the African way and blessed the Ofo or staff of office the African way. Everything done at that ceremony was unmistakably and authentically African and Igbo in particular. We own it. The reactionary advocates for a return to the past cannot rob us of that which we have given to ourselves.. We are who we are. They cannot change us into who they would rather have us be in their jaundiced imagination.
Chuks Nwachuku, a legal practitioner can be reached at [email protected]
