beth-ife / dear-african-parents Goto Github PK

One morning in primary 3 while I was taking breakfast, my parents flogged me because my class teacher told them to caution me on the issue of begging.

Apparently, he saw me 'begging' for cheese balls, I mean c'mon! I know I asked for cheese balls but I was nowhere near the 'beggy beggy' he painted me as!

It's been more than ten years since that incidence but I still remember it like yesterday.

Dad: What are you always doing in school!
Me: (confused and speechless)
Mum: See how guilty she looks!
Dad: (brings out belt)

Well... you know the rest...

These people did not even give me a chance to defend myself! I mean, what if the teacher lied?

I don't know how to start but i will start my biggest pain point. You are convinced about a perspective you hold. You make judgement and build rhetoric upon rhetoric on this rickety foundation. Your rhetoric and litanies sound more and more believable to you even as you conviction strengthens, and condemnation looms over me - but you are wrong.

About everything. the whole argument. The entire way you see it. There is no one thing that is wrong - the entire thing is wrong!. The foundation you built this argument on is hanging by a tassel of corn, but if i say it i will not eat this night.

My siblings are not ready to drag it with you because they sense that there is no victory here. There is just frying pan and kerosene stove. You celebrate them because they leave you unopposed and me? I'm washing plates for the next week.

"Why do they think i'm troublesome? What she said didn't make any sense" I often mused to myself, while tackling the steel dishes into the rinsing bowl from the side. "And Boda, he didn't even say anything to her. Lookat now!"

The real injury here, is the fact that broda didn't say anything, and neither did anyone else. Nobody thought to bring reason into the argument, we accepted our roles in your house, little people to be loved and guided, even against their free will and at the expense of their common sense. Urchins who are helpless and do not know what to do, and so must be shown they way - as you know best.
Non-people taught to listen to and accept counsel wholeheartedly and without question - literally, some variation of "don't question me" or "are you questioning my authority?!" usually preceded a very dirty, African parent-patent blow.

Ofcourse, the few times you were right doesn't change anything. You have already snuffed out the wild, careening curiosity from us, each deadly blow with your Sunday shoe slapped out the inquisitiveness, the desire to foray into the unknown and try to make meaning out if it, the knocks forced us to abandon our divine birthright, creation. I remember chilling with ObiKing one night and seeing a mother beating the shit out her kid because he wandered near a concrete power-pole. He joked that she was beating all the money out of him, I thought she was beating the Civil Engineering out of him.

And so you condition us to live a life so safe we might as well be well protected in the confines of the coffin. We carry this completely lack-lustre, medicine-or-law, "marry-by-the-age-of" mentality well into adulthood. We say we need to play it safe to stay alive so we keep doing what we don't like in order to stay alive in order to keep doing what we don't like. A self-perpetuating cycle that is manifest in how we raise our children and how they raise their children and so on, the seedlings of a completely dreamless generation.

//Am too bomboclasted to continue right now, ill update this night.