Have we lost our culture?

http://mwixelligent.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/of-many-worlds/

Its interesting, how young people are bludgeoned for losing their culture. We are crucified for losing our roots and labelled traitors. There is a Swahili proverb that says ‘Mwacha mila ni mtumwa’ simply translates, ‘He that leaves his culture is a slave’. So what is my culture and how have I left it?

Culture is instilled in the first five to ten years of your life. Then you develop the culture from these initial building blocks. From the first language you learn to the first friends you make by your own deliberation. The music you listen to and songs you sing. The pictures in the first book you read and the jokes that people around you laugh at. That is your culture. Everything else you do from then on is based on these firsts. Your dreams and aspirations are formed by the hopes of your parents and people you look up to. Your hobbies are coined by the activities you are exposed to. In a nutshell, you don’t choose your culture, it chooses you. So children raised in rural setting are praised for maintaining that which city kids have shunned.

I am a city boy, born and raised. That statement alone causes some memebers of my society to scowl and sneer. I must say, the traditional life of ‘my people’ mesmorised me and sparked some interest. So I paid attention to the language and tried to learn it. You see, in the city, my first friends were from all parts of the country. An assortment of cultures. We all had to learn to compromise. In school, they taught us in english, so we spoke in this common though foreign language and blended all the words we knew to form a new tongue of our own. We were forming a new culture. Once, I visited ‘my people’ and tried to speak ‘my people’s language’… my new culture had already become such an integral part of me that I sounded wrong, too wrong to be corrected, only wrong enough to be laughed at and ridiculed. The result of that damage was that I am very good at hearing and understanding the tongue but not so good at speaking. Therefore, I classify as having shunned my culture. I am an icon of my generation. Torn between the culture we should uphold and the culture we have formed.

What’s interesting is that, culture, like history, is dynamic. Every few generations experience some drastic changes that force changes in the way of doing things. Nobody dresses in animal skins anymore, well except for the Eskimos and at the rate this globe is warming up, they are in for some major make overs. Culture and traditions change, especially when parents don’t hand them over to their children. Parents should take up the role of sensitizing their off spring on certain things they value rather than waiting hoping they figure stuff out or ask the right questions. Oh! And those lies we tell kids when they ask us stuff we don’t want to deal with don’t protect them. They only protect us from the challenge of exlplaining things. Where do we get off filling their minds with lies about Easter bunnies and Santa claus then complaining they have lost culture? In most traditional African culture, sex education is taught before the onset of pimples on your face. By the time voices are breaking and shapes are forming, you know what the society expects of you. Now things have changed and this knowledge is needed much earlier.  I for one needed that knowledge much earlier because of the crazy kids that I grew up with, thank God for his grace.

I got a little off track there… emotional stuff. What was I saying? Culture. Yes, culture is dynamic. The foundations need to be set at home. Especially if a parent decided to write him/herself off the scene. Hiding truths from kids to protect yourself from embarassment only exposes them to repeat your history. Explin things in a way that new information later n life strengthens their mind and hearts, deception only plants seeds of distrust that cause us to shun all aspects of our cultural building blocks when they sprout. Put in all the valuable ingredients in with the blding blocks. You cannot coin a culture. Manipulation of cultures result in revolutions. All you can do is instill all the right values, righteous, respectable values into the mix of the foundational structure in the first five to ten years of a child’s life. Then guide and advice so that the new culture he forms will be worthy of praise ather than scorn, something you can be proud of.