The Black Persons Albatross ( A Must Read )

The world in which we live is pretty odd, an existence in which there's an unending struggle for relevance by the 'person of colour'. We are constantly imitating attributes which are often detrimental to our purposes.

How does one explain the black race's inexplicable fixation with borrowed ideas and cultures to the detriment of our home grown applicables? People of the Caucasian hew have sought to emasculate our cerebral potentials by feeding us theories which are at best half-baked hypothesis which when unchallenged by us begin to wear the toga of truth.

Why for instance were we sold this dummy that Mungo Park discovered River Niger and we even teach such gibberish in our schools as a part of our history. He was either walking or being paddled in a canoe. So I often ask, what happened to the local guides with him? Why do we allow the West to believe that until something is brought to their notice by one of their own then it doesn't exist? Whoever conferred the status of decider of relevance on the West? Who made them the Olympics of geographical acclaim with the exclusive right to confer the gold medal of discovery on whom they so desire?

The Church came here and abolished polygamy, all well and good. Then less than a century later they now seek to introduce us to homosexuality as a way of life as sanctioned by the same church? We now hear about the rights of individuals to pursue their love interests, wonderful. What about the rights of the child or children often adopted by gay couples? Don't they have a fundamental right to grow in a normal environment of man and woman until they are old enough to determine their life and sexual preferences? Sometimes I feel we as Africans should consider ourselves fortunate that the early missionaries brought us copies of the bible otherwise these latter day evangelists would have distorted the biblical contents from 'marriage between a man and woman' to read 'marriage between two persons'. Even then I am tempted to ponder what alterations may have been made to the bible as we know it today seeing that we were never privy to the original scroll.

Our masquerade festivals are demonized and condemned as fetish rituals undeserving of participation by true children of God. Then the question arises, who or what exactly is Santa Claus? What really is the purpose of Halloween with its clearly pagan origin? While admittedly Santa is loved by children for the gift essence, the scenic pleasure derived by African children from watching our indigenous masquerades is also profoundly immeasurable. Many Christians are even unaware that the 25th of December yearly commemorative of the date of birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was originally a day set aside for the observance of pagan ceremonies but was appropriated by Christians and declared a day set aside for our Saviour's birthday.

The local clergy are very often embroiled in needless altercation with their host communities over the firing of gunshots at interment ceremonies involving titled men. The church mostly frowns at this for it is considered banal and of no redemptive quality. Reminiscing on the burial of the late English Queen Mother, it becomes pretty difficult to rationalize the refusal of the local church to accommodate such tendencies seeing that canon shots were severally employed to usher the mother of the head of the Anglican communion into the great beyond.

Today, porcupines are used in weather predictions in some parts of the developed world, something that would have been readily ascribed to idolatry in our clime. What about the routine of throwing a coin in a fountain in Rome by first time visitors in pursuit of goodluck? Just imagine what our local preachers would have said had it been such practices were carried out here. Even such traditional practice as pouring libation is deemed idol worship.

Arguably the greatest Western influence on our way of life is in our appearance. In an increasingly image based world, our people, most especially the women, have been made to believe that the lighter skinned one is, the more beautiful such a person is. This has led to the massive proliferation of skin therapies designed exclusively to lighten the skin tone even at great risk to human health. The repercussions of exposure to such unwholesome 'beautification' processes are totally lost on the partakers.

Then our women were taught that the aphorism that less is more also applies to beauty, that a skinny woman holds greater appeal for the male folk. While it is trite to say that obesity is undesirable, the flip side isn't any more appealing for on the subject of beauty, there are no absolutes. This warped stereotype that has neither rhyme nor reason was bought by a desperate band of females eager to possess competitive advantage over their peers in the cutthroat market of male attention. It was further accentuated by the crass portrayal of beauty in the depictions in beauty contests where semi clad women strut the stage in a conscious attempt to showcase beauty as size dimensional. Nomenclature such as size-zero gained a place in our everyday lexicon, yet when you sit to dissect the issues and interrogate such stereotypes, they crumble like a poorly arranged haystack in a barn. When you ask anyone to name just one skinny female personality who holds the men folk in near hypnotic zest anywhere on planet earth, everybody draws a blank, still many a woman became anorexic trying to trim down to these ridiculous sizes.

However and happily too, the advent of full bodied women such as Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian who have a near stranglehold on the imaginations of a great percentage of the global male population have gone a long way to debunk the skinny myth. The luscious appeal of the typical African nay black woman is suddenly back in vogue. How anyone ever sought to project bones as superior to flesh is still all too confounding. Even in the animal kingdom, bony has never held any discerning male captive, either to satiate the pangs of hunger or for the inexorable pursuit of conjugal bliss. Why the African beauty pageant follows the western model has never been full explained.

Today our value orientations have gone topsy-turvy all in pursuit of the western way of life. The sort of things that make us proud as Africans are derided by today's adrenaline full youth. Having proper manners or being respectful to elders and indeed all and sundry are now deemed as unbecoming of a 'civilized' person. There's so much emphasis on foreign travel, without a care as to the gains of such journeys and regardless of the fact that there is little corresponding traffic by westerners into Africa except for those here to make money or the times when they come on safari to see Africa for the 'jungle' they perceive it to be. Many who can seldom afford the luxury of a foreign vacation still force their way through in a bid to 'belong' only to burden those in the diaspora with their unwelcome stay. Is it any wonder then that many embassies treat our people no better than vermin?

We often subject ourselves to western templates sometimes or indeed mostly set to ridicule our essence. Amnesty International reports gain unequaled traction when African nations are involved. There's so much duplicity as best captured by Nigeria's Chief of Defense Staff, Alex Barde in these words, "When they kill innocent civilians, it is collateral damage, when we do, it is murder". His justified outburst was in reaction to a recent Amnesty International report which indicted the Nigerian military for extra-judicial killings in the fight against the Boko haram murderous sect. Much as war conventions ought to be complied with, what happens in the case of the United States that sometimes deploys drones to bomb targets in the Middle-east without a care as to the fate of civilians in the vicinity? Is it a case of different sets of rules for different folks?

We as Africans and blacks wherever we are found must do a lot to alter certain negative perceptions about us. At a time when the technologically developed nations are busy exploring the outer space to investigate whether there are human habitation possibilities inherent in that axis so as to expand the frontiers of mortal space, we Africans are neck deep in the struggle for finite land often resulting in deadly encounters sometimes snowballing into genocide. We decimate our own kith and kin and expect positives from such vile conducts?

It is time for the black person to discover himself/herself and strive to be all that we are destined to be. We mustn't let ourselves be defined strictly by the hackneyed narrative of a bunch of conniving western elite with their characteristic irreverent disposition which refuses to take due cognizance of their own odoriferous past while being ever so keen to pass judgment on our present.

The journey must start in earnest but we must first love ourselves, project our own positive values while at the same time be willing to copy that which adds value to our being. We mustn't be afraid to venture but we must employ circumspection as an abiding principle. Eschewing bitterness and rancor from our midst is an absolute imperative if we must attain our desired height in flight to enable us flap our wings in the near transcendent euphoria of acknowledging that birds of the same plumage now indeed flock together. Our time starts now. 

Okey Joe Emenike

Picture credit : Getty Images