Of all issues that are generating intellectually engaging discourses in the socio-political front, corporate front, economic front, cultural front and in the academia, the issues hovering around the continued existence of the Nigeria youth have gained much currency. Any discerning follower of youth’s involvement in the political and corporate governance of Nigeria would accede to the fact that the much needed vocal, voluble and viable voices in the ginormous and gnarly hall of Nigerian landscape are yet to be given gaps to fill. Not because their voices are inconsequential, but because their voices may serve as threats. Consequently, their voices are not respected-often discarded with a wave of hand. Nigerian youth have been described with different nomenclatures, ranging from being tagged as bunch of sheer opportunists, people suffering from intellectual ulcer, half-baked graduates, to quarter-baked job seekers. Wole Soyinka in his shrewd understanding, described the present day Nigerian youth as wasted generation. These nomenclatures did not come by accident. They are products of well thought out views that are devoid of some trappings of mediocrity.
It is almost becoming a truism that Nigerian youth are not well cultured in the arts of learning. No finicky observers would agree less with my grim inference that the above dead-pan is the source of the problems with the intellectual outputs of Nigerian youth. With the ability to learn, relearn to unlearn in order to learn again, cultural preservation will be of less worries. But this is miles away from where the Nigerian youth are, where they are wallowing in cerebral paucity in which their cluttered minds are neither disciplined nor are their brains engaged in productive thinking. This again bespeaks the kind of retrogressive education they have happily and unhappily acquired through the rigours of industrial strike actions that are embellished with intriguing, suspense-filled prologues and heartbreaking epilogues. In my understanding, learning and culture should be a Siamese twin, in which both are dependent on each other for survival.
Flipside, like professional doctors, the Nigerian system has succeeded in separating the Siamese twin of learning and culture. Before the influx of the colonial masters, learning and culture have played consequential roles in the making of Nigeria. There are variegated types of cultures but happenings and happenstances that have shaped the inexhaustible vortex of human existence, have in one way or the other, made it appeared as if it is only the traditional cultures that have been consigned into oblivion. Few facts will suffice.
Unfortunately, the advent of inverted civilisation in Nigeria which was as a result of the imposed British learning approach has sent us all on an errand in search of our cultural identity. Today, the story remains the same especially among the Nigerian youth. Nigerian cultural heritage has been serially committed into the possessive bowel of oblivion as a result of increase in Nigerian Christians and Muslims. It is now a prevalent understanding among the youth that cultural festivals are laced with demonic content, citing FESTAC ’77 as a case study. It is spine-tingling; Nigerians often curse their skin colour. For the white man, it is an accomplished mission. The white man is often joyous to see us. He came to our land with his Missionary, he brainwashed us, or sometimes forced us to accept his culture, he made our mother tongues appeared archaic, he embedded inferiority chromosomes in our mental structures, and he freely preached the gospel of his superiority. Today, it appears as if the Blacks are ugly, satanic and refugees on the planet earth. The Kenyan-born novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o posits that the Christian mission is a destroyer of African culture. He says,
The European Missionary had attacked the primitive rites of our people, had condemned our beautiful African dances, the images of our gods, recoiling from their suggestion of satanic sensuality.
The bodily and mentally robust publisher of consequential renown, Chief Dele Momodu is optimistic about Nigeria cultural heritage. He argues,
We have not lost it totally, we are coming back to it. There is this new page of cultural renaissance. Our music, our movies and literature are staging the come-back measures.
In her shrewd understanding, the entrepreneurially beautiful business mogul blessed with heavenly gaits, Mrs. Ibukun Awosika suggests that the cultures of people determine their values. She posits,
There are good parts of culture and there are bad parts. We must endeavor to evaluate culture in the light of how it affects the country.
Lucidly put, there is an inverse relationship between our culture and the learning process bequeathed to us by our colonial mongers. Ademola Adesola, a social writer of penetrating outpourings, elucidates this in his graphical reportage titled, Eyo Festival: Between Scorn and Tolerance (2009). According to him,
Since the famed contact of the African people with the seemingly superior white people, things for the former have taken a sorry turn in many respects and a good dimension in a few others. For instance, when the white colonial masters forayed into the continent with their Christian mission in tow, they expressed the most virulent form of intolerance against the religious and cultural practices of the people, joyously classifying them as demonic.
On the flipside, I want to echo Dele Momodu that we are going back. With the resurgence of book reading events, young Nigerians taking the centre stage in authoring culturally inspired fictional books, the coast seems clear, we are journeying back.
The full piece was originally published in Pendulum Magazine, ACJ, OAU.