By Ebuka Onyekwelu, Ph.D
Nothing has been more challenging than our inability to transfer communal style living to our kids. Particularly, extended family ties have been severed, and family bonding dashed. Frankly, I don’t see how any of us would successfully transfer this same system of social support that formed a remarkable part of our own upbringing.
In our days, as young kids, our visit to our grandfather/grandmother, maternal and paternal, was a regular thing. This created bonding with cousins. Even as adults today, we can see the importance of these relationships. Today’s kids barely knew their cousins! It is totally difficult to imagine kids these days having this experience. This is more shocking because, even if we were living in our communities right now with our kids, the fence of privacy in our minds would not allow regular visits for no reason, to all our relatives like we used to back in the days. My friends who live in Nnewi, whose parents are also in Nnewi, sometimes go for weeks without seeing them. While we were growing up, we visited our grandmother sometimes multiple times in a day. On Sundays, after Church, that visit was the next duty. Today, those things no longer matter. So, this is not even about location. In our days, we travelled for a holiday to our uncles.’ These days, such things no longer exist.
I once muted the idea of sending the kids to Nnewi for a holiday alone. My wife objected, and she was right. There are just too many uncertainties, and no one would wish to live with the burden of any mistake arising from such a scenario. But we did that in our days, and we were just fine. Times have changed so fast! I looked at my young son and wondered if I could send him to get something around the estate gate. But these were the things we did on our own, unaided.
To raise a kid who is socially aware and familiar with his community back home is increasingly impossible. To raise a kid who is culturally aware is simply impossible because it means that one would move to their community and allow the kid to live freely and familiarize themselves with relatives freely. Think through this carefully, and no parent today would do that. It is difficult for those living in their community. How about those living in cities and those living abroad, who are far more removed from the communal system that gave us a sense of community and balance?
This once-in-a-while visitation is not enough. Nobody wants to live like a village man again, yet it was that social net that helped to form us. Today, we are raising kids who are socially and communally unaware. This might be our fate. Kids raised in the cities in our time all speak fluent Igbo. Rich kids were not walled up or ostracized from communal experience by their parents. Today, kids in my village cannot speak Igbo unless they are of a certain socio-economic background.
The truth is that we are just pretending. We have lost it. Our education, exposure and knowledge have empowered us to think and behave in ways that are not helpful to our communal lifestyle.
