COVID-19, Cancer, HIV/Aids, Old Age, accidents and the cruel hand of death constantly interrupt the perfect plans of life, love, joy and happiness! Death – as our Ancestors say – is never satisfied. It takes indiscriminately from infant to octogenarian, rich and poor, beautiful and wise along with the evil, ugly and foolish!

We Have Lost Treasure

Over the last 8 years we have lost many icons and loved ones. We didn’t fully write their stories nor celebrate them enough. We like auto mons, kept moving not sure where we were headed to, but we feared the very possibility of stopping to fully reflect on our losses. All fields of Human endeavour are hemorrhaging: Arts and culture, science and tech, engineers, doctors ,nurses, teachers, lawyers, social scientists , entrepreneurs, faith and traditional leaders, beauty queens and politicians – all gone for good!

Where are they going to and why in such a hurry and in such big numbers? Will we ever see them again? Was their work on earth fully accomplished? We didn’t get to write their heroic stories in their own words before they left us. They didn’t bid us farewell? We never thought that they would leave. We hoped that they would live in perpetuity. Reality only dawned on us each time we had to pen the acronyms of resignation #MHSRIP #RIP. Maybe they are resting, but are we? If they have gone to a happier place, have they left us in a mess with neither social, cultural, economic, political nor spiritual compass (GPS) ? Still, we didn’t have the hand-over dialogues and they too didn’t write? They left us to figure stuff out!

Our Heroes and Icons

This morning when I heard that another Icon had passed on or passed away, my sister said to me “another library has been destroyed” before we downloaded its contents in full. Well, our icons didn’t die empty and we did not remain full either.

When our heroes and heroines – our icons are interpreted by others who don’t understand fully the local context, nuances, humour, expressions, customs, traditions and rituals a lot is lost, distorted or simply unrecognisable in their stories.

You see eghhhh, every one that tells a story does so from their class and cultural vantage point. So our heroes are interpreted to us by others and it is the only version that we have of who they are and by implication, who we are?

We Didn’t Learn, Show us the Way!

We didn’t learn our totems in full. We cannot remember our genealogies either?We didn’t learn our own languages nor do we remember our Proverbs/ wise sayings ?We have no clue about our healing herbs nor the poisonous ones ? We live in concrete jungles full of fumes and far away from the bones and landmarks of our forebears. We are alienated from our very beings, our identity, our culture and we lack native Intelligence. Alas ! We’re now the Elders!

Our Own Elders are gone. Gone are the logistic Ian’s, the Masters of Ceremonies at all family events. Those that solved insoluble family disputes, the unifiers, the peace-builders, the glue that held us intact, the holders of ancient knowledge and wisdom are gone. They are gone, emptied from all our Nations, our neighborhoods, places of worship, the planting fields, the forests, lakes, oceans and other work spaces. In our families, clans and villages the Elders have fallen by the dozens. The iconic professors, Story Tellers, wise sages, medicine men and women, grand Dads and Grand Mothers, aunties and uncles, fathers and mothers too! We, the children, are now the Elders! Who will show us the ways of our people? What do we know in order to show the next generation? We read the books but we never learnt the art of what it means to be ourselves!

We Mastered the Ways of Others , Not Our Own ?

We were busy living on social medium and the urban vibe, the white man’s way, the modern way. We all hardly learned how to do our ways. The Elders always did it on our behalf. No, we didn’t learn anything about how our people process culturally and in terms our customs important events such as birth, traditional weddings, death or anything about our traditional food systems. We saw and heard but understood not. We are now the Elders. What will we teach the next generation? We know nothing and yet we are highly educated and well-spoken ?

Foreign Love and Romance

We express love, pain, joy and surprise not just in a foreign language but using foreign symbols, gestures & expressions ? We believed the lie that our people had no history, culture, science, philosophy nor sense of love and romance ?