by Chinedu Anarado

With aggressive advocacy for homosexuality, we are inching closer every day to a situation where it is cool to be gay and lesbian, run about naked and for young people to be free to roam naked with the attendant freedom to cross-dress and feel cool about it.

A few days ago, a close friend, Ifesinachi Okoli-Okpagu wrote on her Facebook page;

“In the past few days, I have been living with a fear, a question hanging in my mind; on our identity; on what it means to be African. 

Africa have gradually become like a child walking in the shadow of its mother; falling into her potholes and trenches. The West showcases its own values dressed in what we here call ‘civilization’ and we buy it, the good and rotten part. We drink from their springs and get drunk on the waters from their gutters. Our celebrities start crazy trends; we make excuses for them, flaunting that annoying word ‘civilization’, then we accept it as part of us.

In the end, we are becoming nothing more than a shadow; nothing really. A people moved about like wind. A tree floating in the air without roots, a ghost, nothing.

Who are we? What does it mean to be African, Nigerian??? I don’t know!”

On Saturday morning, just a few days after I saw the post above, I saw a raunchy video, a clip from the Big Brother Chase- Africa Reality TV show – sponsored by that Multichoice SA. This wasn’t anything milder than pornography. An uncut sex scene involving a female Nigerian and male South African participants on the show, beamed to more than one hundred million viewers across Africa. It seemed to me like a scene out of a western pornography clip. In that moment, the line above struck me. Is this the civilization we are running for? Is this what it entails to be trendy, hip and contemporary? Most definitely not! We are being stripped of what is left of the African values! We have descended into abyss, flaunting sexuality and disrobing the beautiful phenomenon – sex – of its sanctity. We have descended into brazen immorality and christened it entertainment.

An aspect of the African value system accords copious respect to the human person. This can be seen through our communal lifestyle. Taking this further, it also extends to the sanctity with which we address the body especially the private parts and by extension, the act of sex. It was seen as a taboo to discuss sexuality not to even talk of publicly engaging in it if you are unmarried or doing it with someone who is not your spouse. If my mind serves me well, traditional religion dealt serious punishment to offenders. This same mindset can be seen with the religion brought to us by the west. Where then did we start losing it?

Let me give this issue a closer dimension; we have a wealthy media, playing on the cravings of the middle class and the large and still expanding youth population who have found a new way to be up to date in the scheme of things and with it, a new found idea of entertainment. This media keep generating contents that are at cross purposes with our identity as Africans. We gloat and hail and discuss and set the social media space buzzing with streams of profanities arising from these contents. Meanwhile they smile to the banks and ‘sort’ their western paymaster. Must we allow entertainment and western civilization flush down into the gutters what is left of the values bequeathed us by the past generation?

In many African societies our base drive to be hip, fashionable and belong, fuelled by the entertainment industry, is enslaving our minds. Gradually, our minds and beliefs are warped by garbage fed from entertainment, blinding our sensibilities and redefining what proper or ‘civilized’ behaviour is. In no distant time, it may just become hip to have sex on the street! With aggressive advocacy for homosexuality, we are inching closer every day to a situation where it is cool to be gay and lesbian, run about naked and for young people to be free to roam naked with the attendant freedom to cross-dress and feel cool about it.

While they are at this, the political class, starring a good measure of persons from the older generation is pillaging our moral values on the political front, stealing votes, and public funds and flaunting it before us and at the same time, dressing it in opulence and magnificence to set the wrong moral standards.  Stealing will then become trendy and cool as well. Can anyone now see the descent into oblivion? If we have not seen these trends, then, I am sorry. But my generation is hell bent on killing off what’s left of Africa’s sense of dignity as a result of borrowed mentality; an inferiority complex that has led to a craze to acquire western ways. Today we have defined being trendy as; dressing naked and leaving little of our private “assets” to imagination, having sex in the public and feeling good about it, stealing public funds and privatizing political office as the best way to stardom. Rewarding and identifying with mediocrity and presenting such persons as role models. No wonder! We are just setting all sorts of wrong values for ourselves. We are also cascading these wrong tenets down to the generation coming after us. Through these, we are invariably enslaving our minds; the worst form of limitation we can ever surrender to.

What has become of African folklores, our traditional music and dance, wrestling, the famed sanctity and privacy of the human body? Where is our sense of “Africanness”? Where is the tradition that made us Africans? Who will protect them? A good number of us as a result of being born and raised in the cities, have tossed our roots to the bins and embraced western identity through urbanization. We speak English with a borrowed accent besieged by the desire to sound and appear “contemporary” just like Americans/Britons. How are we different if we can no longer differentiate through our behavior, tongue, culture, mannerism, ideology, a western mind and an African mind? Who are we? Who is an African?

Do not get me wrong. It is good to associate with the west, attract modernism and their systems that have invariably improved our lives, adapt modern technology to enhance our effectiveness. But that is as far as it goes. It is in keeping with values, culture, traditions –that do not impinge on human rights and dignity – language and accent, food and relationship that we are able to sustain our identity. It can no longer be hidden that there is a convergence of sorts going on globally. But in keeping with positive developments, we can identify with such convergence without losing our identity. Africa has something to offer the world. We can take a cue from Asia -represented by China -who, against all oppositions has caught up with the world –and even become the standard- while sticking to their value system. You will not find the sort of nonsense African is gobbling from the west in Asia not just China. They have defined development in their own language, given it their own flavor, thereby differentiating it from that coming from the west. They have remained contemporary without being superficial. Guess what? The west has not stopped running to them. What then is wrong with Africa?

I do not subscribe to the dehumanization of the African value system which the media is facilitating. If that is what civilization entails, let it remain with the west after all it is on record civilization started in Africa, ancient Egypt. I do not understand the rationale behind doling out $300,000 (three hundred thousand US Dollars) {the reward is even in western currency} or N48,000,000 (forty eight million naira) to someone for living in a house for three months, drinking, smoking, bathing naked, having sex, partying and arguing with fellow housemates. Hello? What is the achievement, can someone lecture me? What is it promoting? Is there resilience? Ingenuity? Groundbreaking discovery? Scientific or entertainment breakthrough? What exactly? I will also love to be lectured on the entertainment value of the Big Brother Africa Show?

Let us be sincere to ourselves for once, what value has past contestants added to the local entertainment industry since winning the show or coming out as runners-up? What is their claim to fame? Will you not see and appreciate more value in what someone like Chimamanda Adichie has achieved in comparison to the winners of BBA? Maybe I am blind or just not upwardly mobile, trendy and cool. These guys are basically playing on our insatiable craving for immorality to bring us on a media platform and sell advertising space to the highest bidder. You get no reward whatsoever, ok maybe if you are the type with insatiable pornographic cravings.

Over time, we will be bidding farewell to our values, losing the uniqueness of being African to a western mentality that we cannot even simulate. We will wake up one morning and our children will ask us who we are. Invariably we will answer; African, and then it goes, what makes you an African? It is there the problem lies, since there are blacks who are British, Americans, Germans, and Russians even Chinese. What makes you different from them?

It is not because we have no culture that I am writing this, it is because my generation has put machinery in motion to balkanize what is left of the values, mores and culture that mother Africa bequeathed to us. Time to retrace our steps is now!

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Chinedu Anarado, a young African, development communications practitioner lives in Abuja.

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.