Bamise’s homicide and this cryptocurrency technology, By Festus Adedayo

Yesterday, on the set up of the brand new Olubadan of Ibadanland, I took my time to hearken to his cognomen, with studied curiosity. I got here out of the encounter first, with laughter, then shock and trepidation. His Royal Majesty’s reward chants describe him as “omo o toro obe, toro abe; boo bun mi l’obe, bun mi l’abe nitori abe dun j’obe lo” Roughly translated, this implies, the kid of he who begs for soup and begs for intercourse; he says when you don’t have soup, hesitate to not give me the style of intercourse as a result of intercourse is sweeter than soup.

Such cognomens and songs give indications of conventional African society. They reveal, not strictly the promiscuity of pre-colonial Africa however even different sins they dedicated like killing each other for killing sake. Take for example the cognomen, oriki of the Iloko lineage of Oyo Yoruba. Iloko proudly dances to chants of strains like omo abe’nilori fiyoku bun ni, translated to imply, one who cuts off any individual’s head after which forgives the sufferer after the act. My pal, Lasisi Olagunju, an Iloko, proudly flaunts this.

Elders of our land, right this moment, your conventional Africa is below serial assaults. That very same conventional Africa which, in nostalgia, you label the purest of all societies, is right this moment mocked by a technology I name the Cryptocurrency technology. Because the Olubadan’s cognomen was being chanted, I listened to a really naughty little boy of that technology beside me say, so their technology too was that decadent; so why do they disdain ours?

Early this week, because the lifeless physique of 22-year-old Oluwabamise Ayanwole, the younger woman who commuted on the Lagos Bus Fast Transit, was discovered, you have been mocked, elders of our land. Oluwabamise’s stays had been dumped on Lagos’ Carter Bridge, with a few of her physique components alleged to be lacking. Whether or not the younger hapless woman’s loss of life was on account of a rape gone awry or ritual killing, we’re but to be absolutely instructed. Nevertheless, Nigerians have just lately witnessed a resurgence of killings for cash rituals.

Revered British scholar, Prof John Peel, in one in every of his works, mentioned his analysis discovered that in pre-colonial Nigeria, mortuary killings have been predominant in Southwest Nigeria and strangers have been usually killed to protect the lifetime of a group.

At any time when and wherever mutilated our bodies of victims of formality killings are discovered, your conventional Africa suffers horrible blow. As tears roll down their cheeks, youngsters of this technology are fast to warn you, canvassers of the purity of conventional Africa, to avoid wasting your crocodile tears for an additional day. They declare that the graveyards are crammed with bones of tons of of individuals your forefathers murdered for what they referred to as the sustenance of conventional Africa; that cash ritual is one in every of your bequeathals to their technology.

As if that was not sufficient, the Cryptocurrency technology calls you hypocrites. What impudence! Requested to elaborate, the vociferous ones amongst them mentioned that whereas your forefathers, in a single breath, fascinatingly rendered the traditional poetic strains of J. F. Odunjo Alawiye’s poem which requested us to spare that crawling insect and never stamp our toes on it as a result of additionally it is God’s creation within the chant, Yi ese re si apa kan, ma se pa kokoro ni, kokoro ti iwo ko le da, Olorun lo le da…in one other breath, your cultic forebears gorged out eyes, breasts, hearts and personal components of their victims. They mentioned these physique components symbolised creationism and multiplicity. With physique components for rituals, wealth and communal wellbeing have been assured.

I do know you might be stupefied at this technology’s daring guts. However hear but once more. This technology says it’s amused that you’re bothered on the frequent incidence now of youngsters, barely off diapers, driving round shining, metallic wonders-on-wheels. Why are they aghast that we earn thousands and thousands of {dollars} from Yahoo Yahoo rip-off of white women and men? they refrain.

Once more, they ask you to cowl your faces in disgrace. Somewhat than the villains you say they’re, the Cryptocurrency technology says it’s a technology of heroes and warriors. Their protection is that, this can be a technology that has chosen to not stand by and lament the over-a-century slave buying and selling and despoliation of the fecund lands of Africa. In line with them, they selected as an alternative to struggle your battles, battles that you simply have been too effeminate to struggle and couldn’t have received towards your taskmasters. By defrauding offspring of your colonial taskmasters who took you into slavery centuries in the past, the Cryptocurrency technology claims it’s serving to you repatriate the unpaid wages and sweats of your forefathers who, centuries in the past, have been hewers of woods and drawers of water for Europe and the Americas.

In your very eyes, these lullabies of purity of conventional Africa are exploding into smithereens, elders of our land, you who’re the final surviving offspring of conventional Africa. You’re at a crossroads. You’re proper now at that place the place three footpaths meet, the very place you referred to as the crossroads that turns the stranger right into a novice, the ikorita meta ti n damu alejo.

Within the identify of trend, your youngsters are right this moment the archetype of what you resented with the entire of your being. Your youngsters fortunately flaunt sartorial insanity, regalia of that very same species of beings you loathsomely labeled as one whose insane dances on the Market Sq. are scintillating to observe however whom nobody prays to have as a baby; the have been dun wo loja, ko se bi l’omo.

This Cryptocurrency technology wears that very same locked, raveled, filthy, prolonged, bushy, dreadlocked hairs that the native madman in your space wears, the equal of the hairs on the pinnacle of Jesus the Christ’s technology’s Madman of Gadarene. Your abetiaja cap they mock to ridicule as Stone Age sartorial cruelty and your agbada receives their scorn as a pointless parachute. As a replacement, they put on torn jean trousers like this identical Madman of Gadarene and place their trousers beneath the heap of the 2 clefts of their bottoms – the bebere idi. However after all, they’re ever fast to refer you, our elders, to the aforementioned Olubadan’s cognomen as a proof that the generations of yesteryears weren’t as harmless and pure as they’ve been made to consider!

Ah ah! The parable of purity is exploding in your very eyes like vapours of nothingness! As we speak’s trend, the style sense of the Cryptocurrency world that we reside in, blatantly mocks all that extreme protection of the important physique components. Your daughters scarcely put on something in any respect right this moment. They make public spoils of their nakedness, promoting their  cleavages, the bodily variant of what legendary Yoruba Kennery Music exponent, Orlando Owoh, referred to as the candy pineapple inside which there’s a number of sweetness – the ope oyinbo to fi dundun s’ewa.

Didn’t your forefathers train that there’s knowledge in masking glory earlier than its maturation, which you concisely couched in that pithy aphorism, bi isu eni ba ta, a f’owo bo je ni? Your male youngsters right this moment and their new wives pose for pictures on Fb and Instagram with protruded pregnant alaboyun tummies, extra bare than the prehistoric Adam and Eve, in a wild celebration they name Child Bathe. When your forefathers sighted a unadorned man or girl on the road, aghast, they shouted Ikunle abiamo o!, a lamentation of the labour ache of a girl that has come to ruins. If, in lamentation of nakedness, your forefathers, after they noticed a unadorned madman on the streets, murmured, aso o b’Omoye mo, Omoye ti rin’hoho w’oja, why do you, elders of our land, tolerate your youngsters sporting nakedness as dress to {the marketplace} and also you snort and dance with them?

The most effective place to start the interrogation of what has gone mistaken with us is to search out out whether or not this technology and generations earlier than them share a gathering of the minds on what values are. We have to dispense with this earlier than we accuse one in every of cultural and worth impunity and beatify the opposite as torchbearers of requirements, values and purity. Why has the social media turn into the brand new German thinker, Fredrich Nietzche’s Superman, doling out absolute ethical codes to our kids and turning them to alien spectacles we are able to scarcely acknowledge? Why have we chosen to look away in odious resignation whereas our fruits, the leaders of our tomorrow, decimate the values that gave us our sterling id and delight of previous?

In Africa, such values as respect for elders, onerous work, respect for seniority, the prolonged household system, valour, premium on youngsters and so forth reigned. Pre-colonial Africa is commonly held because the Golden Years of the continent.

Allow us to decide the above African values one after the other and see the place they’re in a 21^st century world. Respect for elders. Celebrated columnist, Reuben Abati, confronted one of the vital acidic assaults ever just lately when he demanded that his age be correctly attributed on a tv programme. Abati was dealing with what the late poet, Gabriel Okara, mirrored in his Piano and Drums, piano symbolising modernity and drums, conventional Africa. Sadly for Abati, he forgot that tv and trendy broadcasting are 21^st century objects, with their very own set codes and ethos, to which he wished to sacrifice pre-colonial ritual objects! Greetings and respect for elders in Africa, Nigeria and among the many Yoruba, like Rome, weren’t inbuilt a day and didn’t die in at some point. They die regularly. In Yorubaland, the gradual loss of life of respect for elders started from kids providing what is named idobale igbingbado – the corn-planting prostration place. It then moved to the merely-bowing-of-head place and right this moment, respect for elders is dealing with complete annihilation. Children supply handshakes as greetings to elders.

Hardwork. As we speak, solely a tiny inhabitants of our youths believes in onerous work. They wish to journey Bugatti and Bentley the day they’re born. Music as in style tradition in pre-colonial Africa and even fast post-colonial Africa helped to underscore the worth of onerous work. Musicians of that interval sang that sorcery and magic can’t make one rich. As we speak, musicians sing praises of felons and exalt virtues that they are saying are in scamming and 419.

In the identical method, the values of the prolonged household system, valour, premium on youngsters and others have turn into extinct. These days, Europeans and People celebrated our advantage of communal residing, our Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a South African social philosophy of tradition which explains Africa’s capability to precise compassion, dignity, concord and humanity whereas constructing and sustaining a way of communaliity, justice and mutual caring. Ubuntu is a fellow human feeling which is diametrically against the individualistic idea of society propounded by the French thinker, René Descartes, expressed within the Latin phrase, cogito, ergo sum – I feel, due to this fact I’m. For us in Africa, our underlying social philosophy of tradition was, I’m as a result of we’re. As we speak, Africa has returned to Descartes. It’s everybody for himself and God for us all.

The social media is right this moment held as offender of the implosion of immorality in Nigeria. I don’t subscribe to this absolutely. I feel what we’ve got now could be an explosion of reportage of evil, not explosion of the act. The reality is, there may be little distinction within the decadence prevalent in pre-colonial African society and now. The little distinction is that, the ratio of righteous countrymen then, in comparison with now, has dwindled significantly. Promiscuity was like pestilence then and immorality dominated our world. Till the Nigerian regulation forbade it, bastard youngsters, merchandise of liaisons with married ladies, littered the area. Homicide was like sport and injustice was in all places. Within the politics of the First Republic, useless our bodies have been dropped at the entrance of the homes of political opponents in order to rope them into homicide. What the social media might be accused of doing now could be coordinating all these indecencies that appear to be latent in us – ones in Zamfara, Ebonyi, to Osun – and making them accessible throughout time and area, in a baffling spontaneity that appears like a spike.

The way in which to start is for every of us to return to our properties. Because the saying goes that whoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad; the household in Africa has turn into a mad place. William Yeats, Irish poet, dramatist, author and one of many foremost figures of 20^th century literature, writing in his poem, The Second Coming, talked about issues which have gone awry, purity that has been polluted. It’s identical in our households right this moment. The falcon can’t hear the falconer as issues (have) fallen aside; the centre can’t maintain. Proper contained in the household, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Mother and father gladly obtain automobile items from their Yahoo Yahoo youngsters who they know are kingpins of scamming. They’re those who assist to philosophize the fraud rot that has destroyed many victims’ lives without end by saying that Yahoo Yahoo is an try to repatriate stolen African valuables by the West. I learnt there may be even an affiliation of Yahoo Yahoo moms.

We have now to start from our properties to show our kids the values and purity of onerous work and the unenduring value of indolence and fraud. We should start to show them morals by asking our kids to bear in mind the kid of whom they’re. Although we’re in a 21^st century world, J. F. Odunjo’s books, his poems, the tales of Tortoise and his Spouse who we referred to as Ijapa and Yannibo, tales that moulded us to accountable maturity, are evergreen, imperishable, related for this age and are calling for our consideration right this moment. Every household should train their youngsters, from the diapers, about Odunjo’s traditional poem, Ise l’ogun ise (Work serves as antidote to poverty). In reality, it should be held on the wall as we did almanac these days. That poem teaches that we should always intensify efforts at work as a result of, not solely is there dignity in labour, work is the one factor that may carry one up.

If we religiously do that, we shall be rescuing this technology and those to come back from the insanity of swindling, indolence and warped sense of feat. Extra importantly, we shall be saving our kids from the fingers of this fast-moving, all-that-is-wrong-is-right Cryptocurrency technology, the scions of the ZaZuZeh tradition that kills the Oluwabamises of this world for rituals, believing that of their severed physique components, lie antidotes to poverty.

Ads

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.

That is the textual content of a paper delivered on Saturday, March 12 on the Kegites Membership’s celebration of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo’s eighty fifth birthday, which held on the OOPL (Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library) in Abeokuta, Ogun State.