AGAINST THE INDIVIDUALISTIC AFRICAN

The 'Africanness' in us is dying, and we're not doing anything about it. It's like a war we're fighting in our subconscious minds but inadvertently, we are losing. The multiplier effect of the loss is gradually shaping up and wont to consume us all. Are we not afraid of an era when respect will be erased from our societal values? Or where responsibilities will be left to the individual to bear? Well, it's already happening and we have ourselves to blame.

I think it’s a ploy, neatly carved by the influence of globalization and hurriedly gulped, first by our elite, and then anyone who wants to join them. Who doesn’t? The need to make a mark in the family, struggle to make some money, build mansions, buy flashy cars, send our wards to the best schools around and prepare a befitting burial for ourselves even while we are alive have always been in the minds of most of us, not all of us. The latter group of persons who champion the common good of the people and whose lives are dedicated towards solving problems and fixing things in the society is getting less and less popular.

One particular area I wish to point out is in the way we build houses these days and partly also, how we raise our children. The normal African setting is the extended family, not the nuclear one. As a scholar had argued that the basic difference in the societal set up in Africa and the Western World is that the basic unit of the former is the Extended Family, while the latter has the 'individual' as its basic unit, some have argued further that it is also the nuclear family in the West. Well, I don’t intend to join in the debate. One criticism for sure is that whether Christian or Muslim or those without faith in any of the religions, Africans are only, and I mean, only known for the extended family life, not the nuclear one.

Perhaps you might be wondering where I am going with this. It's pretty simple. The houses we build these days are mainly for our nuclear family and each nuclear family branches out from the extended one. It has now become normal for a member of the family to disintegrate from the extended family once he's established. He takes his wife and children out of the 'family house' and goes out either renting an apartment or building his own. This automatically lead to a disintegration in the family structure and before you know it, my cousins and I are like strangers at a bus stop, or better still, we fight over a queue in bank before remembering our roots. Some cant even remember their family history… I could go on.

Now it has to be said, there may be practical reasons why the need to move out of the family compound may be necessary. Things do not go as we plan always and moving out may become inevitable, at least for survival purposes. This is not however to give justification to every reason at all, because in all, we should at least think of the negative impacts. I'll like to go religion for starters. When Churches or Mosques break up into other units, side by side or within the same vicinity, it causes a sort of complexity even for the members who offer prayers in them. The idea with both religion is to have a common place, say one in a particular area where everyone converge, meet, exchange ideas, assist one another in their affairs etc. But once we break it up, and in the alarming rate with which churches and mosques are springing up, we may not only have nuclear families all abound, but nuclear places of worship as well. I will like to paint a picture of every household having its own mosque or church and those worshipping in it are only the parents and children, maybe with the security guard. God forbid.

The dangers we felt we were 'running' from when we chose to cut our ties with the extended family are issues our predecessors faced and they survived. Surviving in a similar situation could call for some adaptations, yes I agree, but we should make it work. Agreed that our population is exploding and there is the need to move, but we can still make it work. I don’t have to build a mansion that could accommodate a hundred and live in it alone where there are family members in tens sharing hallowed rooms. Don’t get me wrong, we necessarily need some space sometimes. But if at all the four R's (Respect, Reciprocity, Restraint and Responsibility) which have given our societal values an edge over the individualistic stance of the Western world can be understood as our stronghold to our values, then a rethink needs to be done before we find ourselves living on the streets of New York.