The Igbo society is an endangered species. The Igbo culture has
suffered untold mutilations in the hands of the post-civil war Igbo.
The effects of the war and the subsequent demonization of the Igbo man
by other tribes as well as by other Igbos whose belly is their god has
eroded the fabrics of what truly makes for true Igbo values and
honorable virtues.
Dr Amaka lived all her life in the North and started her lecturing
career there before she transferred to the Southeast. Here, she
notices that, unlike how Northern lecturers collaborate amongst
themselves to attract research grants running into millions of naira,
her southern counterparts are busy fighting among themselves over
peanuts and positions. This lady bewailed this observation of hers to
my hearing yesterday.
It hit me differently because it collaborated with similar narratives
that cut across Igbo settlements both home and abroad. A friend of
mine reliably informed me that many Igbo traders domiciled in Cameroon
use their wards, sent to them as apprentices, as slaves. He narrated
how these traders would use temporary identity cards to invite these
naïve young boys to Cameroon. On crossing the borders into Cameroon,
the papers the boys have will become invalid and they would be at the
mercy of their bosses for as long as they please.
“They might agree with the boys’ parents that the boys will serve them
for 5 years after which they would settle the boys but many of the
boys would end up spending over 10 years and still get chased out of
the business by the boss without settlement. The accusation range from
“He was peeping at my wife while she was taking her bath”, to “He used
my money to gallivant with girls.”
I have never been to Cameroon and have not heard the bosses’ side of
the story but I was able to glean from that narrative is that our boys
are no longer functional and neither are our men. Look at the family
system especially that of the Igbos and see how dysfunctional most of
them are. The introduction of the western ways and the inability of
our society to evolve our traditions and culture have caused a severe
mutilation of our ways with half-baked adoption of the western ways.
This has contributed immensely to our dysfunctional state.
We, the board of trustees of the Ways of the Ancient Ones of Ala Igbo
hereby recommend the only viable solution we see, namely; the
indigenization of our school curriculum and system. This implies
re-evaluating and reviving those aspects of our culture which have
been proven over time to have very wholesome effects on us as a
people.
Say, for instance, the Egwu Onwa system. This is the custom whereby
members of the Igbo community come out at a square and concelebrate,
share sociologically and psychologically development games and stories
and in the course of that bond. This is one of the practices that made
our society very functional. It made it easier for our people to
cohabit and sort out differences as well as collaborate in nation
building and mutually benefiting economic development.
How about the Igba Boy system. This is the Hands-On Mentorship System
indigenous to the Igbo people. If we can reshape our school system to
be predominantly hands on mentorship based, we will start discovering
talents earlier and polishing such talents from an early stage.
Everybody knows that the present pedagogy of learning as brought by
the British lacks the fourth R which is Reasoning. Reintroducing it
through remodeling our Igbo speaking art to be more parable and
analogy based will restore the Igbo mindset on the next generation of
Igbos.
I can go on and on. But the fact remains that if we truly desire to
check the rising tide of a denatured Igbo society filled with anarchy
and shame inspiring incidents, we must start looking into
indigenization of our curriculum.
Above all, the language for teaching the Sciences and Mathematics
needs to be Igbo. The Arab teach theirs in Arabic. The Chinese teach
in Chinese. Why not the Igbo the same?
O’star Eze
