Just Ponder On This

We teach Christian and Islamic Religious Studies in our schools but there's nothing on our traditional religious beliefs. Beliefs stemming from millennia old practices intertwined with our cultures that gave us the Benin bronze castings, Nok terracotta, Igbo-Ukwu art, traditional medicine, music, poetry etc.

Ifa divination for instance is being studied in advanced Mathematics and highly recognised by the developed world because of its complexity that startles even contemporary scientists yet we denigrate it. The thousands of years old Ifa divination is considered an advanced level machine language in some IT circles. Imagine what we have lost!

Time travel, teleportation, quantum mechanics and other budding contemporary scientitific fields of study, are found in our cultures but have different names. Our ancestors had magical skills, some could talk to animals, plants and even inanimate objects. We had systems for naming days, months and years but we jettisoned everything for Allah and Jesus.

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors without modern machines and by hands, produced engineering masterpieces but today, we import toothpicks. We have degrees but no skills.

The art works produced by our ancestors are fetching billions of dollars in European museums and our elites pay heavily just to go visit and snap photos with them but we die of poverty back home and they give us aids in trickles.

We fail to understand that Islam and Christianity cannot be separated from the cultural beliefs of Jews, Arabs and Europeans. Islam for instance, cannot be practiced without learning Arabic, if not wholly but at least some part of it.

All colonised peoples who are making waves today - Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Asians generally, never completely abandoned their cultural heritage which includes religion. At best, they modified aspects of it.

We go to Indian and Chinese restaurants and their cultural heritage is displayed all over - you see it in their cuisines, drinks, arts and lifestyle. You enter these restaurants with inscriptions praising Krishna and Buddha, we find nothing odd about them. But we would never go near anything celebrating Amadioha or Sango.

The logos of many western brands celebrate the pantheon of European (Greek, Roman, Nordic etc. gods) - Zeus, Apollo and others. The Gregorian calendar we operate glorifies these gods, the solar system and other planetary bodies are named after them. Sunday is a day set aside to worship the Sun god, its origin is from Hellenistic astrology but it has been appropriated into Christianity. Same with Easter, Christmas and other Christian celebrations.

The Africans are the only people who completely threw away its essence, cut ties with its past and coincidentally, are the only people not developing. 

Without an understanding of your past, you would not make any headway into the future.

By Dan Koje