You see, when a people’s history is documented by intruders, chances are that the victim’s most revered ideology and philosophy would be eroded away by constant misrepresentation from the intrusive elements. Their custom would become an object of global mockery and their traditions would remain a mindlessly tainted villain. Two hundred years of missionaries and their contending counterparts, Arabs, trading the “soul” of gullible Africans, particularly Nigerians, and many of our history is filtered away through the window of stealth oblivion.
Every society has their religion, which is a by-product of the interactions with their immediate environmental structure. Man always wants to explain things he finds undecipherable without dedicating much time to the study of such, hence he creates gods as a consoling figure believed to understand such knotty existence. No doubt however that this happens to every man in his different society. It is this man’s created religion that gives birth to other subclass of his cultural voice like naming culture, dressing culture, marriage, government among others.
Also, the intrinsic tendency of man to dominate others makes him see the necessity to sell his cultural exploits to others who are simply gullible or docile to purchase the merchandise. Alas, man cannot sell his naming culture alongside with others alone to people otherwise, it will become an unmarketable commodity and will be dead on arrival. Therefore he needs to sell his religion to people most especially with the use of physical force or psychological massacre. Physical force when he chooses to conquer his prospective preys by tagging them infidels who deserve to be lynched for his god to feel elated. Psychological massacre when he tells you of an imaginary Heaven which he would say is forbidden for you when you are a sinner, ie not worshipping his gods, and also Hell which he would say your forefathers are already rotting because they worshipped “idols”.
The man so much trusts your dumb mind because he calls your place of worship ‘shrine’ whereas he has only modernized his own shrine as alta or whatever as the case maybe. In that alta, he would say he communicates with god while your own shrine you are “dancing Alanta” abi? The lawd is really good. Honestly these two weapons have been very effective on my African brothers, the potency cannot be underestimated. No wonder you would see even learned ones in 21st century fighting for Jesus and campaigning for Mohammed. These two actors have been advertised like telecommunication networks in Africa since 19gbooro. It is very easy to spot the marketers of this unfounded commodities saying ‘my god’ is better than yours throwing up many allegorical references to solidify their intellectual mirage.
Even some are so fanatic of these merchandise that killing their African neighbors is just a mere exercise of showing their masters how loyal they could be. I have seen many who invited me to a powerful prayer session dedicated for the whites for enslaving Africans. In their own dictionary of life, they believe Blacks would not have survived without their forefathers being enslaved, brutalised, beaten, exposed to hard labour and subjected to libidinal torture. That’s how damaged our people’s brains are.
One would never imagine how long our journey is as a race until you hear that Aregbesola proposes that the future generations of Oduduwa descendants should veil their head with some sort of Arabic garb. You would never know how lost we are as a people until you notice that someone occupying such great a political office in a State that serves as the cradle of Yoruba race known throughout the wide world wilfully hands our cultural ram to the callous excommunication of the Arabs. Yes, many adherents of the faith are expected to throw their weight in support of such insidious move by a historically handicapped fellow.
But wait, it is hijab today abi, when this sits comfortably on our cultural physiognomy, twenty years from now and the speaking of Yoruba language by the sea of hijab users will be tagged ‘ungodly’ and their justification for this would be that “such language is not a heavenly one because Allah does not understand it”. My Yorubian brothers are blind to a fault. This blindness is not a physical one but blunt psychological enterprise. They are very blind because they could not see how ignoble, disrespectful and threatening this stupid move could be for the founding fathers of Yoruba race.
If a state like Ogun, Ondo, Ekiti or others takes this step, one could conveniently hide under the middle finger of modernisation to explain away such ridiculous move but for the State of Osun that houses Oduduwa and other historical artifacts, my brother, it is just a generational bomb detonated today but which explosion will be till the end of time.
Somewhere also in the eastern part of Nigeria, their governor would beat his chest in public that he erected a monumental Xmas tree worth of #600 million as a birthday present for a man who has died more than 2000 years ago even when poverty occupies the strategic center of the masses’ GRA. Also in this same east, the man Jesus crawls his way into the poem of a state’s anthem. I saw this and almost concurred that that freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela, has painfully died in vain, for how would one explain it that a revolutionary for black freedom whose death was recent does not feature in his people’s minds but there is a space reserved for a white man’s god who was busy looking at his men enslaving Africans desperately without mercy.
The earlier we got back to our roots, the best for the coming generations of Africans!!!
Wale Oyedeji.
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