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Magic Of Childhood by Flames33(m): 12:55pm On May 17, 2017 |
THE MAGIC OF CHILDHOOD. At Christmas,in my hometown of Okija, when the sky must have been lit up gloriously in a dazzling splendour,the moon and stars would assemble in a powerful unison to gossip about the earth in the crescent of the night. The breeze not so powerful but cool enough would wound up its pedantry. Grandmother would assemble us-my siblings,cousins and I to a sensational time of powerful narration. She would tell us a handful of stories enough to quench my curiosity for the night__genealogy and folktales were all she got. The tortoise and his mischievous escapades takes the frontline in folktales. She had once told me of the proverbial traveler to distant places who must not cultivate enmity on his route too. Recently,she released that of an orphan fed grudgingly by a cruel foster mother and often denied the udala fruit. But the spirits so benign threw down for her in bounty, the fruits once she sang to the tree of her plight and misery when she visited the bush. One of my favorite stories featured Ojadili the legendary wrestler who had beaten the spirits one after the other at different locations,and had laughed at them a mirthless laughter when he was on a quest in the spirit land. I liked the good fare,the resultant gayness and briskness that came from it. I liked most of all, that in this shared space of Africanness I could sit and enjoy effortlessly stories incarnated with an assemblage of impossible excellencies and told with a new freshness and local flavor of an aged mother. I had known Ugoo Mkpa all through my life in the ancient town of Onitsha in those days but they left when we were in primary four for Enugu. Ugoo was fairer,taller and stronger quite frankly. We played detective in games and crime scenes,looked for troubles and teamed up in fights. He taught me how to harvest vegetables from farms,how to weed,how to climb especially paw-paw trees. These were because he was as well older. We rolled tyres,wheels,tubes,boyless,played acrobatics on sands,cooked raw rubbish,went topless and bare- footed,made catapults and guns from cassava stem,made flutes with paw-paw stalk. But we were good children and went on errands. My childhood was bereft of luxury and affluence,that we wore our poverty and smallness of our lives like camwood drawn nicely on our bodies with perfect curves and linings. We wore it like logo. But yet,my childhood of poverty,of countless playtimes and ceaseless stories,of beans and mangoes that lay balmy in my stomach always,of seasoned laughter,was not baseless. It was unique,something close to magic. I had sometimes considered them as mysteries of toddlership. We lived concretely. More now than ever before,I have seen children with absolutely no knowledge of folk tales,no genealogy of their family. Children with their childhood set free from every primordial hardship at the cost of their moral worth. I feared most all whether they’ll have any story to tell their children. The 21st century Nigerian Igbo wealthy parents,lock their children upstairs,dissociates them from their folks,tell them no stories,then take them to village once in a decade. Inturn,they take them to summer holidays in Bahamas,takes them to fanciful places and eateries. They become children with no knowledge of whom they are,lack peers,lack stories,lack experiences. They lack their identity and heritage and most of all live in the creasing mess of life their parents had imagined and created for them,it would never be funny playing the role. It would be much better to allow the children an integral toddlership, while they are grown,they can make a distinguished choice for their mode of living. My cap up for my mothers-revels,such distinguished tutors for my childhood of plays and stories, with a such glorious flourish. Help breach the flow of unafricanness in children when you become a parent. Such will rob a child of the joys and magic of childhood. I love Africa! #my_Africa_of_folktales! |
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