₦airaland Forum

It baffles me when people keep talking about African Culture or any culture for that matter. Culture is whatever a group of people are practicing at any particular time period in history. For example, lets go back 1,000 years ago, the activities (culture) is much different from say 400 years ago or 100 years ago.

Somethings people call culture are really not culture but the way people lived due to technology and life at that time e.g

Food - Before humans invented fire, there was nothing like eba/fufu or egusi soup or efo riro or pepper soup or whatever the tribes ate back then, so that was not in any body's culture then, when fire was discovered people learnt to combine different things and cook. With further developments we can now bake using oven e.g cake, bread etc and even borrow ideas from other places. What we call culture is what we learnt when people started copying from other tribes, e.g why do Ibo's, Urhobo, Ijaw, Yoruba etc all eat eba/fufu/amala? you think they did not interact at a point in time and copied from one another? even the soups have some similarity in preparation.

Now that the world is much more interconnected, we are basically unifying in culture. I see it as a losing battle when people talk going back to "our culture", there is no such thing because if you want to go back to your "culture" you have to go back to the village, live in mud huts, go to market square, watch local wrestling in the moonlight, and all such things that people did then, you cannot live in Lagos or London and pick some things you like and say you want to instill culture in your kids.


Language - Language is a means of communication among peoples in same geographical area. If you are living in New York or London as a Nigerian, and your kids cannot speak your local dialect, how does that affect him? I am not saying it is not good to be multilingual but if you look at it closely, the reason why we want to be multilingual is so we can communicate when we go to places where English is not spoken, for example south America or China. Now if you child is Ibo or Yoruba or any other tribe, the only people he cannot communicate with are probably his grandma or grandpa in the village as almost everyone in Nigeria can speak English or Pidgin English.


Clothes - Are clothes really culture? or what was available at the time? Before the white man came with those fancy wrapper and lace material where the different tribes dressing like that? If we could find pictures of people in Ibadan or Enugu or Warri 500 years ago, do you think they would have all those gele and buba or Ijaw hat and wrapper? so if the ones that came after them adopted these clothes why can we now not adopt jeans and t-shirts as our culture since that is what we all find comfortable to wear now.


We can go on and on....even the English spoken by Shakespeare is no more spoken in modern times. It is good to be nostalgic about how things were in the old days but remember life must go on.

It baffles me when people keep talking about African Culture or any culture for that matter. Culture is whatever a group of people are practicing at any particular time period in history. For example, lets go back 1,000 years ago, the activities (culture) is much different from say 400 years ago or 100 years ago.

Somethings people call culture are really not culture but the way people lived due to technology and life at that time e.g

Food - Before humans invented fire, there was nothing like eba/fufu or egusi soup or efo riro or pepper soup or whatever the tribes ate back then, so that was not in any body's culture then, when fire was discovered people learnt to combine different things and cook. With further developments we can now bake using oven e.g cake, bread etc and even borrow ideas from other places. What we call culture is what we learnt when people started copying from other tribes, e.g why do Ibo's, Urhobo, Ijaw, Yoruba etc all eat eba/fufu/amala? you think they did not interact at a point in time and copied from one another? even the soups have some similarity in preparation.

Now that the world is much more interconnected, we are basically unifying in culture. I see it as a losing battle when people talk going back to "our culture", there is no such thing because if you want to go back to your "culture" you have to go back to the village, live in mud huts, go to market square, watch local wrestling in the moonlight, and all such things that people did then, you cannot live in Lagos or London and pick some things you like and say you want to instill culture in your kids.


Language - Language is a means of communication among peoples in same geographical area. If you are living in New York or London as a Nigerian, and your kids cannot speak your local dialect, how does that affect him? I am not saying it is not good to be multilingual but if you look at it closely, the reason why we want to be multilingual is so we can communicate when we go to places where English is not spoken, for example south America or China. Now if you child is Ibo or Yoruba or any other tribe, the only people he cannot communicate with are probably his grandma or grandpa in the village as almost everyone in Nigeria can speak English or Pidgin English.


Clothes - Are clothes really culture? or what was available at the time? Before the white man came with those fancy wrapper and lace material where the different tribes dressing like that? If we could find pictures of people in Ibadan or Enugu or Warri 500 years ago, do you think they would have all those gele and buba or Ijaw hat and wrapper? so if the ones that came after them adopted these clothes why can we now not adopt jeans and t-shirts as our culture since that is what we all find comfortable to wear now.


We can go on and on....even the English spoken by Shakespeare is no more spoken in modern times. It is good to be nostalgic about how things were in the old days but remember life must go on.

@OP, You have a point but the way you are going about it is wrong. Without going into much details, there are several ways your argument can be countered. For example, many blacks have lost their lives due to attacks by racist whites which could be random. A black man who was looking for a ride was tied to the back of a truck and dragged several miles till he was decapitated. I can't count the number of girls and women and even boys who have been raped, murdered and dumped in some bush or alley. If you are in the U.S, you will surely have heard of all these crimes.

In cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York etc even kids fear for their life when going to school in certain areas of town and you as an outsider dare not step into some zones or you will not live to tell the tale. In 2012 there were 500 murders in Chicago alone, 435 caused by guns while Detroit had 386 homicides and New York had 414 murders. Now these are murders alone is just 3 cities; robberies, rape, carjackings etc etc are not included.

When you talk of rule of law, that is true generally but remember that the highest bidder usually carries the day in western justice. If you are rich and can afford a top lawyer you can get away with most crimes or with minor punishment compared to the average man who will face the full wrath of the law. Don't forget the fact that as a black man also you are presumed guilty by default while the white man is given the benefit of doubt.

I could go on and on....all am trying to say is no place is utopia, there are problems here we don't see in Nigeria while there are lots of problems in Nigeria we don't have here, off course everyone knows that it is generally better in the western world than in Nigeria but that does not mean everyone should leave Nigeria because many are making it in Nigeria as well. The richest black man in the world is from Nigeria, why not the U.S? if he had taken your advice to leave Nigeria when he was young do you think he would be the richest black man?

Before the White man came to Africa, most Africans had only loin cloths as clothing with the women exposing their b.reasts just as natural as we expose our faces or arms today, there was no shame involved. When the Europeans landed on our shores, most cultures adapted their clothing to what they obviously acquired from the Europeans. My point here is that most Nigerians today complain about losing our African culture when a Nigerian dresses in a certain way especially the women and they say they are imbibing western cultures especially when they wear revealing dresses with parts of their b00bs on display, forgetting that before the white man came our women actually exposed all of their b.reasts, it is in Western cultures that the women cover their b.reast.

Also, when I see people dressing up in different traditional attires and say this is their cultural attire, I wonder why we chose to identify with those attires that were non-existent before the Europeans came to our shores. If we are really interested in sticking to our native cultural dressing then it will be the loin cloths which was worn for centuries before the white man came. The current traditional clothes we are claiming are not traditional but came as a result of European influences.

My whole point here is that culture is dynamic, so whatever people are wearing today generally is the culture.

Every Nigerian knows this survey results is incorrect as regards Nigeria. According to the survey report, they ask people if they will like to have someone from another race as a neighbor, if that is indeed the question asked, I am 100% sure every Nigerian will say they prefer to have a white, Lebanese or even Chinese as a neighbor even preferably to their fellow Nigerian because in our minds it automatically elevates our status if we have a foreign neighbor.

Religion makes a lot of people not to reason rationally. "Pastors" will tell you that you are poor because you did not pay "Tithe" or "Offering". Have you sat down to ask yourself, if that is the case why are Muslims in Dubai rich even though they don't believe in Jesus, or why are are there millionaires and even billionaires in China when they don't believe in either Jesus or Mohammed? there are Hindus in India that are Millionaires who have nothing to do with Christianity or Islam. Does that not tell any rational human being that prosperity has nothing to do with believing in the particular religion you happen to believe in mostly by chance.

Even this religion that we are all killing ourselves for, do you know the only reason we are following these religions is just because the white and Arabs came here first? If the Indians have come here to colonize us, then we all will probably be worshiping the Hindu God. Do you all really think a Hindu man that lived and died in his village as a Hindu will go to Hell or same for a Chinese man? Let's try to think and remove this religious bias and we will see that we are basically living in a fools paradise which these "pastors" are capitalizing on. Most of these "Pastors" don't even believe what is in the Bible, because if they do, they will not be doing what they are doing.

Kamsy10: Honey you're the one one that poverty has finished cos you don't even seem to understand the simple statement muami made.
At the bolded, I think you need to leave that village for once and travel out and read books about how the catholic church functions

What has this argument got to do with this topic? This is like saying because the President of Italy is corrupt then it is O.K if the president of Nigeria is corrupt too. The way you are reasoning is why the Nigerian politicians keep using divide and conquer tactics to rob us blind without anyone even raising an objection.

solomon111: The attitude of Nigerians disgust me.
I can't believe people are trying to justify this.
Any Nigerian that support these jet-hugging charlatans do not have any moral right to castigate politicians for reckless display of extravagance.

Honestly, when it comes to religion a lot of Nigerians have mental issues. All sense of reasoning seem to elude them that you wonder if these people just descended from Apes. Anybody can call himself a "Pastor" on Facebook and post a status with a religious connotation and say type "Amen" if you want your blessing. Before you say Jack, there are thousands of comments already with "Amen" and you ask yourself, do these people actually believe they will receive some sort of blessings or reward by typing "Amen"? How can Nigeria as a country develop when majority of its populace are like this?

Is it really critical that the "Man of God" must visit all those countries? I would have thought the money used in buying a private jet or if it is a "Gift" the money raised from the sale would go a long way in establishing more churches in those countries and other places without a church of their own. This argument is for the religious zealots.

In reality, the money would be better spent taking care of the needs of less fortunate people that abound in a poverty ridden society like Nigeria. I would think Jesus would appreciate that more than jetting off to various countries to visit churches that are doing just fine on their own.

I read an article on Yahoo.com today listing the 25 least visited countries in the World according to U.N statistics. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link to see if Nigeria was there because of all the bad press we get but thank God this is one bad list we did not make

http://travel.yahoo.com/ideas/least-visited-countries-in-the-world-201146242.html

http://www.garfors.com/2013/01/the-25-least-visited-countries-in-world.html

I then decided to Google most visited countries in Africa and I must say I was quite surprised to see that Nigeria was amongst the top 10 (number 8 on the list) and more visited than even Kenya. I am still wondering were all these visitors are coming from and what exactly they are visiting Nigeria for, seeing as we do not really have a big tourism industry. I don't want to believe they are including Nigerians with dual citizenship visiting home in these statistics. What do you guys think?

http://www.findmehotel.net/most-visited-countries-in-africa/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings

Thanks i.meller, that's not too bad, I like your breakdown. It means with about 500k naira I can spend 5 days in Dubai with the family. Awaiting your videos.

Thanks for sharing your experience and pictures I.meller, I would really like to go on an adventure like this too with my family. Please can you give me a general estimate of how much this 10 day trip cost you? Awaiting your response. Thanks.