And after that?

Some days ago, I was visiting a close friend. I’d often call her house ‘my Lagos village’, mainly because it keeps me in touch with convention as I call it. You see, when your parents are from mixed tribe as mine are, sometimes you forget which custom to follow.

Given this friend comes from a large family, she often has visitors. It is either a relative, an older friend, a sister, or brother is passing through her house. These visits often help bring me up to date with what’s happening in the south-south and south-east. Whenever I am at her house, we often have arguments that help straighten out some of what we read in the papers. Some of our discussions centered on a certain road advertised in X state which has been fixed or if it was just ‘newspaper noise’ as we would say.

Other times, our discussions could move to politics, faith, work, business, family, children, and marriage. Often the older ones amongst us would regal us with stories of the ‘old Nigeria’. They would tell us how things were and what the plan was for a good Nigeria.  And so, we would move from one topic to the other, ending at ‘how we were brought up stories’.

One day, the oldest Aunty in our midst entertained us with how in order to keep them on the straight path, her parents had handed them over to a teacher to live with. Then they would return home only during the holidays.  How unbelievably strict the teacher was, and how very strict her parents were. We each took turns to dig up stories from our growing up days.

One of the most entertaining stories we shared was that of a friend of ours, who suffered greatly for being outspoken and a little too bold for her parents. She was flogged repeatedly with kobokos for denying when queried or disciplined by her parents for wrong doings. Someone even told us how she was stripped naked and made to stand in front of the mirror for hours.

However, the golden thread which ran across these stories was the high level of discipline. Everything meant something to our parents.  They flogged us, cut our hair, and banned us from various activities. Sometimes they took some of us away from our funky schools to a seminary (this happened to one of my cousins) for showing wild traits. It was puzzling how much of a psychologist they all were. ‘I can see from your eyes that you want to be a bad girl,’ they would say. It almost appeared that they beat you in anticipation of an ill you will be doing.  When you said yes to an offer of food or drinks whilst visiting with your parents (without the explicit corner eye approval of your mum), your lot at the end of the day was often ruthless.

Our parents deployed all means to keep us in check. The objective was to teach contentment, learning to abound, learning obedience to authority, teaching that no one is an answer and very predominant in the east-the lesson of ‘you walk your way up the ladder’.

At one of our meetings, I put up my hand to say: “I felt these traits had more disadvantages than advantages. Aggression from our parents or over discipline of a child led to intimidation which resulted in timidity in a child. There were people who had to wait till they were in the university to learn to express themselves or never really learnt that. They arrived in the real world waiting for instructions or acting in a way that sought to avoid reprimand.

Everyone thought my view was ‘very foreign’ and utterly ridiculous. I explained that it was a different perspective and perhaps someone could pause and think about it. No one was willing to share my view but I stood my ground. I had experiences to share. I could recall one of these our ‘parental rules’ that almost cost a friend of ours his job in America.

If you look directly at an adult in the eye, it is often termed as rude and you are regarded as a child with forward tendencies!

And so, my friend arrived in America not wanting to look people in the eye. On his first job, he worked very hard, but avoided looking at older people straight in the eye, lest he be deemed rude. It was a colleague at lunch who asked him earnestly if he was doing drugs. He told him he had picked up information at the office that they were considering firing him for ‘appearing shifty’. He was startled. On further enquiry, he was told that he never looked anyone in the eye. He had to explain that, looking at older people in the eye at home is deemed impolite. He had to correct this very quickly.

With this experience, I believe the cane and other methods of discipline mustn’t be too far from children. They should have a balance. The big question that came to mind much later was: we all have these types of stories to tell, everyone. If you doubt me, raise the issue at lunch time in your office. The million dollar question also is: if we were all raised with these strong values and tradition, so why then is the nation where it is? Where did the values go?

Nkiru Olumide-Ojo