Dennis Ogu

Today, many people have ended up marrying their close relatives or falling in love with them simply because they never knew each other as relatives before the love affair.

The Igbo man would always say that “akwara amaghii nwanne”, meaning that “the vein knows not who is a blood relation.”

Those days, people paid great attention to extended family system and strove to get acquainted with their relatives to avoid making embarrassing mistakes. They never toyed with this. And that is the real African understanding.

Even when people started moving to cities, they still travelled home to meet their relatives, introduce their families to one another etc. But is this ritual still in existence today?

It’s noteworthy to mention here when people would go to meet one old man or old woman in their lineage or village to ask questions on what relates to their culture or blood line, and they would be fed with accurate information.

Unfortunately, those old people (I mean knowledgeable old people) are either non-existent anymore or are drastically small in number nowadays.

After this remaining few, who else will feed this generation and generations to come with the right information about our people, our norms and our values? I mean this generation of largely ignorant and ‘I don’t care’ youths that have found themselves in this era of grinding Westernisation and destructive modernization.

As if we now have good system of education. Those days, during holidays, parents took their children to the village so that they get acquainted with their people and environs; but today, what we have are parents that don’t care, parents that push back their children and wards to school for holiday lessons as if those who introduced the holiday for teachers and students to have a break were ignorant or were foolish.

Must every knowledge be acquired in the class room if I may ask? Can’t the children acquire knowledge of other things than the academic works of the classroom? “The essence of education is to empower the mind to think”, says Albert Einstein. We should ask some basic questions and feed ourselves with home truths.

These days, the news we hear everyday is how people marry their blood relatives and how others get married to the wrong partners. This is because nobody is there to guide them or those who are supposed to guide them have either failed them or are ignorant themselves. What kind of parents are we if we can’t guide our children to the truth?

When children mingle very well with proper guidance of parents, they get to know how they are related to one another; they also get to know the “dos and don’ts ” in their society and in their relationship with one another.

This is a call to all parents, the new generation parents to teach their children about their roots and guide them to the truth. Such knowledge can never be acquired from the four walls of the classroom; it is only from the home that they can be acquired.