Part of my list before I started Junior Secondary as a boarder was a cutlery set. Amidst all the excitement of me starting boarding school, an experience all my older siblings had gone through, my sisters were dishing out their tales and I would come to realize that I needed to eat garri and soup with a cutlery set. It came as a shocker to me. I couldn’t reconcile these two things going together but at boarding, we ate garri and soup four times a week and we ate it with a cutlery set. Perhaps after two weeks or so of this, I got used to it.
In my home economics, we were taught the numerous table manners or most importantly, we were taught western table manners. I have no problem with telling people to eat their mouths closed, heck I don’t want to see that but this is in fact universal table manners I believe. But knowing additional information about where to place a fork and when eating is just something I don’t need to know. Why don’t I know how to break orji? A norm in my ancestral tradition. Why isn’t that considered etiquette? Why isn’t eating garri with cutlery considered bad table manners? I mean there are foreign food that don’t require fork and knives and we adapt to that, we don’t suddenly think Italians got it all wrong because they don’t use cutlery to eat pizza. Heck, the British don’t use cutlery with scones.
I once read a Twitter post where the user talked about a certain body teaching them etiquette lessons and they were made to eat their swallow with fork and when she asked why, they claimed it’s because multinationals might be at the place. Wouldn’t it make more sense if the multinationals were the ones who learnt our etiquette for coming?
Now racism is a faraway issue for Nigeria. We are the most populated Black Country and we have no much complex white and black issues in our contemporary history. But we were in fact colonized by the British so you have to expect some white supremacy in our history and conducts. The problem now is not about the white supremacy in the history, it’s about the fact that we are too lazy or rather uncreative to make our education about ourselves. Ask any Primary 3 student who stopped killing of twins in Nigeria and they shriek Mary Slessor. She did good work but her work was confined to the South-South region of Nigeria, mostly in Calabar. The Yorubas never killed twins and neither did the Hausas. Ask a regular Nigerian who discovered the river Niger and they might scream; Mungo Park. How do you discover what people are already using? What’s the next thing, Black people were discovered too?
This supremacy cuts further into our educational system. It is said with such nonchalance in social studies; Christianity, Islam and traditional religions. “Traditional religion” like they are all the same. Like these religions don’t all have different myths. Like they are one big religion. We embrace the views of this white supremacy as if they were our own ideas or perhaps in a bid to conform to people who don’t care.
But the fault now lies with us. We have the power to change our own narrative. There is no colonial government hovering over us now. It is we who are in charge of our education and after sixty years of independence, we still haven’t done much to control our narrative.
