Quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe on February 16, 2019, 2:49 PM

From this piece here.

As a village boy, I asked my grandmother why the fishes in the local stream could not be killed while the big waters’ fishes could. She simply explained that harvesting fishes in our local stream would make it nearly undrinkable as the current was not efficient enough to clean the fishing induced-perturbation process. But in the big streams, the current was large to bring equilibrium to any perturbation fishing process could cause.

Yet, to make people adhere to respecting that, elders would make it illegal to do so. With the religion of the time, it was associated to one god but technically it was not really about any god – they just want to have a decent stream to use for home needs and using a god will scare people from polluting it. That is why people who “test” deities (after becoming born-again Christians), by killing those fishes are missing the point: you are not fighting any god, you are simply destroying an equilibrium for good drinking water in a community.

If you check, the decision to make people not to fish in that small stream came out of deep observations that the body of water was critical for the survival of the village. And for generations, they honored that tenet to survive because water sustains life. The rascality of looking for one small fish, in a small stream, endangering lives of villages, can only be stopped by telling everyone that one deity owns the fishes. Practically, the fishes are free, but man in ancestral Africa feared gods, and everything was associated with gods to maintain order!

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Africa is super in tradition and culture, which ordinarily should have been our greatest pride, because they are our unique heritage.

To maintain law and order, everything that was highly valued was associated with the gods, that way - you respect it, because the gods are/were wise, and it's not in your best interest to incur its wrath.

With civilization and accidental "modernism", the demythologization of our 'gods' was badly handled, ending in more or less a disaster. And now so many things are broken: we are now tenants to several cultures and traditions, without being landlords to any; they have beaten us to a pulp.

A renaissance is obviously needed. While we embrace AI and all the beautiful things western education and technology have given us, we have to re-imagine them and see them from African lenses. That way, the world will come to respect us once again and stop sending us aids. We had a longer and glorious past, time to reclaim what we lost via cunning ways.

We weren't doing too badly before, but the headmasters made us to believe that we weren't good enough, now they are busy haunting the brains of the 'never-do-well' continent; meaning that we are fit for purpose.

Africa may be down, but certainly not out!