Growing up many decades ago in Igede-Ekiti, I was fortunate to have elderly people in my life who were born in the earlier century – the 19th century – when values were a little different from the dominant ones during my childhood in mid 20th century. Values are never static. They always reflect the priorities and pragmatic choices of a society at a particular time. A story told to me when I was a young girl by my grandmother, Alademijoko illustrated one cherished Ekiti value of the past – transparent honesty. She said during their youth, farmers would place their produce by the roadside, unmonitored, and would indicate how much they were charging for each of these. Passers-by would take exactly what they wanted and leave the money there. As a young girl, I could not just conceptualise how this was possible, how thieves would not disappear with the money and all the produce. The elders of our time spoke of a tricky way unruly children’s behaviour was managed, without the children being aware of the tactic. A child causing too much trouble at home would be sent to another household to go and collect àródan. The family receiving the message instantly knew the child was to be kept with them for as long as possible because he or she was disturbing the peace at home. The host family would then tell the child the àródan had just been borrowed by another family and so he would have to wait for it to be returned. Such a child would spend hours playing and waiting for the àródan, until s/he was sent home with another story. There was no such thing as àródan. It did not exist. It was a phantom object made up by parents of a certain generation to control children’s behaviour. Àródan in Ekiti dialect literally means “stand and freeze.” Elders telling these àródan stories laughed about them and said the new generation of children, meaning us, would not have been susceptible to such a ruse. It was a narrative that suggested that as children, older generations considered themselves more credulous and obedient to their parents than the newer generations coming up.
Integrity is a strong Ekiti value I grew with, to live according to one’s principles and not compromise dignity. This spirit helped Ekiti to resist the Ibadan war of colonisation for seventeen years, without Ekiti people betraying the cause or selling out their fatherland. Not only did they resist militarily, they invented a very effective political solution and formed a federation to fight this assault on their land, hence the ‘Ekiti’ as suffix completing all the names and villages. No one broke rank. This resistance to colonisation is one of the reasons Ekitis are regarded as “alagidi”, stubborn people – not a bad attribute in this case. Hard work is another value lauded and encouraged by the Ekiti. Our region is an agrarian area with far less resources than the coastal areas in Yoruba land, yet Ekiti has produced some of the best scholars and professionals in the world, contributing a vastly disproportionate percentage of professors to the academy in Nigeria. “WP”, the designated car license plate identifier for the Ekitis in those days were ubiquitous in the parking lots of universities all over the country. I describe Ekiti to my foreign friends as a place that produced cocoa and Ph.Ds. We were taught hard work in our homes, our schools, and our communities. In spite of the fact that my late father was university-educated, and was a teacher in the high school, he cultivated three large farms to produce yams, pineapples, pepper, okro, vegetables, tomatoes, cassava, corn and so on. During our holiday from boarding school, my siblings and I were taken faithfully every Saturday to work on these farms from morning till late afternoon. It was his attempt to teach us the value of hard work through farming.
My mother passed her examinations and obtained her Standard VI certificate and became a teacher at a time when female education in her community was very limited. She was one of the first female teachers in our town. It took a lot of suffering and hard work for many Ekiti students in that generation to be educated. Schools were usually very far away, with no vehicles or motorable roads. Those were the days when students walked from their school in Ifaki every two weeks, to their home towns, to collect provisions which they carried back on their heads.
Ekiti values also include community development through self-help and cooperation. It was the norm in Igede and many towns in Ekiti for the towns to support the education of bright young students by pooling community funds for this purpose. Students who had finished their West African School Certificate successfully and did not have enough money to pursue higher education would be loaned the needed money until they finished. Such students would then pay back after graduation, without interest, so that it could be recycled to help other needy students. At times, the payment was in the form of service. For example, a university graduate might be required to teach in the local high school for some years in lieu of payment.
In the past few decades, Nigeria has experienced severe political turbulence which had deformed the values of many communities and ethnic nationalities around the country. The massive and cancerous corruption in the country has infected every cell in society. Ekiti was not spared. When I visited home a few years ago, an aspiring politician, who said his sole purpose for engaging in politics was to make money, was driving me through our town. As we approached the main street, we saw about twenty young men sitting under a tree. This was at 10 a.m. on a work day. As his car got near, they all got up to shout the popular appellation given to this politician, who himself did not have any visible means of livelihood. He parked the car and walked towards them and they all hailed him. They followed him to a buka where he bought them food and drinks. He was proud to tell me these were his boys. I was horrified. Just a few years earlier, these would have been boys working hard on their examinations, competing with each other to get into the best universities, polytechnics and other higher institutions. They would have been helping their fathers on the farms, or working in big cities in one capacity or the other. Instead, they had become semi-thugs, with disreputable and fraudulent older men as their mentors and leaders.
In the midst of all this value dislocation, I find gems of integrity and hard work. An incident happened in Ado-Ekiti in 2005. We were doing some shopping around the markets. At a certain point, while driving around, I spotted an Iya with a tray of bananas, “paranta”, on her head. They are my favourite and they are not available in my country of residence. We stopped the car and called out to her. She came over and I bought all the bananas on the tray. I paid but she did not have any change. I told her not to worry about giving me the change. About a week later, we were in the same market, also driving through, when I saw her. I called her again to buy bananas from her. I paid her, and incredibly she tried giving me back my change from the week before! I thanked her and told her to keep it. Inside, I was overjoyed. “This is it”, I told myself. “This is who we are.”
The corruption that has damaged Nigeria is wide and deep, seeping poisonously into family life, shredding the fabric of love and trust, causing dangerous conflicts, and making people treat others and their community with wickedness and disregard. It is not unusual for people to steal their elderly parents’ money and then abandon them. People steal the inheritance that belongs to others in the family, land, money, houses; they steal the money voted for community development. Local roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, and other infrastructure that could benefit from these funds are neglected, making our towns look under-developed, primitive, and unsafe. Filth, physical and metaphorical, is the new value of the age. Public spaces are not swept or cleaned. People defecate right in the streets! Take a walk down on major streets and you’ll see human feaces right in the open. This never happened when we were growing up. Our towns and villages were organised to take care of public spaces through traditional and local government systems. Wolewole, the health inspector, was not exactly a beloved figure in those days, but he did his job well to ensure public health. These systems have mostly broken down. They need to be revived.
In spite of the economic hardship and political uncertainties Nigeria is going through, we must gear up and rescue our dear Ekiti. Ekiti had long existed before there was an entity known as Nigeria, and it will be there regardless of the national identity. It is our ancestral land.
Transformation has to start from each individual. We need to define our personal values, and these have to include integrity, hard work, honesty, and having a large vision. Our community values have to integrate these, as well as caring for each other, investing in projects that enhance growth and productivity. We cannot ignore the arts, music, dances, film, writing, and story-telling. We should use modern technology to record and preserve dying arts, like the oriki and other customs that are disappearing with modernity.
I met many young Ekitis on another trip home not too long ago. Many have given up on doing the right thing to achieve their goals. For people who live in an agrarian area with an abundance of land, it was difficult for me to see the grandchildren of farmers complaining that there were no jobs. Their grandfathers and grandmothers with no Western education, through farming and hard work, sponsored the education of their fathers, mothers, uncles and aunts. The value of hard work seems to have been lost over time by a society that rewards the lazy and corrupt, with massive amounts of money looted from the public treasury.
The shift to Pentecostal Christianity and Radical Islam has meant the distortion and destruction of traditional religious beliefs which used to guide the philosophy, morals and orientation of our society. Ogun, which seems to be the dominant tutelary god of the Ekitis generally, was a man who forged new paths, developed technology, and took risks. Many of the present-day Ekitis do not have any cultural education about the gods and goddesses of their towns or families. They do not know why their grandfathers and grandmothers were named Osayemi, Osatuke, Farotade, Ogunbiyi, Osunremi, Fatoki, Fagbemi, Faturoti, Fagbamila and so on. In the ignorance and confusion fostered by their weak and fanatical understanding of Christianity, such names are now violently distorted to become Oluyemi and Olutoki, thus erasing thousands of years of family heritage and belief systems. Tragically, the adherence to Christianity has not fostered any meaningful understanding of that religion, its roots and history, its politics and the tenets behind its belief system. As Ekitis, we labour under a new colonisation of the mind, the most dangerous, because we impose this on ourselves by absorbing ideas that destroy our history, heritage and limit our imagination and development. It is another kind of laziness, intellectual and spiritual, an unwillingness to engage with what we were given by our ancestors, to restore this, enhance it, transform it and pass it on to future generations. Everything we borrow from other cultures, material or non-material, is produced by people who work hard to create them, be they material objects or new ideas. Foreign people produced them through the logic of their OWN ancestral and cultural heritages. There is nothing wrong in borrowing ideas from others to support our development. No society is an island. But it is a travesty to completely take an ax and sever the accumulation of history, philosophy, science, and arts, given to us by our ancestors. It is nothing but sheer cultural suicide. A tree cannot survive without its roots. We are riddled with self-doubt and low esteem, believing that our own heritage with its incredible wealth is not good enough. It is more than good enough if we take the time to study and understand the meaning of our ancestors’ belief systems.
The women of my youth were industrious, doing many jobs at the same time. Modern society now calls it multi-tasking. It was the normal life that our grandmothers’ generation lived. They were farmers, food processors, traders, herbalists, weavers, food vendors, nurses, therapists, political and community leaders, and all-round givers of love and comfort. When my father was studying at the university, my mother would send us, the children, to our grandmother’s house when we were sick. It was our paternal grandmother, Farotade, who would nurse us back to health before sending us home back to our mother, however long it took. The same grandmother, Farotade was so successful in trading cocoa and ekuro (palm kernel), that she was able to give her son, my father, a solid one hundred British pounds (a huge amount of money in those days) on the eve of his departure to the university. This was not an unusual case in Ekiti or Yoruba land generally. If we cast our minds back, many of us will remember the women of those times and the sheer amount of work they did during the day, which often started as early as 4a.m. or 5 a.m. These women were also excellent in the creative arts. During their time, they were required to learn the oriki of their husbands’ families as new brides, long and extensive poetry, which each generation of women enriches with their verbal dexterity and knowledge. Which of us didn’t remember our grandmothers regaling us with our family’s oriki? We feel pride, a sense of belonging and continuity when we hear our oriki. It says we are descended from a long line of people who have a certain history, quirks, and characteristics we could be proud of. It is the poetic oral history of our lineage. That, too, is slowly dying with modern life. Sadly, many Western-educated Ekitis now could neither write nor memorise textbook poetry taught to them in school, while old and beautiful traditional poetic forms are also lost to them.
The question to ask at the dawn of this 21st century is who we want to be. Even in the midst of the national disorderliness and disorientation in which Ekiti has found itself, we need to strengthen our personal convictions and institutions that affirm our values and lives. There is so much destruction, cultural and psychic, going on. It’s happening through neglect, laziness, and misguided hostility. We need to celebrate the good leaders among us, the ones with great community values that would help us to forge a good path, not the rogues who destroy society by stealing and flaunting community asset. Let’s get back to work, real work, using our hands and our brains. Olowe of Ise, one of our ancestors, was one of the greatest sculptors in the world. His pieces are in museums, galleries, and fine homes all over the world. Let’s create opportunities in schools, colleges and community centres to teach new crafts and bring back the old ones such as, pottery, weaving, sculpting, basketry, sewing, and others. Let’s create culture. I stayed at a fancy hotel in Ado Ekiti once, and there in the gift shop were items imported from Dubai! It was disheartening. If anyone is visiting Ekiti, they want to see and buy Ekiti products. The enlightened elites would be happy to decorate their homes, offices, and businesses with locally-made products. Such a shop in an Ekiti hotel should be full of beautiful products created by Ekiti people with imagination and skill. These would generate revenues from national and international markets. People are craving “culture” all over the world, even as globalisation homogenises societies. Our cultural uniqueness, expressed through our belief systems, our art, our philosophy, our moral and ethical system, is salient now more than ever. We must create programmes to orient our youth and make them productive and proud Ekitis who would carry the torch confidently into the future. Our fate is in our hands. Let’s put that famous Ekiti brainpower to use.
Credit: Bunmi Fatoye-Matory