There is something deeply uncomfortable about the way many Africans have learned to look at themselves. I am not saying that Africans should abandon Christianity; I am not saying that we should return blindly to everything our ancestors did. Our ancestors were human beings - they made mistakes, just as we make mistakes today. A culture should evolve, question itself, correct itself and improve.
What troubles me is something else: where did we learn to despise certain things about ourselves? Consider something as ordinary as akara. A woman fries akara by the roadside: a Christian walks past, buys it, eats it and thinks nothing of it. But let that same akara be prepared as part of a remembrance of someone who has died, and suddenly the food becomes "fetish." The bean has not changed.
The oil has not changed. The food has not changed. Only the story attached to it has changed. And somehow, the African has been taught that what is native to him must be suspicious. He can celebrate Christmas, he can celebrate Easter, he can wear Santa Claus costumes, he can exchange gifts and share food in remembrance of the birth and death of Jesus Christ; but let him remember his own ancestors, observe an indigenous festival, participate in a masquerade or preserve a traditional practice, and suddenly words like pagan, fetish, demonic and sacrifice appear.
At some point, we have to stop and ask ourselves: who taught us to see ourselves this way? This is where I make the uncomfortable statement: the black man has, in many ways, become white - not in his skin, not in his facial features, but in the way he has learned to measure himself. He looks at the foreign and sees civilisation; he looks at the indigenous and sees backwardness.
He changes his name, changes his festivals, abandons his ancestral memory, and begins to desire the symbols, institutions and values of the people who taught him that his own were inferior. And then he calls that progress. This is not an argument against Christianity - it is an argument against unexamined inheritance. If Christianity is what you genuinely examined, questioned and chose, then it is yours.
But if you were taught that everything African was evil before you were old enough to question it, then perhaps your certainty deserves examination too. You don't have to return to your ancestors; you don't have to worship what they worshipped; but you should at least know what you abandoned. Because a people can walk so long on another person's road that they forget they ever had one of their own.
And when that road disappears, they may discover something frightening: they no longer know how to find their way home.
