I serve in the Children’s church, specifically with the 6 & 7 years class, which constantly reaffirms my position on not wanting kids. But that’s not what this is about. I recall a Sunday service where a little boy had put his offering in the basket with his left hand and got reprimanded by the other teacher with me. I was boiling on the inside and I didn’t want to say anything immediately considering the other teacher was way older than me, so I physically removed myself from that environment.
I cannot for the life of me understand the logic and relationship between the right hand and respect. Why? Who said so? We noticed that my niece’s left hand is her dominant hand and thankfully, no one in the house has tried to “correct it” because my mum recalls how my uncle who was a “leftie” got the beating of his life till he had to learn to do everything with his right hand. I’ve asked severally where the notion that using your left hand to do anything connotes disrespect originated from and no one can give a satisfactory response. The worst is when people want to use religion to excuse certain things, I always ask “chapter what, verse what?” Because what we’re not about to do is misinterpret the Holy Book. And as God will have it, my parents paid for my education so I can read and understand and have read the Bible cover to cover three times. Of course I do not have the Bible committed to memory as I do not have a photographic memory (even though this would be awesome, ey God wink wink) but if you’re going to link certain aspects of culture to the Bible, please come through with receipts.
To this, I’ve come to the conclusion that tradition/culture and dare I say religion to an extent, has got Nigerians and even Africans in a chokehold. Proper shackles. It reminds me of the analogy of the five monkeys and the bananas experiment:
A researcher puts five monkeys in a cage. There’s a bunch of bananas hanging from a string, with a ladder leading to the bananas. When the first monkey goes for the bananas, the researcher sprays all five monkeys with freezing water for five minutes. Some time later, when a second monkey inevitably tries to go for the bananas, the researcher once again sprays all five monkeys with the cold water for five minutes. The researcher then puts the hose away and never touches it again. But, when a third monkey tries to go for the bananas, the other four attack him to prevent him from climbing that ladder. They are afraid of the punishment that may come.
Then, the researcher replaces one of the monkeys with a new monkey who wasn’t part of the original experiment and was never sprayed with water. And, as soon as he touches the ladder to go for the bananas, the other four monkeys attack him to keep him from doing so. If he tries again, they attack him again. Thus, the new monkey learns not to go after the bananas because he’ll get attacked if he does.
The researcher replaces a second monkey with another new monkey. When this monkey goes for the bananas, the other four attack him, including the new monkey who was never sprayed with water. The researcher then continues to replace all the monkeys one at a time, until all five of the original monkeys are removed from the cage. Each time the newcomer goes for the bananas, the others attack, even when they, as new monkeys, have never received punishment for going after the bananas. And thus, the new monkeys, who have never been sprayed with cold water, learn not to go after the temptation of the bananas.
The researchers hypothesize that, if they were to ask the monkeys why they don’t go for the bananas, they’d answer “because that’s the way it’s always been done”.
Source:: https://www.proserveit.com/blog/five-monkeys-experiment-lessons
This sums up how I view most of what we accept as “tradition/culture”, we can’t explain why we do what we do, we just do it. The worst part is, we don’t ask questions and aren’t even in a conducive environment to ask questions as to why we do what we do, lest we risk coming off as insolent modern 21st century bratz.
