I have really wise friends
I have really smart friends
And then I have these other friends. These ones I don’t know how to classify them.

For when you hear their thought process, you will wonder if this part of the body called a brain is vestigial in some animals.
When they utter words, you automatically want an occupation with hammers for every thing they say make you want to break their head.

But then I got to thinking;
6 years,
10 years;
200 years from now and these same ‘not so senseless’, poor in making decisions, and utterly tiring friends of mine would be known as ‘the ancestors’
A status men will begin to idolize.

I see us use a whole lot of our mind’s compartment to believe things that were told to us by people who couldn’t figure out simple things, I mean, some of the very learned of them actually argued that the earth was flat, like a table.

Hollup!

I am not even talking about the unlearned ones from your villages that birthed those you now call grandpa. Just imagine it.

They told you to pour drinks on the floor for the ancestors and you agree, well it’s *Omenala, so it can’t be broken.
They said a woman should be shorn when her husband dies and well, who are we to not obey the voices of ignorance passed down to us?

We carry knowledge like tentacles on a snail’s head but still slip back into the cave of ignorance we use to shell whatever good we can make of life, just because we have been told to ‘stand on the wisdom of the elders’,
Now guess who said that? ‘THE ELDERS’

I feel this is rigged.

Then our faith, love, strength, and even humanity is subject to a broken past called tradition,
Something that might have been suggested by a ‘not so smart’ old man who was only opportune to live before us.

So I take a stand today.
I will relate with the rules of the ancestors like they were still alive now
I will weigh their wisdom based on how wise it is, NOW!
I will not waste my time in their myth, only to satisfy their dead bones long gone with the sands of time.

I will make decisions now and then advice younger generations to learn from my words, but before I go from this earth;

I will let them know I wasn’t the wisest
I wasn’t the smartest
I was as man as man can be

And most of all;
As they grow, and find better ways to do what I said couldn’t be done,

They shouldn’t be afraid to discard my letters and fly the plane of their imaginations to outer space and back.

For no matter how sacred we decide to treat the scrolls of heroes past,
And bend always to their judgments on matters, using them as the ultimate yardstick to measure life.

I dare say that many of them were also as confused as we are at some points of important decisions,
And to crown it all, some chose wrongly.

Which only goes to say that we with them were all normal humans.

And if I won’t let another man dictate what I do and decide I run my life, I’m including the great ancestors too.

 

*Omenala is the Igbo(Nigerian Language) word that means tradition