By Charles Ani Chidiebere
December 4th, 2021.
In a typical Nenwe family during the early 90s, children eat together in the same plate. This, I believe, was to keep the family bonded and maintain mutual love.
In most cases, children no matter how many, always have their food served on the same plate and were meant to share a piece of meat or fish as the case maybe.
Meat was cherished and looked upon by every child and sharing of it marks the high point of every meal. Even children like myself that are from Emudo, a community that’s popular for her daily market -Avor which other communities look up to for daily supply of ‘jaki’ (donkey) meat were not left out in this hype for meat as ‘Azu fridge’ (ice fish) was a luxury only few homes could afford on Sundays.
It was more like a taboo for a child to eat the meat until the food is finished and any child who does this, even while eating alone is seen as greedy, impatient, irresponsible and a potential failure as an adult. My grandmother in particular, had these two instructions that announce each meal, – Chidi remember to bless the food before you eat (as if the food was cursed ab initio) and, make sure you don’t eat your meat until you finish the food.
We were taught to be patience and wait till the plate is empty, the youngest shares the meat, the eldest takes first and it follows down to the youngest. This was the routine with the exception of some days Mamakwengu (my great-grandmother) would insist that all male children take first before the females.
Fast-forward to the present day, I have crossed many rivers and from the look of things, reverse has almost become the case. Surprisingly, parents rarely give a damn over the number of meat a child takes per meal and whether or not he finished his meal before eating his meat(s). In fact, we now have a situation where children have assorted meat kinds and parts like gizzards, snails, periwinkle, ‘kpomo’, ‘shaki’, ’roundbout’, ‘towel’, ‘biscuitbones’, and so on, all in one meal. Some will even serve their children ‘pepper soup’ which literally eliminates food and makes it a total meat affair or meat sauce in which case, meat takes the place of stew.
As if that’s not enough, some very ‘caring’ adults will go as far as buying babarcue, ‘suuya’ or sharwama for a child thereby making one child eat up a meat that could cook for a whole family in the days of yore. To think that this kid equally grows up to become morally sound like, or, even more than most of us with different experience made me question my own parents yardstick for morality.
By the way, who says a child can’t eat million pieces of meats million times a day and still maintains his sanity? Who’s this social scientist that linked children’s growing into responsible adults to their ability to finish up their food before eating their meat? It was Hon. Festus Ugwu N. (Sunny Ugwu) who told us, during one of his classes, that a rhetorical question is not a question that has no answer but a question whose answer is not needed, perhaps, because it’s already known. The only thing I can make of the whole thing is that we were raised by moral puritants who succeeded in using the cloak of morality as a cover-up for the poor economic status of most families. On a lighter note, poverty can be a great teacher of morals o! (lol). Another case of someone who cannot afford a bottle of beer convincing himself that beer is absolutely bad.
Perhaps, if majority of guardians we had as kids were kind enough to call a spade a spade instead of calling it a garden shovel; they’d have served as perfect examples in honesty, we’d have strived to become better than our parents since we’d know the true situation of things. This alone could have answered the prayers of every parents and we’d have been motivated to change the world around us for good.
Don’t forget, a certain Nigerian was motivated to attain lofty heights not because someone told him it was bad to wear shoes but because he knew he had no shoes.
But no! We never knew the truth because poverty and not our guardians sets all the standard then. And when poverty calls the shots, integrity becomes scarce and consequently, everyone plays low.
Now you know; kneel down wherever you are. Place your right hand on your head. Repeat after me –
THUNDER FIRE POVERTY!
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