The Price of Stupidity: Or Is It Civilization.
NTOABOMA. A long time ago, one European Missionary Educated school teacher came to my great grandmother and begged her to implore my grandfather (her son in law) to allow my mother to go to missionary school in some far away Church.
My great grandmother refused. But this school teacher persisted with his mission, to educate my mother, then just a little girl, at all costs. Eventually my great grandmother summoned my grandfather to hear what he thought.
“If I send my daughter away for someone else to educate, what happens to us, our memory, our history, our culture?” Asked my grandfather. My great grandmother pondered over this very question for more than a year as she engaged the school teacher and her son in law.
Fast forward some many decades, there’s very little culture, and there’s very little “us” left in that village. Even the very little culture left is disappearing fast. For instance, there are no longer any Vodun Temples left in any home. The Legbas have disappeared from the center of our compounds, replaced with crucifixes in our doorways.
Some people call it change. But that is the delusional version: It is colonization. And it is near complete. You bring up a conversation about Vodun in the same compound that my great grandparents built, and the eye-rolling alone that you get, will kill you! Most women of my mother’s generation now agree, the colonization is near complete in that village. We see it now, in the mirror!
And so it is true, women have played the larger role as builders and protectors of culture and tradition in Ntoaboma. The efficient maintenance of culture and tradition from generation to generation was a proud duty of women in Ntoaboma.
I see it now, perhaps, more clearly. When you educate a daughter, you educate a nation. I mean, you insure that nation! And so it is also true that the way to destroy a nation is through the (mis-)education of their daughters. So long as the enemy can launch a non-linear attack on your nation, and invest heavily in throwing their education on your daughters, and mothers, be rest assured that it is over!
(Investing in educating other people’s children is always cheaper, more civil, and almost more ethically sound, than killing those people and taking their lands!)
And so it is true, and I will say it again, when you educate your own daughters, you educate a nation. Better that that education, I mean, better that the curriculum, is from your own mothers, your own grandmothers, and your own great grandmothers of your own existence. Why allow other (European missionary educated) men, who left their own nations behind, to sojourn in your land, educate anyone in your society? Why allow that at all?
Is it stupidity or is it a delusion?
