Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Being an Elder in Nigeria and America

Moses:

I did a full-blown essay on this, "Eldertocracy" as a belief system in a recent book.

To those who study democracy, they tend to forget that the units of politics and governance are so many in Africa, and they are not dead. Community leadership operates outside of the formal sector. In a fieldwork in the Sahel, we saw clear evidence of the use of older institutions to govern society. Even as big as Nigeria is, it is under policed. There are hundreds of villages without police, and they function.

Those units should be revived and used, as they are outside of the corruption networks.

There are abuses, as you now have migrant-driven citizens who will call a US professor, fronting as a mentor, as Baba or Ba'mi, a very manipulative relationship.

Two days ago, in the company of Professor Dele Ashiru, Dr. Raji, and another friend, we were sent packing at Onigbongbo in Lagos, when the town crier, whom I have not heard for decades, went about saying "all must vacate the town as the Oba wants to make sacrifices," which is called Oro. By 9.30, everyone left and the entire place, extremely dense, was vacated. I am not talking about a village in the hinterland but in Lagos. I can walk from this place to the house of Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information.

Data like this are needed to rethink the political system. And we must begin to separate the woes of democracy from our capacity to invent units to deliver governance.

TF

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, November 21, 2022 at 12:08 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Being an Elder in Nigeria and America

[This is a Facebook update I made today]

 

If you are away from Nigeria/Africa long enough and you begin to age, the contrast between your diasporic abode and your natal country begins to appear to you in very sharp relief.

It's a well-known stereotype that we Africans are family oriented and that we respect elders.

The stereotype is of course largely true. It is even truer in the village, where the ethos of elder privilege still exists largely undisturbed by republican modernist pretensions.

As a child I spent time almost yearly in the village visiting with my family during festivities.

When I completed secondary school, I spent about a year in the village.

One remarkable and memorable thing for me about life in the village was how no elder, man or woman, was allowed to carry their load (yam, firewood, cassava, other crop harvests, farm tools, or hunting kills) past a group of young people once they crossed from the bush to the village.

When an elder emerged into view heading to their home with a load on their head, several onlooking young people would simultaneously scramble and rush to relieve the older person of the load.

The first person to get to the elder would delightedly take the load from the elder as if they had won a contest and happily complete the journey to the person's home. It did not matter if the elder was only a few feet from their home. It was sacrilege to not help them carry their load to their home.

The elder would first make a small show of refusing the gesture before expectedly, "reluctantly" succumbing. It was, in a way, choreographed social theater, but that didn't take away from its delightful social signification.

The young person would get to the home of the elder, set the load down and walk away with a sense that they had satisfied a cultural obligation.

I was an eager, enthusiastic participant in this practice every time I was in the village. I remember how I would sometimes outrun my peers to get to a load-bearing elder first. I remember how I would sometimes intentionally position myself in the villagsquare's long bench called akpa so that I would be the first to see any elder returning from the farm.

It gave me--us--so much joy to help the elders with their loads. The elders, we knew, had done the same for their own elders when they were young.

No one compelled compliance. We loved doing it. It was beautiful, even if a bit ritualized, since sometimes one was literally walking with the load only 200 feet to the elder's home. The elders would always oblige even if they were almost at their doorstep.

It was a kind of social event, enacted daily between the young and the old. It made the old feel valued, respected, and honored. It made the young feel valuable and a part of a cultural system of symbiosis, co-dependence, and mutual care.

For several years, I kept returning to this experience, one of my fondest memories of aspects of village life in which I participated.

Contrast this with America.

Elders enjoy little cultural deference, and it breaks my heart when I see it.

In Nigeria, when there's a long queue and an elder appears, they're ushered to the front of the line. They're encouraged to cut in line. That's why we allow elders to skirt election queues and vote before younger folk.

In America, unless they have an obvious disability, no such courtesy is extended to older people. How many times have I wanted to scold my American friends in a line for allowing a weak elder start from the back of a long line.

I didn't want to disrupt America's social convention or get myself in trouble as no one had appointed me a line monitor or enforcer of elder respect in a foreign land. So I would restrain myself and swallow the bitter disappointment.

And it's not just young Americans who buy into the age-neutral social republicanism of America either. Even the elders themselves are comfortable with it and celebrate it.

I remember when I lived in Michigan and was close to a Nigerian family there. The matriarch of the family, Ms. Ngozi saw their retired, weak, elderly neighbor repeatedly struggle to move groceries from her car to her home.

One day, she couldn't take it anymore and ordered one of her sons to go and help the elderly neighbor move her groceries to her home.

When the boy approached her and announced his mission, she flatly refused and said she was fine doing it by herself.

Ngozi, who was watching the encounter through their window, went out and intervened, carefully explaining to the elder that it had been grating her conscience to see her struggle with simple chores when she had teenage children next door who could quite easily help her with them.

She added, perhaps to convince the elder, that in Africa this was a taboo and that to refuse such help was offensive to the young person offering it.

It worked, and the elder relented and allowed the boy to help her.

Another time, the old woman was shoveling snow from her doorstep and Ngozi ordered one of her children to go and help. The neighbor this time didn't refuse outright but asked how much the child wanted to be paid. The child said there was no payment involved and Ngozi, again, had to plead with the elder to accept the help.

America is a heavily transactional country, and age does not intrude into or alter this fundamental fact of American social and quotidian relations. That's why the neighbor wanted to pay the young boy as most people in most neighborhoods do when young neighborhood kids help them shovel snow or do other chores.

There's nothing wrong, in and of itself, with a transactional ethos in social relations. Perhaps even the act of relieving the village elder of their farm load is also transactional in its own way. It's just not a transaction based on the exchange of money.

It's a transaction based on the belief that by being a good, responsible, young member of your village, ethnicity, and community, you'll reap the rewards that the blessings of elders confer, and that, when it's your turn, you'll benefit from the same gesture. It's a kind of social savings account I guess, one that you'll draw from when you get old.

Even so, the older I get, the more I appreciate our tradition of extending unconditional courtesy to elders. It's one of the things that America will never give us diaspora Nigerians/Africans and that we miss about our original home.

It's one of the reasons I increasingly hear fellow diasporans above and within my age bracket speak passionately about not retiring in America but in Africa.

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