“Stealing a drum is easy, but finding a place to beat it is not.” – African proverb
As Mother Africa walks through what is left of her forests, searching for shrubs and seedlings to replant them, and all the while looking for meaning in the legion of her children’s illogical and disharmonised attitudes, she sighs. There is no doubt they need to be re-trained and re-educated to become a generation that is compassionate, innovative and perhaps wiser. She desires her children to be gifted with a set of higher ethical values that have been lost or was never attained by the present generation and those before them. She desires a people who will live a wholly intelligible life – not as mindless as the present, but less boring.
She bemoans the current unpatriotic attitude being exhibited by her people. All around her she notices a disproportionate number of her sons and daughters are fascinated by the phenomenon of being rich, but not necessarily through hard work. She is appalled that her children are quick to celebrate any sibling and/or others who throw money around, without questioning how the wealth was acquired. And she speculates what she has let into our lives to make our attitudes toward wealth become so deeply entwined with our deepest conflict – to do right or to go along with the harm.
Like all mothers, she has not given up the fight yet. She has faith in the humanity of her children. She believes they can elevate their ethical and intellectual capacity to do right, and subsequently unearth new opportunities to expand their abilities rather than despair and disengage. She is deeply interested in the future of her children. But she is aware no such intellectual exploit is complete without a full understanding of our past. And she is not interested in the history as has been told by perpetrators and benefactors of the current regime, but by those who have made sacrifices and suffered for the good of all.
Many have appealed for her to understand that the commercialisation of convenience has allowed for an ever-greater need for materialism, and ushered in an epidemic of envy and greed. Naively, they ignore the absurdity of blaming a trend for unethical attitudes. So, she will not have any of that. Instead, she is working at something new to enlighten her children’s minds for them to begin loving and embracing their uniqueness. She is more interested in the elementary simplicity of living, for that is what sustainability is all about. She wants her children to stop quaking with fear before others. And she wants them to be kind, but not senseless; neighbourly but not dumb; and above all, creatively industrious.
She knows ethicality is not a thing of the will. It needs to be instilled. Thus, she entreats her children to seek out a new nurturing that can make them resilient – so they can stay open-hearted to the aching fleetingness of life. The thing about ethical living, as it relates to the intersection of culture and education, is a lot more layered and complex than we would readily accept. It calls for higher commitment levels and an openness to new ways of doing things.
We need to embrace new ideals in the way we educate ourselves. So, Mother Africa borrows the words of Cathy Davidson, the American educator, to her children: “As long as you focus on the object you know, you will miss the new one you need to see. The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge; not as thing but as a process; not as a noun but as a verb”.
This is an urgent call from a mother to her children to live their words. She reminds us that it is easy to get caught up in the eloquence of our words. And she highlights this because many of us are brilliant at making promises and declarations that sound inspiring and noble. Sadly, we lack the ability to back them up with consistent action. Our lives lack true authenticity, as our choices, behaviour and interactions contradict what we proclaim. It is the reason our Mother entreats us to align our thoughts and speeches with our deeds and attitudes, in order to create harmony and integrity in our lives.
Tough as the call is, it is what we need. It demands that we humble ourselves so that we can strive for continuous growth. It requires discipline – and it invites us to cultivate empathy and compassion, such that we will always consider the impact of our words and actions on the well-being of our siblings and on all humanity…
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Kodwo Brumpon is a partner at Brumpon & Kobla Ltd, a forward-thinking Pan African management consultancy and social impact firm driven by data analytics with a focus on understanding the extraordinary potential and needs of organisations and businesses, to help them cultivate synergies which catapult them into their strategic growth and certify their sustainability.
Comments, suggestions, and requests for talks and training should be sent to him at kodwo@brumponand kobla.com
