My cousin Tinuke had taken my two nieces—Farida and
Fadila—aged 6 and 3 respectively on a weekend treat with her friends and
colleagues. In a particular gathering filled
with adults engaged in hush tone conversations, Farida and Fadila with some few
other kids were playing in loud voices. Three year old Fadila, with the frenzy
of a baby, had been playing with her flowing dress, raising it up and down.
“Fadila,”Farida said in a draggy loud tone, the type an alarmed child uses, abruptly
stopping her play with other kids, “you’re opening your body like a Christian.”
Tinuke was amazed and at the same time ashamed. The stunned,
discerning adults had turned to look at the kid who had said that, trying to
trace her to her mother or something. She, Tinuke, was amazed that such
statement had come out of Farida (such a little girl), and ashamed at the biting
eyes of adults following poor Fadila as she found her way to Tinuke’s hands
with the guilt of a baby who’s been scolded for a wrongdoing.
“Where did you learn that,”Tinuke later asked Farida
after they had left the gathering, cautioning her not to say that again. “Lateefa
told me,” Farida said.
Lateefa, somewhat between 12 to 14 years old, had recently
been invited by the little girls’ mother to help with household chores while
she attends school. Born to uneducated parents who had spent a great number of
their lives in the village, Lateefa holds an endearing view of Islam and is
beginning to learn to speak and write good English. Prior to her coming to the
city, Lateefa had barely mixed with other children from other tribes and a few
from the Christian faith. She had however, learned something deep, that which
could be perceived as denigrating about Christians and she’s ardently holding
on to it, spreading it like a contagious illness to little children. Where she
had learned it from could vary from home to her former government school or on
the streets.
During the period when Jos was experiencing series of
sectarian violence, my mentor was driving with his little boy in the front seat
when the boy suddenly leaped up the chair as the car sped past some razed
houses and said, “Daddy, see all the houses that Muslim people burnt.” The man
almost choked on the steering before pulling over to inquire where he had
learned that. Certainly not his home, he knew. And after several pressures, he
could still not remember where he had heard that only Muslims burnt houses and
killed people. The father corrected him, and taught him never to utter any hate
word about any group of people or religion. Bad things are done only by bad
people; and anybody, whether Christians or Muslims could be bad, he sounded that
to the eight year old.
Tinuke and my sister in-law later cautioned Lateefa,
and are still cautioning her, on how she would let go some other preconceived
notions she might hold about other people. It’s a tedious process but there are
positive results.
Just like we don’t know when we cross the faint line
and make a racist speech, so is that of religion. Caution is the word we often
say. But I wonder how many people—teen-agers and adults—out there still need to
be cautioned. And caution is such an illusion that some people may perceive as
unnecessary or irrelevant or nonexistent. Had Tinuke and my mentor not found
the words spoken by the kids as deriding, the kids wouldn’t have been
cautioned, leaving the innocent children to spread prejudice and grow in hate
without even knowing the meaning or its effects.
And this is another reason why caution is such a
vague word. A good number of the Nigerian parents have deliberately left
children, and anything that has to do with their religious knowledge or ideas
about humanity, to the invincible hands. So we are careful with what kids learn about sex,
menstruation and wet dreams. We warn them about strangers, not because of what
they will learn from strangers, but so they don’t collect candies and get
kidnapped. Before we enroll them in schools, we inquire about schools with
A-list teachers, excellent track records in school leaving examinations, fine
arrangements for extracurricular activities. For those who can’t afford the
expensive schools, education, no matter how it is churned out to these
children, is the ultimate goal. Any other thing learned from these schools is,
well, part of education. What we hope they learn about faith in these schools
are lessons that will make them meek and pious. While not bad things for kids
to learn these traits, we also leave the moral and the significance of all
these acts of faith to be taught by the Sunday school teachers and Koranic
teachers only.
Another reason why caution may not be applicable
here is because extremism, as we have taken it, is only when someone blows up
everyone in a mall for his or her faith or joins a violent religious fighters
or hate groups before they are termed extremist hence, only then such person needs
to be cautioned. It has mostly be proven that most dangerous extremists or
fanatics have the tendency to have grown with believe like playing with a
Christian as a Muslim is sin and tantamount to roasting in hell, and vice
versa. We sometimes laugh it off when kids say something like Farida said, but are
smirked when we hear them talk about sex or breasts or butts.
Everyone talks about hate today, but we are somewhat
lazy tracing it down to how it all began. Racism began by some people of a particular
race believing they were superior to another race. Color had been perceived as
inferior, which wasn’t really seen as a big deal. Then it degenerated to people
killing other people because of their colors, and then we saw a need to stop
racism. Hate word, however funny or regardless of who is saying it, is hate
word. If we haven’t seen a need to trace where it’s springing from, and halting
it from there, then we are not ready to curb extremism or fanaticism in the
world, which so far has been a terrible scourge that is bedeviling humanity.
