Of Child rearing and mentalities: A case against the rod

Today - I wish to make a few statements on the subject of, ‘raising children’.

I acknowledge the poignant potential of the issue, for in their child, every parent and guardian sees reflections of themselves – a perception of who we should be, or should’ve been – the dove-like innocence, the purity of heart, the curiosity for all things alive.

We all seek these things, for they make manifest our having been modeled after a higher, less imperfect being.

It is with this in mind that I address myself to our subject – for it is chiefly by understanding and shaping children, that we can understand and shape tomorrow.

Indeed, our people’s future hope is dependent on how well we train the younger generations in our lives.

Allow me rhetorically pose a couple of questions which, I trust, should be foremost in the mind of such person; -

 ‘What mind do I bequeath to the children?’

‘When I am gone, how will they think? What will they value, what will they not?’

I find the asking of these questions key, or for that matter make an attempt to discourse on the whole knotty affair of child nurturing, because it is my deep conviction that it is the mindset of a generation – which, as I’m sure we all can agree, is the aggregate of individual thought constructs – responsible for a society’s stagnation or progress.

It is a people’s median frame of mind, majorly molded in infancy and tempered through life, which determines if they live as slaves or freemen; dependent, or masters of themselves.

My blood thus boils with indignation, when, talking a walk through my neighborhood, following the evening newscast by tube or listening to people’s tales on long bus rides; I encounter the despotic, cowering and emaciating heavy-handedness with which African parents handle their offspring.

‘Mukasa, don’t do that! Akot, sit down and be quiet! Guma, don’t talk back to your auntie!’ - all often reinforced with beatings and rough handling.

These are the hallmarks of an inherited mentally emasculative and spiritually suppressive culture; symbolized by the rod and verbal injunctions aimed at breeding a vicious cycle of submissiveness and pliancy in the African person.

Whether or not they are the heirlooms of African cultural antiquity, or the artificial remnants of European colonialism – or a contemptible hybrid of both, I cannot tell, and couldn’t care less!

What counts is that we stop entrenching fear in the minds of African infants and youth, and glorifying obsequiousness in their conduct.

As a cherry-topping on this putrid pie of African society that we serve our children – we, the contemporary generation of African parents, have added the greatest poisoner of all; pervasive monotheistic Abrahamic faiths that terrify our children with inexistent hells and promise illusory heavens in the hereafter!

Such is the stuff from which sycophantic, gullible and complaisant national populations are made; like our own here in Uganda – tap and belly dancing merrily to the beat of an economically parasitic and roundly oppressive political oligarchy, patronized by an opportunistic, sadistic international axis of capitalist exploitation!

We should not feign surprise, therefore, when successive generations of Saxons, Asiatics and Dravidians; whose children are reared in an atmosphere of inquisitiveness, scientific skepticism and cultural doubt, endlessly dominate our own!

                                                                                                                #JustSaying

                                                                                                             Solomon Manzi,

                                                                                                               - August, 2015