THE ACCIDENTAL GREAT PEOPLE OF KWARARAFA

 As a young ardent student of history, my thirst for knowledge sent me to parts of the world where the lands abound with evidence of ancient civilization.

I saw where Europeans, Asians, and Egyptians built monuments that outlived them for thousands of years and how their descendants are now proudly maintaining those places for the rest of us to travel across the globe to pay and behold their magnificence.

From the Nubian pyramids of Sudan to those in Saqqara in Egypt; one could see the clarity with which their ancestors boldly championed the civilization of their era.

While they studied and learned how to write down their plans, carved texts on stone tablets, and built great cities, my forefathers were already farming the fields of the Benue Valley and fishing in the rivers that connected their lands with those that housed some of the world’s greatest monuments.

At a time when Kano served as an international commercial center and welcomed merchants from across North, East, and Western Africa, my ancestors prided themselves as great warriors who could not be conquered through physical and spiritual warfare.

Today, I must pay large sums to visit and take pictures beside the monuments other people’s ancestors built through sheer determination to aspire for greatness, but cannot point at one which my ancestors built that could bring anyone to my doorstep. None!!!

Kano’s commercial past has today produced the likes of Dangote, BUA, AA Rano, and other billionaires who leveraged their ancestors’ business acumen to prosper and promote their heritage, which is exactly what Italians did with their Roman heritage.

I have only been told about my ancestor’s greatness without any physical evidence, so I asked myself: What were my ancestors doing when the others were daring the odds by building monuments and championing the course of civilization?

Someone said they were “drinking and fornicating” because that’s exactly what we inherited as seems to be stamped on our DNA.

We have become so useless and powerless that a few bandits have rendered our people homeless, killed thousands of us, and turned our farmlands into grasslands; yet we believed that our ancestors were great warriors.

So what happened to our heritage?

Where is the evidence of our greatness if we were ever great?

Our history is only oral while others have artefacts and scrolls that are 6,000 years old to prove their greatness.

Everything we know about our ancestors was written by those who introduced their language and alphabet to us, and we believe what they’ve written because we don’t have any records other than what we’ve been told.

My grandparents told me the names of animals in my native tongue before I even knew what they were called in Engish, but they didn’t think it was important to learn how to write them using Jukun alphabets as the Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, and Arabs did.

I went to school and channeled all my energy into learning how to become a great writer so that one day, I would be able to rewrite our history and tell the tales of some of us who improved on our ancestors’ farming skills to become the biggest farmers in the country or the fisherman who leveraged on his ancestors’ fishing techniques and created a suitable habitat for all the 

Manatees and Hippos in the Benue River, instead of killing them for game, so that we can pay good money to bring our families to see these animals with our eyes in the wild like we do when we travel to places like Kenya and Uganda.

My ink is drying up and I may die without writing one world-class article about any great feat achieved by my kinsman. Painfully, my skillset may never be used for the only reason for which I acquired it.

We are a disgrace to the memory of our ancestors if they were ever as great as we were told. From the villages in Kebbi and Southern Kaduna, through the hills of the Plateau, the plains of the Benue Valley, and the confluence at Lokoja all the way to Arochukwu in the East, we populate the land with useless people. None has done our ancestors proud, that’s why we are here.

Our traditional institutions battle stupid politicians to safeguard our cultures but we do not even honor them the way we praise these empty politicians who only use our resources to become whatever we see and adore.

We now only fight amongst ourselves because that was all we ever did from the beginning. Everybody is our enemy but we aren’t doing anything to make history as others have used their ancestors’ foundations to do.

We must have a rethink, sit our asses down, and delete all the nonsense that has been keeping us grounded. We must chart a new course and have a new agenda to pursue or else, we will be written out of every tale of the future and our descendants may never forgive us for being idiots while others toiled to make history for their people.

©JBZ_2023