Growing Up in Africa Was Survival and Thrilling. Here’s How:
Three things many non-Africans don’t know:
First, Africa is not a country. It is a continent of about 50 countries.
Second, we all do not live in huts.
Third, many of us had to outsmart our parents to enjoy childhood.
The third point is what I want to talk about. It is the thrilling part.
Africans have high moral standards. At the start of menstruation, many parents would tell their daughters to avoid boys. But boys are hardly told to avoid girls, so we would still write love letters.
A lot of times, many of these girls would report. I can vividly remember my best friend being flogged in 2007 for writing a love letter to a girl. The girl had reported him to a teacher.
The teacher with his belt sitting way high on his extremely large potbelly administered the beating as if to exorcise him of an ‘evil spirit’.
I was a shy kid. The girl I liked also liked me, but we never kissed. The closest we got was a side-hug. And that saved me a lot of trouble.
This insistence on discipline was encouraged at both home and school fronts.
It is American to ground a kid; it is Nigerian to flog the kid. It is also Nigerian to administer other forms of corporal punishment.
I remember a time I didn’t have a complete Christain Religious Studies note. The teacher found out and invited me and other ‘miscreants’ to his office — the back of a class he shared with two other teachers.
After flogging me, I rode the scooter. This means that I would stay as if I was on a scooter, with my back straight. And no, I wasn’t on a scooter. After ten minutes, I was already sweating profusely.
I did an hour on that spot.
When I got up, my knees were wobbling. I wrote the note that night.
Thirteen years later, I still remember the incident.
Back home, African parents either punish a kid or give an unforgettable talk. Those talks are worse than beating. It is like the story of every mistake or wrong you’ve ever made being compiled into an audiobook.
With proverbs, anecdotes, insults, comparisons (to your friends who were only pretending), and religious excerpts, an African parent can reform you in the space of two hours. When you go to bed that night, that’s all you’d dream of.
You would wake up the next morning a reformed person — at least for the next few days.
How We Got Away With Many Things
Movies
Growing up in a typical African Christian home, you are taught that disobedience to your parents is a sin against God and you can rot in hell for it. At some point, I must have decided to brave hell — as we say in Yorubaland, ‘you can only die once.’
We didn’t have cinemas to go to. Almost every home had a television and a video player. The privileged ones had DSTV (cable tv).
So, we bought movies — the kind banned by our parents for adult content. They would rather have us see typical Christain movies which you could tell the end from the beginning.
Not that all the movies we bought were bad — some were quite violent. We never dared to buy porn CDs even though we easily could.
Chinese movies were also a delight. Jet Li and Jackie Chan featured a lot in our childhood.
By the way, we bought pirated CDs. There was no way in the world we would have been able to afford original movie DVDs. For less than $2 (at that time), you could buy a pirated DVD with 10 American movies.
We couldn’t see all these movies when our parents were around, so we would wait for them to leave the house or see it quietly in the middle of the night — best believe we woke up late in the morning.
When seeing a movie in the middle of the night, you had to sit near the power fuse or cord. When you hear a footstep from your parents’ bedroom, you yank the cable off.
Don’t run, your feet will make a sound. Just pretend you’re looking for your class note or socks. Most times, they’d buy it.
Privacy
As a typical African kid, you have no privacy. Though few get this privilege, more like one out of twenty kids.
African parents don’t knock on your door and you had to be doing something suspicious to lock your door. You would have to explain why.
I listen to white friends who talk about parents respecting their boundaries — that was weird. I didn’t even have any boundaries. There was nothing to respect.
They have a search warrant for your room at any time. And God helps you, they find something incriminating like pornographic materials, you’re dead (literally).
Porn
Growing up, this was worse than murder. Then, it wasn’t easy to have possession of porn. We were young — below 18 — and legally we shouldn’t. However, it was during puberty. We were experiencing changes and hormonal imbalances. Many of the girls we knew started dressing more fashionably and were now wearing bras.
We started to get a lot interested in the subject of sex.
Girls easily satisfied their curiosities with romance novels. Most of these novels had torn backs. Parents, ignorant of the content, approved of their voracious reading habits.
Boys were a little more curious.
Some who had web 2.0 phones were able to get short porn videos. We would crowd in empty classrooms to see an act that didn’t really make sense to us, but aroused us.
We wanted to see more of it. Some of us were caught with tapes and comics. The materials were seized and the culprits punished.
It wasn’t long before we started buying pirated porn DVDs that we kept where our parents could never get to.
Since I wasn’t living alone in my room, I could never dare to buy one. My younger brother would find out.
Church
This was a must. Most of us never liked it, but many of our friends would also be around. That was a big consolation.
So, we’d go to church to gist and share music. Many of us were using China-made phones that could share files through Bluetooth. We’d also see videos. It was around that time that 2go — a social platform — came onboard. I did Eskimi — met girls online.
Vigils were tedious. I hated them. African parents would not only make you attend, but they would also ensure, through knuckles on your head and punishments, that you were alert all through.
To them, they were praying. To us, it was a deprivation of sleep.
Till today, I hate vigils!
Some of us scammed our parents during fasts.
On days of fasts, time would be unbelievably slow. An hour would seem like a lifetime. I didn’t get the point of fasting, I just wanted food.
So, we bought snacks the day before. By 4 am, we were already full.
Our parents would come to wake us up for prayers by 6 am. They were hungry, we already ate something.
On that, many of us were never caught.
The 9 pm News
Before I went to boarding school, it was a must for me to see the 9 pm news with my dad. It made me know more about the government. I was more fascinated by the adverts though.
I was quite lucky. Many of my friends were made to summarize whatever they heard in the news. I was lucky my dad wasn’t close friends with their dads.
The Gist -
In some other settings, all these would have been termed ‘abuse’. It was termed ‘training’ in Africa. We can’t say it made us much better persons than those who had soft childhoods, it was just the way of ensuring a child would not become wayward.
Despite the beatings and the punishments, we still engaged in truancy. We learned to outsmart our parents and think faster.
And, it wasn’t that our parents weren’t loving. It was just all they knew about training a child. I can still remember a popular statement while growing up — ‘spare the rod, spoil the child.’
All they wanted was for us to turn out well.
