You wanna know about Africa?

If you want to really know about Africa, the place not to look at is the urban areas. That is just like looking at another America. Hop onto the nearest ride and pay the villages a visit and see what the rich cups of Africa have to offer. People who can tell you about the continent are those who have experienced it in full. Look at children born in towns for example. They are almost like foreigners in their own countries. These are individuals who can’t speak their mother tongue even if their lives depended on it. We have ladies who only know how to eat out and can’t even start a fire.

Let’s start with the children. In the villages, there are mostly three or four TVs and definitely no playstations or gaming facilities. Here children are supposed to run all their chores in the morning and by eleven, everything is done. The child will then proceed to the nearest river where they take a dip, naked i must add. They then eat wherever lunch has found them then a game of soccer and marbles till late. I must add that they have boiled maize and tea for breakfast and some hard stuff for lunch and supper. Children here get to spend time with their always available parents and grandparents and learn how to behave and how not to. By the time evening comes, this child is exhausted and falls into a blissful sleep. This explains why the best of wives are from the rural areas. Girls are taught how to cook and treat their husband with respect. They are taught how to be wholesome individuals in the society in spite of educational status. In `urban areas however, the picture is completely different. A child is woken up by the mother in the morning, drops down a flight of stairs (mostly the only exercise of the day), finds a bowl of cereals floating in milk and breakfast is done. The child then goes out and basks like a lizard for thirty minutes waiting for friends to come by and when they do, it is into the house to check out the latest movies and games. When they are tired of the screens, it is time to take their back-packs and some lunch money then go hang out in the mall. They don’t clean up behind them. The maid is paid to do so. These are the very children who end up getting addicted to the worst of drugs, suffer from type 2 diabetes and even obesity. Their morals are more often than not in tatters and mostly have pampered and inflated egos. They don’t know what right is and what isn’t because none ever taught them. These children saunter into villages with their chest puffed, feeling like king roosters that had been prophesied to bring redemption to the barnyard hens. They pass old men without even a second glance and expect everyone to pay allegiance to them, salvation has come. Their trousers are more often than not tied at half-mast to signify the death of some VIP, their morals.

Those are just the few contrasts between the village and town folks. The townspeople definitely ain’t custodians of African beliefs. They signify the failures of Africa as a society. They can only show you where we went wrong. If parents don’t take the necessary steps, we may as well be having two societies in one.