The Attitude Lounge with Kodwo Brumpon: Our heritage won for us

“One who borrows a cloth does not dance proudly.” – Igbo proverb

In a fast-changing world, we have a duty to protect our sense of identity and the continuation of our wonderful uniqueness, whether as individuals or as a society. It is the key to making the world appreciate our rich traditions, whilst giving them an understanding of our valuable connection to our environment and to our history.

We are who we are as a result of the many events and customs that have circumscribed our lives. That is what we call our heritage. They are so a part of us that they flow and dictate how we even relate to the world and experience our dreams.

A heritage is like being locked in a dance with the past, whilst trying to get the present to smile at the side-steps and the swinging of the waist which can never be ignored in the future. It is a quest to succeed at emulating greatness, without losing one’s essence. This is not about our history, but on that which has survived the past because of it beauty and significance. The quest to preserve that today is easier said than done. But it is a necessity that should keep us on our toes.

Any form of heritage is an expression of appreciation of the effort of those who lived in the past. It is a reminded to us that we have stood on the shoulders of giants, and the probability that we too, with hard work and dedication, we too would be hailed as giants in some future period.

Whenever we look down the history lane, we notice markers that have brought us to where we are today. Culturally, those were aspects of our circumstances we wanted to keep, and so we made efforts to practise them better till we almost perfected them and made them noticeable. It is “our heritage won for us.” That is how beautiful our national pledge puts it. Deep down we believe they were part of the conditioning which has made us who we are today. Thus, it makes no sense to simply let it wash away in the name of modernity.

Too many of us have been so swayed by the technology buzz; we have forgotten it is only a tool to enhance what we do, and not a replacement for the tones and layers of information about our lives and those of our ancestors, that which we popularly call our culture. Whatever we do, we cannot live as if there were no people before us, and we cannot pretend they never did anything useful with their lives.

If we erase all that they did, we send a message to the future generation that, only the present matters. And this means, they will have no choice but to ensure that they also erase whatever it is that we are currently doing, because it will be the past for them.

We need to understand that however we live, and whatever we do now, we have a duty to examine all the different parts of life, as well as it pasts, in order to create the tomorrow we all dream of. In this process, we will always realise that there would be parts of the past which we cannot ignore if we are ever to create meaning for the future generations about how we live. We have a responsibility for how we educate the future about the present.

To do that, we have to go back into the past to trace the processes that has gotten us to where we are today. It is those parts; we talk about when we talk about our heritage. It is those parts of the past we cannot simply erase. There is a wealth of knowledge and skills that is passed on through it to us, and to successive generations that have economic and social value. The intangibles contained within them are important for psyching the general populace to aspire for greatness.

And yet, too often, we flee and burrow in the comforting arms of the present. No matter how ugly our history sounds, there is always some good in there. It is not possible for any group of people to have had it so bad that they would want to erase everything about them. Without sounding offensive, we need to understand that individuals who champion erasure of our past have self-esteem issues.

No people have become great without embracing their past, for there are always parts within that trigger lessons and inspirations for the present. As a nation and a continent, the mistakes of our forefathers are lessons for us, their struggles, our inspiration and their victory our pride. We therefore have a duty to protect the heritage they won for us.

Just because certain aspects of our customs look and sound outdated in an era of technology, does not mean, we have to label everything about our past as useless. We need to appreciate that history is technically created by individuals who select certain aspects of what happened to a people in the past, describe and analyse them, and pass their interpretations on to a wider society.

There is always their biasness. That is why our heritage is so important. And yes, a heritage is also subjective, but they are the biasness of the majority of the people, what is generally accepted. All things being equal, the latter has more acceptability than the former. Let us therefore strive “to hold in high esteem, our heritage won for us.”

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Kodwo Brumpon is an executive coach at Polygon Oval, a forward-thinking Pan African management consultancy and social impact firm driven by data analytics, with a focus on understanding the extraordinary potential and needs of organisations and businesses to help them cultivate synergies, that catapults into their strategic growth, and certifies their sustainability.

Comments, suggestions, and requests for talks and training should be sent to him at [email protected]

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