You hate to hear from us, but you knock our doors everyday to tell us about your superiority.
How if we don’t abandon who we are and believe what you believe, we are condemned.
You say it to my face, you say it in my car, you say in my TV, you say it in my phone, you say it in my laptop, you say it in the books, you say it to my kids at school, you say it in billboards, you say it in public buses, you say it in posters and flyers, and everywhere just so I can hear it, see it, and believe that you are superior to me.
This morning alone like every day, I have received from six of my WhatsApp contact list, messages telling me why what I believe will lead me to damnation.
You call our traditions, culture and belief systems “heathen” and all sort of derogatory names you won’t tolerate when you are called and have the guts to say it to our faces everyday without retribution.
Your other brethren from Adam, shout from their loud speakers five times everyday in a language we don’t even understand, just to disrupt our peace and there is nothing we can do about it.
You summarily conceal our traditions to damnation if we do not agree with your avowals.
You spread fear by hoodwinking us that we will burn in a pool of fire if we don’t accept what you tell us.
You pronounce us condemned even before we die.
When you gather, you sing and pray all manner of terrible prayer points against our traditions.
You break chains and fire all kinds of arrows to destroy our traditions.
You have dedicated holidays and worship days for borrowed beliefs but you are doing all you can to suffocate our own beliefs.
You urge us to listen to you any time you speak and accept everything you tell us hook, line and sinker, without interrogation and lead us to your God in the end.
In your parochial mind, we are lost without what you know.
But flip the coin and give an ear to the details of what our own traditions, culture and religions say, you fret. You go on the defensive.
You shut us down.
You expose your intolerance.
You mob us.
And you know why?
You are told that what you believe is the only thing that is true.
That sense of senseless superiority is actually your problem. Let me tell you the truth this morning. If you have a mirror, stand there and look at yourself. YOU ARE JUST FULL OF YOURSELF. You are a dictator. You are intolerant. You are one of the causes of the problems in the world. You are part of those who seek to dominate minority opinion in the world thereby creating tension and trouble in the world. You are sickening and disgusting. You need to change.
But whether you change or not, we will not change too. We don’t owe you any obligation to. Our rights are enshrined everywhere like yours to do what we do. It is only in your “holy” books that our rights aren’t recognized. The same holy books that are the cause of the largest recorded carnages on our planet.
In the same manner you go about telling our siblings your narrative, it is also our right and time to use new media to help the coming generation regain confidence in their African-ness, their culture, and their tradition as God created them to be. We all cannot be like you who has become irrevocably convinced that your path to the creator is in the geneology of foreign tribes. It is our right to disagree with you and you can’t do anything about it other than call us names which if we call you, you won’t accept. But the message will continue to sink, not in your own mind, but in the minds of those it is meant for and there are many of them. So hear this! You must continue to hear from us.
God bless you and have a great service in church.
Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo, Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist is a Cross Riverian and writes in from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.