One of the vital lessons I’ve learnt in my few years on this planet is the uncommon aptitude to learn things for myself, the uncommon aptitude to mutilate stereotypes. For the green years of my life, I have lived in a society tainted with many conceptions. Like a sheet of glass covered with a layer of fog. In this place where I come from, I was amongst many other things taught the ways to be a man. That a man had to have a profound voice and should be more interested in football than in Novels. This society cultured me into believing that manliness was refulgent in superficial things-how I walked, how I pronounced words or how I crossed my legs. And so because I found pleasure in reading Charles Dickens and Camara Laye, because I did not meet up to these benchmarks-I did not huddle in front of the television to watch the nations cup or join my brother to play man games with the neighbours children, I felt I must be less of a man.

 

The black gods are rules we did not establish but which we dutifully adhere to. They are partisan, they give a set of policies that all must follow.

 

For instance, as an avid book lover, I had like many others discovered foreign books before the quite few Nigerian titles. I therefore had a certain expectation to what books should be like. I believed books had to be about people, white people only. That books, like foreign movies and music had to be about something I could not completely identify with. I was stunned when I discovered black writers, African writers, Nigerian writers who told stories of opposites, of Palm Wine and the inefficiency of the Nigerian power system, told stories bubbling with realistic characters, characters who oiled their lips with Vaseline in the harmattan season.

 

The black gods leave no space for opposites, they are opinionated.

 

The setting of these gods is palpable in our complacency, in how we are diffident as to trying new things. I, like countless others have been nursed into bluntly accepting the one sentence anecdote of “It’s simply the way things are done”.

I have met women whose lives are fostered constantly in the shadow of a man, who have taken all of life’s decisions with the reminding soundtrack in the milieu of how it decorated them for marriage, how it decorated them for ‘that’ man. These women have had conceptions tendered to them by their mothers accompanied stiffly by the echoing tenor of “It’s simply the way things are done”.

 

This statement has been rubbed into us with the tender balm of negligence, because we choose not to ask questions, we choose not to understand. And so when I started to ask questions, when I yearned to understand, when I wanted to know why my Uncle could not take a new wife because his siblings did not want him to, why funerals were treated with rehearsed reverence, or why the bride’s mother had to walk about at the weddings I attended, there were no answers to these many questions than the conventional assertion.

 

The black gods are laden with many unanswered questions.

 

They are also perceptible in the blindness with which the black man totters after religion, after feminism, after retrograde sexuality and countless other complexities. The black man fails to remember that how we see a thing is chiefly dependent on how we’ve been taught to see things.

 

I remember growing up those many days in Sunday school. I remember singing songs to shun sin, songs that guaranteed me of the love of Jesus ignorant of whether I loved this Jesus or not, I was told he loved me and it was all that was necessary. Our teacher would tell us of many sins, tell us of the contrary voice we heard asking us to do bad things, she would tell us the chief sins were lying, stealing and things the religious man would consider ‘petty’ ills in contrast with infidelity, alcohol dependence and the several others.

 

Years later, I found out that I viewed the world through this window with opaque drapes, that I viewed the world with the jaundiced eye that made lying tolerable when balanced with infidelity, or murder. In this same vein, the adulterer says “I am better than the queer man, I totter after women, and he has a special place in hell for him”. Our schools teach our children that tolerance is the ability to accept something you may not agree with or people who are not like you and yet we do not practice this in any way. But it gets taught, like we are taught a cascade of things we do not practice.

 

 

The black gods let us sheath ourselves in the loftiness of other people’s sin, thus they do not say we are too righteous but they lead us into believing other people are not righteous enough.

 

My people say-He who calls whenever Elder Ene kills a deer, let him call if the deer kicks the living daylight out of Elder Ene- And so, asking the African man to defy the black gods, asking him to accept gender equality, retrograde sexuality, doing away with religious fanaticism, asking him to loosen the threads of his narrow mindedness is like telling him to dance naked when he has been taught to wear clothes, like telling him to disregard reverence and call when the deer kills an Elder.

 

But today, I am no longer of that principle that prunes me into ignorance, one reeking of torpidity but wrapped underneath the piteous covers of culture and tradition. We say we do not want to lose our old ways, to take off the rigid tunic of the black gods, yet we conform to other niceties accompanying the new ways, we trim ourselves to accommodate things we consider as not too distant from the fetters of the black gods. However, we should eat this contemporary piece of cake, or not eat it at all, rather than swipe our tongues over its icing.

 

Today, I choose not to be a slave to the black gods. I choose to not do things just because it’s simply the way things are done. I choose to go against a society that has fitted me into cryptic pieces of standards about feminism, religion and countless other things I had previously not understood. A society that has taught me only the things it perceived I needed to know.

 

I choose to conform to certain things and rebel others, not because it’s what everyone thinks but because it is what I think. I know now that Novels are an expression of a writers deep feelings and not a set of laid down rules, that the world would treat me differently for reading Camara Laye when the nations cup streamed on NTA, I know now of the stringency of the black gods, of people’s reluctance to leave its superficial comfort, of their complacency accepted with shrugged shoulders in being like everyone else.

 

In this new fangled belief, I would teach my children that Novels are not intended for women only, that manliness runs deeper than the plastic sheen of mannerisms and that assessing people based on these phonies only is like judging the content of a gift by its wrapping, it is incomplete. I would teach them the attributes of a real man, the attribute of tolerating others, teach them to shun being akin to everyone else, to see one another outside the vivid beam of chauvinism and above all, I would teach them to learn things themselves.

 

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Caleb Tochukwu Okereke is a Nigerian writer and literary blogger born in the 90’s. His works have been published on the Kalahari review, African writer, Quality poets, teenageaye magazine, amongst others and in the Texas based journal-The Hamilton stone review. A skin deep literary fiction writer, Caleb is also a well known spoken word artiste and believes in conveying the countless stories of Nigeria through his works.

 Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.