Where is Mother NIgeria by Tope Apoola

WHERE IS MOTHER NIGERIA?
by Tope Apoola

Pleasant week for me, I was at a Chinese Restaurant twice, courtesy of a relative. Quite a number of things competed for my attention, and like I had never been to one before, I noticed and appreciated the beautiful, ethereal songs that oozed from the inconspicuously placed speakers. I had always loved classic music, especially Yanni’s, Enya’s, and Nigeria’s own Asa’s, though this particular one was Chinese, it still produced the same feeling in me, a soothing feeling of exquisiteness. Only on the second visit did i fully appreciate the reality which stared us in the face, that the Chinese indeed believed in a way of life and passionately wished to share it with the world!
Let me illustrate in fair detail, how i came about this conclusion about the Chinese. I was not immune to ethnocentrism, neither had I fallen cheaply to the efforts of the authors of this restaurant tradition to impress whoever came around. Just before the wall of ethnocentrism teared down in my mind, i hummed a few street songs to myself, thinking that it would show to me, how colorless and dull some music could be, when compared to ours. I was wrong. The playing music was equally entertaining to me if not more, and with the power of imagination, i deciphered it wouldn’t be easy if i was to choose the better between the two unrelated genres of music, even if it were to be played through very good machines. The reasons are not far fetched; i was in a Chinese pub, and here, everything Chinese is right! They have a tradition, which they proudly share with the world!
I wondered as I rested my back, how proud we truly are, of our own tradition, or how worthy our ways of life are (because culture is no more than human inventions and should not be sacrosanct). If the only thing we portray to the world is fast music, impulsive dancing steps without depth or soul, then we might well be deserving of any opinion the world have about us.