Ozuzu
Obododimma Oha
--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.
COORDINATES:
Phone (Mobile):
+234 8033331330;
+234 9033333555;
+234 8022208008;
+234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu
Personal Blog: http://udude.wordpress.com/
Cornelius Hamelberg
Professor Obododimma Oha,
Congratulations on this very important, educative blog piece. It’s a hot topic. It needs some re-reading to digest the more salient points.
I am only zeroing in briefly in what I see as the relationship between culture - home culture and education; for example, the tremendous difference between a home in which there are books and one in which there are no books. The home in which there are parents and role models and one in which there are no such role models or religious personalities, political icons and heroes as role models worthy of emulation.
The value of good home training being so intrinsic to all ethnicities/ culture group, I’m wondering how the Igbo Ozuzu system and others like it are incorporated into the school system in Igboland and in the rest of Modern Nigeria, and if at all that is the case, how that kind of essential home training could be integrated into the educational institutions, teacher-training, pedagogy in other countries…
Somehow, I associate good Yoruba home-training with an inordinate respect for elders, even elders by a margin of one or two years. Teachers are thereby generally in the same category as elders. Something that we (Africa / Africans) have is culture, of extreme and extraordinary value that no one can take away from us – but even there, we have to be careful:
“He comes for your gold,
Watch out for your soul.”
You say that ”One who is attending school or who has attended one, should be refined .” If only that were the case , then schools would produce much better results in e.g. the PISA scale
For example, in Sweden which is rapidly becoming a multi-cultural society/ Multi-cultural Sweden, the school system is also under severe pressure, facing its perennial problem of very unproductive time, time wasted in the classroom due to indiscipline in what’s known as a free and open society and students coming from very diverse cultural backgrounds, even warzones. (Once upon a time, as an English teacher, I started catching hell from a Lebanese student from the moment he identified me as a “synagogue man”, he would then ritually ask me, “Did you fukkk last night?” As for some of the teenage female students, even worse behaviour.)
We are to suppose that the divergences are less and the cultural uniformity is greater in Multi-ethnic Nigeria and the rest of Multi-ethnic Africa and diaspora. I suspect that there must be discipline issues in Nigeria too, arising from the benevolent and benign or the not so benign modernising influence of rap, Afrobeat, and trailblazers like Burna Boy
Yet, unlike e.g. Nigeria where there is a hunger and thirst after education, in some of the “advanced” or “more developed” countries such as Sweden there is no commensurate hunger and thirst, or motivation; not everybody wants to be a professor in the humanities which is certainly not one of the more highly paid career options available to the gymnasium school leavers many of whom prefer to work for decent pay for a few years before pursuing a profession in one of the many fields available to them. So, it would seem that higher education is not the be-all and end-all that it is in some other places…
Discussions and debates have boiled down to the conclusion that good breeding and home training are the domain of good parenting and that the teacher should not be the one given the additional burden of doing the parents’ job of “home training”. BTW, the sorry fact is that some of the parents are themselves in need of the elementary ozuzu home training, and of course some of the students are already parents.
Interestingly enough ( if my memory serves me right) not so long ago Rabbi Manis Freidman suggested, that before getting married people should attend some educational training course after which only those who obtained a marriage licence should be allowed to go ahead and get married (like the driving license the motorist is supposed to have so that he/ she is not a menace on the road)
S. E. Rogie: Advice to School Girls
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAA-CzCGMXm13Np4dhO2JvEtX5Rnht9q3Wz%2B4LrWkKY6%2BQpBjew%40mail.gmail.com.
Obododimma Oha
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAA-CzCGMXm13Np4dhO2JvEtX5Rnht9q3Wz%2B4LrWkKY6%2BQpBjew%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAC50OP9bh2Fr7mHsZPfetW5SK%2BniE2y7zdzO%2B4vExpKEGpcWJw%40mail.gmail.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
At a parent-teacher school meeting in Nigeria, a rare occurrence, when the parent, usually an Oga , pats his contented stomach approvingly and says, “my children” he’s first and foremost demanding quality teaching, secondly, some respect and attention because he’s usually referring to a few dozen urchins that could be enrolled at that one particular school ( ok, I’m exaggerating), whereas, in the Wild West, it’s still the nuclear family which is a long ways away from learning about any communal sharing;. in the nuclear family with both parents at work all day, the child is left to his / her own devices until dinner time, whereas in the communal living and communal sharing a five-year-old has many responsible adults nearby, to supervise what’s known as the ozuzu home training; that’s how I acquired Fulani as more or less my first language, by socialising with all the kids in my immediate neighbourhood whilst their parents and of course, mine too and the many aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces, etc had the authority to correct any errant or deviant behaviour.
In the good old olden days ( smile) a ten-year-old is being naughty, misbehaving, all you have to do is threaten to call a police constable to arrest him, and he will tremble, terrified at the thought of a police constable in uniform and thus STFU, but nowadays, in our post-modern era in which the child-soldier is a recent thing of the past, the miscreant ten-year-old might well sneer and tell you that he’s not afraid of the geriatric constable, in fact, you should call him so that he will deal with him, right in front of your eyes, so I’m told, I was last in Freetown and only for ten days a half-century ago.
In my view, perhaps because I was never ever subject to any such, corporal punishment at home or school, has its distinct disadvantages, even if the old school of parenting still believes in “ spare the rod and spoil the child”. My theory is that corporal punishment as an institution in itself is capable of producing a generation or a nation of cowards, yes-men, praise singers, cringers, sycophants who cower at the sight of the whip, who welcome and submit to military dictatorships, and who themselves in time could also become bullies.
I once asked a Chechen mother, “How can your men be so brave?” She answered that it’s because when they were being brought up as children, they were never intimidated, or given any harsh punishment.
However, from what I have experienced in Igboland for example, moral and cultural values of Igbo civilisation are instilled in the youngsters, from their days in the cradle and through school. They have a lot of respect for teachers and a hunger for education - and by the way I can testify to this element of indocility which I simply cannot explain: When you tell an Igbo person that your name is Cornelius, five minutes later he or she will be calling you “ Collins” and “Collins” is what you will remain forever (smile)
About the multiculti Sweden that I referred to, I must point out the generation gap that exists, between the immigrant parents, and nowadays, their children that were born and entirely bred in Sweden under the tutelage of parents that want to impose their home-country morality , manners and culture on them. Although I’m quite acculturated to my current environment, I am no exception, so when I say to my son, for example, "I’m going to find you a nice Igbo woman for holy matrimony", ( since he started school in Nigeria and learned some Ikwerre (a pidgin-Igbo dialect) he routinely tells me “ We’re not in Nigeria” or “ We’re not in Africa”
About the " help", if I can, if I could move the way that I would like to then I would have been in Kaduna since a few years back making my own modest contribution to righting the imbalance because as we all know, the North is lagging behind the South with regard to Western Education and with education it's the strong foundation that counts more than anything else. With a strong foundation, there is no challenge that cannot be met ...
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAA-CzCGMXm13Np4dhO2JvEtX5Rnht9q3Wz%2B4LrWkKY6%2BQpBjew%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAC50OP9bh2Fr7mHsZPfetW5SK%2BniE2y7zdzO%2B4vExpKEGpcWJw%40mail.gmail.com.
--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.
COORDINATES:
Phone (Mobile):
+234 8033331330;
+234 9033333555;
+234 8022208008;
+234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu
Personal Blog: http://udude.wordpress.com/
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAA-CzCG4vUJZzd1avCEAOVvNu8%3DUZK6PGQyRJihYCqdT%3D-MTCg%40mail.gmail.com.
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Monday, June 8, 2020 5:32 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ozuzu
Cornelius Hamelberg
Ken,
Shalom aleichem!
Yes, indeed yes, it’s mostly Day Care from the beginning of their second year in this life, especially over here in Sweden where parents get a whole year of paid parental leave for parenting their babies, and a monthly Child allowance for each child until they are sixteen years old , one of the great reasons why the ultraorthodox immigrants (of all faiths) are having so many babies ( wives are not even granted a sabbatical from childbearing)
Unfortunately, the Day Care is more or less a dumping place for the little ones, but there are many advantages to that too - such as picking up some foreign languages at a very early age – in the case of the Multikulti Day Care in Stockholm, a three-year-old could pick some Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, without even realising that these are foreign languages if not for the fact that some of the ethnically Swedish parents don’t speak these languages.
Many of the kids know the Day Care personnel and later on their teachers, better than they know their parents and grandparents
For now, never have I seen so many parents parenting in the playground or in the park, as these Corona pandemic days, which we are told could last for years.
I suppose that you could find much of this as un-pleasant.
This too (very unpleasant for the non-violent ethos
What kind of president is this that doesn’t send any condolences to the George Floyd family?
A good thing that Joe Biden is not like Trump, Joe Biden met with the George Floyd Family – that’s real Brother’s keeper
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB2456BDA7DA7E4B12B749DD56DA850%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university