Hello, everyone.
I welcome you to my blog. Before Christianity, Africans believed in a lot of things they believed to be supreme and practiced different traditions; some were brutal to women and children, while others were kind to women and children. Tradition is the customs and beliefs of a group of people that are passed down from generation to generation. Currently, Christianity has saved us from many brutal traditions, though some still exist, but Christianity has helped reduce them to the barest minimum. Those days I see nollywood movies and people being sent into exile or getting banished for committing an abomination or going against traditions, and sometimes it leaves me trying to picture living in an era like that.
image is mine.
I have seen elders of a community doing everything within their power to make sure that after them the customs and beliefs of their people live on and not die with them, so they bring in some youths and show them how things are done. Sometime back in the day, these youths were forced to be part, and sometimes they went into learning traditions willingly, but in all, they just wanted their tradition to live on and not die. Currently, with Christianity on the rise, a lot of traditions that were being practiced back in the day have become things of the past.
We are all from different places, and we all have traditions our people used to practice or still practice till date. traditions vary from one community to another, some we frown at and some we are happy to participate in. One tradition that has been in my hometown for ages is not fading in baby way is the traditional retirement of age grades (also known as igba uche). I have written about it in about to post from last week, but this time around I would like to go into details and explain all about it better.
The traditional retirement (igba uche) is a traditional ceremony that holds in my hometown after every four years until two years ago, when the timing was adjusted considering how much people age before it gets to their turn. People of the same age grade come together to form a group and give their group (age grade group) a name, and to be approved, they carry out a project for the village (community) and probably build something or anything that benefits the community. To be approved is called izara aha; this is also celebrated, but the celebration is not as big and as loud as the retirement.
This age group continues to pay taxes to support the community and its development as well as help each other when the need arises until their retirement. At retirement, they cease to pay the development levy imposed on them but continue to support each other. At retirement, the whole community comes out to celebrate them for how they must have contributed to the development of the community and also for how long they have lived.