by
Obododimma Oha
The ability to climb trees is one of the cultural expectations of male children in the Igbo culture. And climbing certain trees, like the oil-palm, are completely the assignment to male children. Women, daughters or wives, are not supposed to climb oil-palm trees and harvest their nuts. If climbing trees involves risks, as it truly does, male children should get prepared for such risks. And so, one is not surprised the the late Igbo highlife musician, Oliver de Coque, proverbially sang in one of his albums as follows:
Obere nwa na-amụ iri elu
Obi ga-esi ya ike!
(A child learning to climb
Needs to be courageous!)
Yes. One needs courage and not easily be scared of heights. It is about courage and risk-taking. Humans cannot get anywhere or make any breakthrough unless they take risks. Life itself is a risk, not just that it involves risks. A person learning and hoping to scale and go up has to have the heart. Life is not for the faint-hearted. It is for the daring.
One needs courage to confront Corona and other viruses and not hide or cringe in fear, saying we are finished. Spending sleepless nights in a lab looking for a cure is courage, is determination. That person looking for a cure is the child learning to climb who needs to have a heart. There was one episode of National Geographic that I watched with my children sometime ago. In it, one scientist was studying and following rattle snakes, until one unfortunate day he was bitten. He barely managed to reach his car before he passed out and got medical attention. Lucky fellow. But he came back later to follow and study the rattle snake! My children shouted, and wondered whether he wanted to die. But he did not die; instead he mastered the ways of the snake and his findings contributed significantly to the invention of a device that could identify wherever the snake was hiding! It is the work of courage and of persistence.
Indeed, that child in us learning to climb should have the spirit of commitment, of persistence. The child wishing to learn needs to be ready to learn and be hungry for that knowledge. The child wishing to learn to climb, as Oliver rightly states, should have courage and also not make personal comfort primary. The quest for personal comfort could be an obstacle in many things.
Apart from an attachment to personal comfort, the child learning to climb also needs to think less of safety. Not that the child should not bother about safety at all. But having that as primary worry takes away the spirit of adventure from a person.
The future of humanity hinges on a remembrance of what Oliver encouraged in his music. We are that child learning to climb and should have courage and commitment. We cannot be that child if we are satisfied with being just observers to things happening in life, or people who merely consume (badly) what others produced.
Humility is also necessary in learning to climb trees. Some people have mastered that art already. So, someone has been there before. Yours is not the first time. Even though you must do it by yourself, it is better if you ask questions and take answers as answers.
But there is something cultural there that one must emphasize. The imagery is taken from a particular culture and it speaks about authentic masculinity. A male should have climbing trees as a skill. Even if the Igbo have passed the tree-climbing stage, it is nevertheless an invitation to what the Igbo exemplify as the real nwoke (male child). We can understand gender in the Igbo culture, therefore, as not necessarily a subversion, but an assignment of roles meant to generate a stronger human relationship. Today, how far or close is one from the cultural assignment in word or deed? Or is the understanding from a different context, maybe from Lilliput, in which the rattle snake can fatally bite the person following it twice?
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