Who are you raising?

I got an interesting email from a group I am following and towards the end of the email, a few questions were raised by the author. I din't think much about most of the questions, but the one which caught my eye was the question which asked: "Who are you raising?". The email talked about how as parents, we do not know for certain who our children will become so we must raise them with love as they might one day take care of us or even change the world.

As I reflected more on this question, I started thinking about all those children being raised in foreign lands which for most of us has become home. You see, in the busy hassles of everyday life, we can easily forget about teaching our children about their culture and heritage or even their language but most of all about their true identity. I think it is not enough to give your child a Shona middle name because you are Shona and do not want them to forget that. It is however good that you have given them an option so that when they grow up they can choose what they will call themselves - the English/French/hebrew or the native language name.

This question got me thinking about an interesting encounter I had with a certain young man. I do not even remember his name. Anyway, a while back, an associate and I went to collect a young man who was going for some test we were also sitting for. The young man couldn't have been older than 20, he had lived in Zimbabwe until he was 16 then he had relocated to South Africa with his parents. He jumped into the car, and said "Hello!" in a very refined English accent.

My associate being somewhat conservative and a bit rude looked at him and told him in my native language, Shona, that he din't have to speak in English because we were all Shona. The young man would hear nothing of it and continued in English whilst this associate of mine, who was male also insisted on replying him in Shona. I think there were some male ego issues at play! This conversation degenerated to a point where my associate asked the young man if he even had an idea what his totem was. The young man without hesitation told him that he was a Moyo Chirandu.

I must admit I was shocked that the young man knew what his totem was because based on the impression he gave initially, I had assumed that he would be clueless because I have met a lot of people who have been excluded from their culture and background who looked and acted a lot like this young man. His answer also seemed to have earned him some respect from my associate who had already started calling him names like "munose".

This young man taught me a very important lesson about his parents. It's true that he came from a privileged background, had gone to some of the most expensive schools both in Zimbabwe and in South Africa, but whoever his parents were, they had been sure to impart in him some knowledge of who he really was. They left it up to him to him to choose who he wanted to become. It also made me remember a few friends I had met whose parents had been Malawian and Zambians but who had relocated to Zimbabwe. These guys had never gone back to Malawi/ Zambia and their fathers had been buried in Zimbabwe, but they could speak so fluently Nyanja which were their father's native tongue.

I know so many of you reading this will think that we are in the modern ages, who cares if your totem is a Lion or a Monkey or a Rat. Who cares if you can speak Shona, Ndebele, Nyanja or Vemba... those are after all not United Nations or World Bank recognized languages! Some of you are saying to yourself, culture is dynamic and always changing but in my defence I will quote Marcus Garvey; who said, "A people without the knowledge or their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." It is my view that as the new generation of parents, we owe it to our children to give them a choice like our parents did. They laid everything on the table for us and it was up to each of us to choose what we would take up and who we would become. We all need to be grounded in something besides religion because if we truly know who we are, no one will ever be able to make us feel like a lesser being. So today I leave each young parent with the same question: who are you raising?? How much of your true identity are you going to allow your children to know? Are you going to exclude them from the richness of the culture which you grew up in? A culture which like any other might have had it's weakness but which is yours. Are you going to allow your child to drift and flow with any ideology which belongs to whoever comes their way because they want to belong to something?? Are you going to be the dictatorial parent who tells their child only what they should not do and not the cultural background to that decision?

My dear young parents the task ahead of us is huge especially in this "global village" but let us not tire, let us play our part in giving roots to these trees we call our children! Food for thought!