A historian by the name of Jeffrey Fadiman documented the life and customs of the Meru people, the tribe of The General. He spent over a year completing field work in Mt. Kenya and recording their oral history. He found that elders were willing to share their secret histories because the youth were not interested in learning it. They feared that hundreds of years of tribal knowledge would be lost if not recorded with the random white man (a paraphrase of his words, not mine).
I invite you to read some excerpts of his book, When We Were Young, There Were Witchmen, posted below. I’m sorry that this is a longer blog post than usual. I think that if you take an additional 4 minutes and read below, you will come to appreciate the African tradition of respect for the elder and the rich history that they possess. When I was younger and visiting my grandparents, I would not go to bed until Granddad told me my story. He would select one of the many in his repertoire, most relating to his childhood growing up with his teasing siblings. Or how his summer chore was to walk the family cow from their home to the summer cottage. Or how this cow would moo every time he came home from a date, and his parents knew what time he arrived and if he was late for curfew.
I gained an appreciation of his past, of his life, and his perspective. I plan to share his stories with my children. I worry that grandchildren these days have not or will not know this bond. It seems to be a universal trend that we, the youth, have access to more resources, so we rely less on those who came before us. Our elders can share knowledge that Google searches do not produce. But we have to give them the opportunity to speak, as slowly as necessary. My former boss, Kenny Leon, always said, “Ah, the youth is wasted on the young.” This doesn’t always have to be the case…
Okay, enough of my jabbering…here are the excerpts:
The value in recording the history:
Each time an old man dies in Africa a library is lost to humankind, for within the memories of the old men lies the history of an entire people. It is a complex tale, as rich in drama, incident, and narrative as the far more widely known drama of Homer’s Troy, the Viking sagas, or the samurai epics of Japan. Some African traditions take hours to tell, a few take days; those that make up the body of this book stretched over months. Some traditions are fictional, others are based entirely on fact. Some blend fiction and fact, often so artfully that anyone who listens is held spellbound. Some can be retold only in song, often only by tribal troubadours. These traditions are folk art at it finest; they hold Africa’s rich past.
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The disinterest of younger generations in learning from their elders:
The younger age-sets had been either exposed to British schooling or aspired to it, thus forming the first generation of Meru’s new literates. More and more of them believed that wisdom lay in books and schoolrooms, not in the old traditions.
Tradition was that younger generations would visit their elders, bearing presents in the form of food, drink, or tobacco. In return, the elders would share their wisdom and the youth would better understand their history and life in general. The elders in these communities are scared to (and of) death, because the youth refuse to learn from them.
For every prior generation these formal visits had acted as an informal but effective system of social security. Too old for physical labor, the elders still served the tribe by passing on their knowledge to the young.
The older a man grew, the more he was assumed to know, the more often his juniors would seek him out, and thus the more frequent his gift became. The old, old men of Meru, unlike those in Western societies, were never seen as useless and left to age and die alone.
Without exception those who formed the oldest living age-sets were embittered at those younger than themselves. Most, when asked, felt that the younger age-sets had been ‘bent by British as though they were twigs instead of men,’ and ‘they scratch in books like foolish guinea hens, seeking seeds of wisdom from white men while ignoring their own.’ In consequence all elders feared death in a way unknown to prior generations, less for the loss of their own existence than the loss of the entire Meru past.
More to come later…
-LL
Ps: This entire book is available free, online: http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft8199p24c&chunk.id=d0e204&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e204&brand=ucpress