THE world over, but especially in Black Africa where procreation is treasured, it is the desire of parents to be succeeded by good children. Among my people the Yoruba, it is customary to refer to children’s as their parents’ clothing, and to pray to be succeeded by good children. Good people value their name and are concerned about their legacy. Indeed, this thought of legacy and the fact that, as Chinua Achebe tells us in Things Fall Apart, “living fire begets cold, impotent ash,” wearied King Solomon, the son of David: “Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have laboured, and wherein I have shewed myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19).
If history proves anything, it is the fact that the desire for a good legacy must be complimented by parental responsibility. Parents, if they want to laugh even after they are dead, must live right, and must give their children sound upbringing. Increasingly in the Nigerian society, though, parenthood is sacrificed on the altar of daily bread, and many children grow up knowing very little about right or wrong, redeemed only by momentary episodes of societal correction. Which brings me to my subject today, Nkechi Blessing Sunday, the Nollywood actress who recently distributed dildos as souvenirs during her late mother’s one-year memorial party! According to her, the motive was not to suggest that ‘men are scum’ but to help single ladies who may not currently have men in their lives. Mrs Helper then added in a fit of rage: “25th was my mother’s birthday, hence the cake and a little party to host a few friends. Not like you all deserve any explanations on what I choose to do with my own life, because when we are suffering/hungry I do not see any of you.”
It is perhaps no surprise that as an actress, this individual is not associated with any real, discernible skills beyond an obsession with her big backside which she flaunts in movies as her most prized asset. And as I tried to show in “Like their movies, like their lives,” the movies that these folks churn out are an exact mirror of their rotten lives. Like Sidi in Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel who makes a decision to marry an old lecher without the input of her parents or friends, this lady seems to have no advisers: she advertised sexual immorality at her mother’s remembrance ceremony and inadvertently robed the deceased in the garb of a perverse woman who failed to give her what we call “home training.” And that is a tragedy because the poor woman may have tried her best to show her sex-obsessed daughter the right way and got shunned. The Yoruba call such unyielding children omo adanu or omo ofo (wasted children). After all, when a child will not mend, will the parents kill her?
Motherhood may be increasingly meaningless in Euro-America today as leftists try to rewrite the order of nature, but mothers remain big treasures in Africa. A Yoruba proverb says “mother is gold, father is a mirror,” and while I cannot help but notice the affective distance between gold and mirrors, it is clear that the Yoruba value parenthood, a vital source of social sustenance and continuity. A Yoruba song says: “Mother is gold of great cost.” Sadly, Ngozi Blessing not only trivialized motherhood, she actually defamed it, and that’s no surprise given that her entire bodily geography is on display on social media, enticing straw men. Turning a remembrance ceremony into farce surely advertised her utter lack of manners. The symbolism is decidedly perverse: her memory of her mother is a sexualized one.
By publicly distributing sex toys at her mother’s remembrance ceremony, Nkechi Blessing assaulted public sensibilities and possibly corrupted morals. What is the connection between a mother’s memory and dildos? If you wanted to share sex toys for any reason, why make a public show of it, thereby inflaming the imaginations of the young, impressionable minds present on that occasion? Just how do you dishonor your own parent by promoting promiscuity and social dissonance at her remembrance ceremony?
The whole world knows that our actress does not wear panties and does not do one-minute men: she’s made both clear. Even street prostitutes blush but these daughters of the world’s evening time do not: Ngozi Blessing has informed Nigerians that she has a “tighter and juicier” organ than the bosom paraded by one Bobrisky, a cross-dressing fraud. And the public testimony of her ex-boo, Opeyemi Falegan, isn’t exactly flattering. Falegan told an interviewer: “Do you know why I left? Personal hygiene. You have to tell a woman to change her pant in three days, you have to tell a woman to brush her teeth in the morning and after the whole thing, everywhere is messed up. You want me to manage that?”
Well, William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” And it’s been impossible to forget a statement made by one of my teachers, Professor Segun Adekoya, during an English literature class at the Obafemi Awolowo University: “A woman who lacks grace will paint this and paint that, and look like a masquerade.” All round us today, it is difficult to find a woman amid the barrage of paint. And in the name of fashion, ladies, especially Nollywood celebrities, flaunt their flesh with abandon. Wearing Brazilian hair on a Nigerian head, they purvey absolute garbage in the name of social discourse. And, on close contact, they are incredibly dirty, and will reduce a man to a piece of bread. With a tongue sharper than knives, they will dispatch a man to hell very quickly with tales of underperformance. Said the Greek philosopher Euripides: “There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.” There are good women out there, but not those who change men like toothbrush.
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