A Leaf That Doesn't Know What Tree It's From

Nigeria is one of the African nations quietly losing its culture, and history is the first casualty. There is a saying that not knowing your history is like a leaf that doesn't know what tree it came from. That leaf can still exist for a while, but it has no idea what fed it, what shaped it, or what it is connected to. That is where a growing number of us find ourselves today.

Our history is being erased, not by one single event, but by neglect. The clearest reason is simple: no one is telling it anymore. Many of us grew up with evenings built around stories about where we came from, and school assessments once treated that knowledge as something worth testing. That habit has faded. What has replaced it is a slow drift away from our own identity, culture, language, and food, largely because Western culture has become the default setting for what counts as modern.

This shows up everywhere. Our playlists lean foreign. Our restaurants are stacked with dishes that have nothing to do with the soil we stand on. Our boutiques are filled with English-style wear, while our own fabrics wait for a wedding or a "traditional day" to be taken seriously. In many schools, speaking our own tongue is treated as something to be corrected out of children rather than protected in them. Even our uniforms reflect a template imported from somewhere else. In everyday arguments, it is common to hear someone say "if you go to other countries" or "they don't do it like that abroad," as if another nation's culture should be the standard for how we live. That culture belongs to them. It was built from their history, not ours.

Nigeria holds far more than three tribes, yet the national conversation keeps shrinking us down to Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa, as if everyone else fits into the gaps between those three. Look north and the assumption is often "Hausa," when in truth there are hundreds of languages, cultures, and ways of life across that region alone. The same is true in the south, the middle belt, and everywhere in between. An average Nigerian cannot tell you much about their own history, and that matters more than it seems. To understand today, you have to search yesterday. That is exactly the part being erased.

There is a Yoruba proverb that says a river which forgets its source will dry up. A nation works the same way. What we choose to remember now is what our children will have to stand on later.

©️ Okon David Ekanem @TalkAfrica.com.