Promise Adiele
Amos Tutuola’s novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, narrates the story of an indolent son of a wealthy man who is overtly gratified by his father beyond all conceivable redemption. Out of immense love for the boy, his wealthy father employs a palm-wine tapster to tap palm wine for him every day, so he could drink with his friends to their ravenous full. However, joy has a fragile body that breaks too soon. The impartial pendulum of fate swings, and his father dies. Afterwards, his palm-wine tapster falls from a palm-wine tree and dies as well.
Following the death of his two benefactors, the boy is inevitably exposed to the realities of life. His friends abandon him, and he goes in search of another palm-wine tapster, a journey which leads him to the bush where he encounters gnomes, ghosts and surreal elements. His phantasmal experience shapes his life and inculcates in him the resolve to survive. However, owing to his father’s failure to teach him the ways of hardwork, he is marooned in his search for self-sustenance.
Not too long ago, President Muhamadu Buhari referred to Nigerian youths as lazy. His reference to youths in his country as a lazy group rightly drew wide condemnation across the country even though his aides tried in vain to do a damage control and befuddle the rest of us with amorphous semantics. The searchlight today turns on Nigerian parents who are equally lazy and therefore fail in their primary responsibilities as parents to raise good children. Although the president may have used the word “lazy” to describe Nigerian youths who are economically unproductive, my reference to lazy parents has nothing to do with parents who are not able to provide for their household. By lazy parents, I mean parents who fail in their basic responsibility to raise their children to become good citizens and in so doing contribute in plaguing the society with ills of innumerable dimensions. Tutuola’s novel, delivered in unconventional English language full of grammatical infelicities captures parental failure and its effect in the life of a child and the larger society. Parental failure is daily interrogated by diverse religion and culture, yet children who grow to become youths and eventual adults manifest abysmal lack of good upbringing which is a direct indictment on millions of those who profess to be parents. The armed robber was not born so, the prostitute, the innately criminal minded, the economic saboteur, the political desperado, the ritual killer and the kidnapper, those established in subterfuge and treachery, sexual predators and paedophiles, they were all born by someone, a father and a mother who abandoned their parental responsibilities. Parents who have failed in their roles to raise their children properly inadvertently unleash mayhem of a monumental proportion on the society. Parents who also, in the guise of pampering their children spoil them to stupor throw into the society untested and half-baked adults who jump ship at the slightest challenge. Such adults resort to all manner of underhand practice to survive and advance the culture of indolence already established by their parents.
Using Tutuola’s novel as a guide, I am going to focus on wealthy and middle-class parents. These kinds of parents occupy various positions in the society and public service which give them the opportunity to sermonize and moralize to a hapless audience over issues of parental responsibility and child development. They junket across the world and hardly have time for their children. Their stale and trite excuse is that money must be made. So, while pursuing the mirage of life, the vanishing illusions of materialism, they abdicate their primary responsibilities of raising their children and outsource these responsibilities to maids, drivers, private lesson teachers, boarding schools and sundry group of people. When they manage to have time with their children, they present a façade of care and love towards them by indulging them with all manner of niceties and unrealistic values of life.
These kinds of parents can hardly point to one thing they taught their children, they do not know their behavioural idiosyncrasies, and do not know what kinds of children they have. Their only input is to provide money and run off to luxuriate in their own obscene indulgences. These parents do not have time to take their children to school and they never have the time to do school assignments. They will almost repel the idea of praying with their children, going through their school books, knowing their teachers or even sharing their youthful experiences with their children as a form of didactic approach to shaping their lives. These parents will not be there when their children watch pornography but will be quick to appear on TV and go on radio to say what a vice and a danger to the society pornography has become. These parents will pay money to exam merchants for their children to pass and even offer huge money to secure university admission for them, yet they use every opportunity to berate the growing tide of examination malpractice and how important it is to enthrone transparency in university admission process.
Some mothers do not cook, they do not teach their daughters how to cook and their children cannot perform very basic domestic chores. The cook, the house maid must do it. In turn, the daughters become misfits as adults and as wives who go on to burden the lives of young men. Some fathers are far away from their sons, they buy expensive items for them. The sons drive expensive cars and go to school with bales of naira and dollars or are whisked away to school abroad. These parents do not care about the career inclinations of their children, they just want them to study certain courses in the university without any attempt to know if the child is equipped for such course or not. At the end, what we have is a frustrated child who grows up a deviant youth wanting to assert his own personality which most times runs at cross-purposes with that of the parents. In this way, what we have are children who are sybaritic, uncultured, and ill-equipped for the inevitable vagaries of life. The parents of such children, no matter how highly placed should consider themselves lazy and a colossal failure.
I have advised some parents to go to schools, attend parents/teachers’ forum, see the subject teachers of their children and know their strengths and weaknesses. Also, it is important for a committed parent to go to the child’s university, go to the department, see the course adviser and the lecturers and find out the GPA of their children. Those who have heeded my advice have come back with the shocker of their lives.
Adiele writes from Department of English University of Lagos via [email protected]