There are a few things that irk me like a lost identity.
Baba Suwe trended on Twitter 3 days ago because of a TikTok cosplay by Tiago, a skitmaker. Tiago is a white boy that was bred in Ọ̀yọ́ in the palace of the Aláàfin. He speaks eloquent Yoruba and has adopted the Yoruba culture as his way of life.
In his cosplay of Baba Suwe, he painted his face black as the late actor usually did in his movies. That’s where the outrage came. Some people called this act racist because in other countries like the United States, a white person painting his/her face black is considered racist.
That’s my grouse. Why should I be offended by what’s considered offensive in another culture even if normally, I would have not seen any offense in the act? We don’t share the same experiences for me to be offended by it.
It’s inadvertently places that culture over mine.
Some years ago, some people in Nigeria started getting offended at a normally harmless question of asking how one’s night went because in Western Europe, such question translates to asking about your sexual activities over the night. Some Nigerians in Nigeria, learning of this began getting offended by greeting they had hitherto answered or had even asked others. Emphasis on Nigerians in Nigeria, please.
Conversely, you’d see the same set of Nigerians would scoff at some acts that are considered offensive in their own culture. An example is handing over or collecting an object with the left hand, especially from an older person. Over time, many of them have tagged this as archaic and not to be accepted in the 21st century. Another example is prostrating/bowing for older people which the Yoruba culture enjoinds. Same people have likened this to subservience. However, when confronted with the fact that in the Western Europe that they glamorize and tag their culture ‘cool’, people curtsy to monarchs and members of the royalty, it becomes a case of comparing intentions.
Similarly, I’ve always held the belief that conversations on social media have retrogressed. I have a theory for this but that’s not the point of this writeup. A few months ago on Twitter, a tweep was mocked for his name. His name was Ogedengbe. Those who made fun of the name believed it wasn’t cool to bear such name. However, what could be cooler than being named after a warrior and the liberator of his people from the domination of a greater power during the Kiriji Civil War.
In the same vein, a lot of people romanticize and eliticize foreign sounding names, even when they do not know the origin of such names. You know where I’m going with this, right? As long as it sounds foreign, especially if it’s from the West, it’s better than their local names.
Heck, many people anglicize local words that should be left alone.