[Redway]

How elders in someone’s home-town community dismiss/fail to acknowledge many seasoned, rich points of convergence and inspiration from young people, prefer to disrespect them (even to the extent of smear-campaigning and public gaslighting) and wonder why so many young people, who were in the corner writing premium dissertations and cooking smoky jollof rice with duck the whole time, run away and hardly ever come back. Which can sometimes drive a wedge between the best of friends and one-in-8-trillion community-associations. All because some auntie Lucy or Florence-bastard spotted them outside the club and had very judgemental things to say. Generational dismissal (whether it’s random smear-campaigning or harsh, gossipy spiritual judgement) really ain’t t’one, and, again, unacknowledged brilliance in youth leads to loss and a monumental waste of opportunity that might never blossom in the same way. So the very people claiming to be custodians of culture and legacy should respect young people more and not engaging in collective generational gaslighting, smear-campaigning someone who’s in the corner minding they business.

How some of these people still maintain solid links with their home-town community and have reverence for the legacy and unique condense of it all (if that’s the vibe-undercurrent) is … it’s applaudable. Spiritualised-gossip church-waggers and toxic elders don’t make it easy, but yet, some of these young people keep turning up, in heart and/or in t’flesh, while they slice ugboguru and enrich the community with things they can offer, offering back to the very soil that sometimes spat them out, over-pathologised them. They pour out showers of incessant riches (richer than a pot of ofe-Owere/Owerri stock-based with the bone of okporoko, goat, duck, goose, venison/mgbada, tolotolo and lavished with snail and periwinkles), even when people continue to undermine them and disrespect their name. If that ain’t spiritual resilience, I don’t know what is.

Young people have a voice, even when the world assumes they’re best being drowned out.