Why did My Son Refuse to Wear his Native Attire to a Chicago Elementary School?
We were facing each other. His kaftan was neatly folded between us. My 8-year-old son shook his head slowly.
“Never!” he said.
His school was having a week of activities centered on self-expression through dressing. In line with the dress guidelines on the school website, each pupil was expected to come to school on Tuesday of that week wearing home clothes in the school colors — purple and gold. We rummaged through his closet and found nothing with purple or gold in it. Our unconscious leaning towards buying only blues, greys, and blacks for him and his 5-year-old brother was apparent. Of all the clothes strewn all over their bedroom, there was no purple or gold in sight.
With 1 hour left to get them both ready for school, I found a neatly folded native attire they’d worn for a family event a while back at the bottom pile of their clothes shelf. It was a simple, well-tailored, bronze kaftan with purple piping on the neckpiece. I was overjoyed at this discovery. It was the perfect combination of the dress expectations of their school and their culture.
But my children blatantly refused to wear it.
“Why?” I asked the older child. “You can’t get nearer purple and gold than this attire. Why wouldn’t you want to wear it to school?”
That was when he told me that it wasn’t something cool for school, that his classmates would know he is “African” and he didn’t want that.
“Some things are better kept to oneself.” My son said. “It is like a password, you can tell your parents and those who are close to you, but you can’t go around telling everyone.”
With his response, my shoulders sagged. I was deflated.
Given my relationship with both of my sons, I encourage them to be vocal with me, to reduce the power distance between us. On many levels, we speak to each other as equals and I often share my honest thoughts and vulnerabilities with them.
“Are you ashamed to be Yoruba?” I asked him.
“No, I am not ashamed. That is just how I want it.” He replied.
I wouldn’t force my conviction upon him — not at some minutes past 7 on a school morning when we still hadn’t figured out what to wear, but I left him with a story from a few decades back. The origin of the story is doubtful, but its moral is clear. It was of a student whose poor mother had traveled over 4 hours by public transport to surprise the child in school, only for the student to tell other schoolmates that the woman was a maidservant, to keep to the false narrative of coming from a wealthy family.
“That is sad.” My son replied. “Why would anyone do that?”
I left the conversation there. Eventually, we picked out a maroon long-sleeve tee shirt with brown trousers for him, and wine trousers with a blue short-sleeve tee shirt for his younger brother.
A Brotherhood of Strangers
After they left for school and silence took their place in our home, I reflected on what my cultural identity meant to me, and what it was starting to mean to our children. I remember a trip to Disneyland Paris with my partner — their mother. We were sitting at lunch in one of the theme park’s restaurants which was designed to look like an indoor safari world, when 4 men walked up to a raised podium in a far corner of the restaurant and started to sing in an unfamiliar African language. One of the men accompanied the singer on a Konga drum, while the others sang along and danced. They were performers paid to complete the dining experience but to me, they were family. I jumped up from my chair, walked over to the podium, and joined the men. And I danced.
It was a liberating trance-like dance. I didn’t learn it anywhere. I didn’t even understand what they were saying, but on that stage, we spoke the same language. Encouraged by my unexpected participation in their performance, the drummer rapped louder on the hide as I spun faster like a dervish, gleefully possessed. By the time the last note died, I was alive. I was happy. We hugged like long-lost cousins. They tried guessing my country of origin from the traditional fila (cap) and kente fabric impression I wore. We swapped pleasantries and climbed down to an applauding crowd of diners, whose nationalities would be too diverse to guess.
This is the power of identity and the connection that I feel for my roots. But my children’s reality is different. I spent the silent hours that followed my children’s departure to school in reflection. I resisted the temptation of letting myself wallow for too long in self-pity and shame — knowing that a man like me would have children like them who weren’t confident enough to own their culture ‘with their full chest.’
My self-acquittal however, came from knowing that even my father (God rest his soul) had insisted that we speak only in English inside our home. Just like I had to dig out their bronze kaftans from the bottom piles, I remembered that our native attires, which we traditionally wore to church on Sundays back then, also sat at the bottom pile of our battered clothes cupboard. The only time we wore them aside from Sundays, was when all our other clothes were dirty and we had nothing else to wear. I recall sunny Saturdays, wearing old mismatched dashikis smelling of camphor while hauling our soiled clothes to the well where we washed and played. This allegory became even more poignant for me, seeing the similarities in how we treated these clothes to how we carried our African identities with us into the wider world. We loved to preserve it for the occasion, but usually, we were too ashamed to wear it every day around our shoulders. A lot of us (and I am not less guilty) are native by convenience, and no sooner do we return to our cloisters than we neatly fold up our Africanness and place it back where it belongs — the bottom of the pile.
It took me many books to discover the muted greatness that my origins held having being raised by a father whose idea of sophistication was well-spoken English and Clarks leather shoes. It took me reflecting on the wisdom of many adages in different tribal languages to appreciate the depth of sense and poetry that we’d lost. It had taken me a long time to get here too. And it was in this space of self-reflection that I stepped back from self-flagellation on this identity issue, and chose to see my children’s disdain for Africanness in a different light. It wasn’t their fault that we never taught them their native language. At least, my mother, in deference to my father’s position had insisted on speaking to us only in Yoruba and had raised us in a predominantly Yoruba environment. It wasn’t my children’s fault that their mental image of clothes was of tee shirts and denim trousers — agbadas were clumsy entrapments they had to endure at family celebrations. It wasn’t their fault that I didn’t tell them enough bedtime stories that spoke to the greatness of the many warriors before them. They have been sheltered from long trips along dusty paths and denied the joy of skipping happily along ancient paths that led to the farms of their grandfathers. They never sang canticles in Yoruba or sat at termite-eaten pews in ancient churches where we worshiped strange gods.
I acknowledge my role in helping them shape their experiences to appreciate this Africanness. I know that the journey is tough for anyone seeking to find themselves on the pages of crossed-out and rewritten histories, so smudged that the eye is now lost. But I remain unrelenting in my desire to share my truth with these boys — a truth that originated from my association with the Yoruba culture and later evolved into an identity that has encouraged me to ask the many questions that shaped my understanding of the world. This year, when our first son is 9, I will have him read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and contrast it with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. I will sit with him and his brother around imaginary fires burning beneath imaginary moons, and ask them questions that hopefully will lead them to finding their convictions. Because I know the power of identity and how it defines a man. I know the strength of conviction, and how it inspires confidence in the face of great change. And I know the emptiness with which a man can live in the midst of many but lack the meaning his soul sorely craves.
I pray that Life gives me enough time to walk with them to the point where they will be rooted in such an unwavering sense of self that they will not question their essence in a world designed to efface the soulless.
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