#DaRUWANA: The Need to Preserve Our Cultural Ideals
By Rabiu Musa
INFOMEDIA – The Kano Leadership Enlightenment and Advocacy for Development Initiative (Kano LEADS), has called on the good people of Kano to prioritize the cultural heritage of our forefathers for sustainable development.
The organization noted with dismay how our societies are given room for the current tide of global urbanization to get momentum in Kano state and northern Nigeria in general thus, eroding our significant and historic cultural values and the fabric of the ‘Kasar Hausa’ setting and its people which affords us due recognition.
This is contained in the #DaRUWANA radio program aired in Freedom radion. The program, sponsored by Kano LEADS, hosted Alh. Gidado Mukhtar, the organization’s head of Government, Security and Law cluster who spoke on Nigeria’s 62 Independence and the extinction of Hausa Land cultural values in the face of the current civilization of adopting values from the western world.
Alh. Gidado Mukhtar said that the dominance of western culture in Hausa land is very conspicuous and the adoption of these cultural values from white people altered the components of our social structure, making our cultural heritage weaker where it began to recede into irrelevance.
He added that culture and people are inseparable and contributing factors to identity creation, values sustainability from one generation to another, and the totality of the peoples’ humanness.
The Elder statesman lamented how our country derailed for adopting a governance style akin to our oppressors even though Kano and the entire Nigerian ethnic nationals have their respective traditional systems of governance in the pre-colonial era. He said the adoption of the western system of governance and throwing our holistic approach of governance peculiar to our culture and values as people is what plunged us into a haphazard and vague system of life.
He further added that although as people of culture and values who are being colonized and adopted a western system of governance in a circular country, we should have domesticated the system to accommodate our varying and distinct values peculiar to our religion.
A cursory look at the western world, Mal. Gidado noted that “the white man will never copy a culture from an African setting because of a superiority complex, in this regard, why should we copy from him? “This resonates with the sad stories of the freedom fighters’ struggle for independence and liberation from western oppressors”.
“Our authentic cultural values and traditional practices are treasures that must be preserved by all and sundry including authorities concerned if our fondest wish is a prosperous society with a unique identity, and social practices inherent to our religious values”.
