There was a time when human beings could read the Earth.
I grew up with my grandfather, and I witnessed many things that felt like magic to me back then.
The wind meant something.
The behaviour of animals meant something. A dog barking strangely throughout the night could mean something.
The position of the sun meant something.
The seasons spoke.
The rivers spoke.
The trees spoke.
And they paid attention.
My grandfather could look at the sky, observe insects, feel the wind, watch certain animals behave differently, and tell you rain was coming.
As a child, you think these people are performing magic.
Then you grow older and realise they had spent their entire lives studying a language you were never taught to speak.
The language of Mother Earth.
Modern civilisation gave us incredible intelligence, but somehow we became strangers to the intelligence beneath our feet.
We know when our phone battery is at 10%… but many of us cannot tell when our own spirit is exhausted.
Weeks can pass without our bare feet touching the soil that produces almost everything keeping us alive.
My grandfather would sometimes tell me to go outside, walk barefoot and communicate my heart’s desires.
It wasn’t always about begging God for something.
For them, there was power in declaration.
They spoke.
They decreed.
They believed there was a relationship between man, the Creator, the ancestors, the land, and the unseen world around him.
Africans were deeply connected to their roots and one of the tragedies of Africa is not that we had no knowledge…
It is that much of what we knew was dismissed as bad, evil or primitive before the world learned how to describe similar ideas in another language.
Long before many things had modern names, our ancestors had encountered them through observation, spirituality, nature and generations of accumulated knowledge.
They studied plants without calling it pharmacology.
They understood seasons without calling it meteorology.
They studied human behaviour without calling it psychology.
Knowledge existed before the vocabulary we use today and the big big grammer we use today.
Africa had spiritual traditions.
Divination.
Ancestral communication.
Ritual healing.
Dream interpretation.
Africans developed different ways of understanding the invisible dimensions of existence.
Then many of us were taught to become ashamed of indigenous names, medicines, and spiritual traditions.
Imagine someone choosing Amber over her native name “IHEOMA or ADUNNIADE” just to feel among?
What belonged to our ancestors became “backward.”
What arrived from elsewhere became “civilised.”
We can honour the dead of other cultures as saints…
Saint Peter.
Saint Jude.
Saint Augustine.
We ask for their guidance and yet the moment an African speaks about honouring his ancestors, we become uncomfortable.
Somehow their dead became holy… and ours became a subject to cast & bind.
But here is the funny thing, modern world is becoming fascinated again with meditation, plant medicine, ancestral healing, holistic wellbeing, etc.
And none of this is new to Africans.
But I must also say this… not everything our ancestors believed was correct.
Some traditions deserve preservation while some deserve evolution and some deserve abandonment.
But throwing away an entire civilisation’s knowledge because it was not written in European scientific vocabulary was a BIG MESS-UP.
Today, there are things your ancestors knew that you may never know because nobody remembered to teach your father and there are things your father cannot teach you because nobody was allowed to teach his father.
There are libraries walking around African villages with grey hair right now and every time one of them dies without transferring what they know… a library burns.
We will continue paying for our mistakes until we all wake up to the realization that we used to be a world power with powerful kingdoms, controlled major trade routes, etc.
Always Remember:
There was a time you never knew they existed. If you were okay before them, you'll be okay after them.
Never lose yourself trying to keep someone else
To surpass your father, you cannot only inherit what he knew… you must encounter what he never encountered.
You must encounter new people, new places, new knowledge, new battles, new spirits.
There is a reason many sons eventually become no different from their fathers, even when they swore they would be different.
They inherited the same environment, the same fears, the same limitations and, as funny as this may sound, sometimes the same enemies.
Every generation is supposed to discover something the previous generation couldn’t reach.
Some fathers fought battles their children will never understand just to move the family one step forward.
Now it is your turn.
And one of your duties is to question the limitations your father was forced to accept as reality.
Do not spend your entire life fighting battles your father already won.
Every generation must go further into the unknown and that is how families evolve.
That is how bloodlines change.
Your father conquered the world he knew.
Your responsibility is to discover the worlds he never knew existed.
It is a relay race... We are all going to be ancestors someday and those coming behind us will pick it up from wherever we stop.
That is how generations advance.
Never underestimate the power of simply getting started. You don’t need to have everything figured out… you just need to take the first step. Momentum comes from action.
Focus on yourself, Your journey, Your people.
The loudness, the flexing, the flaunting, unless you’re in showbiz and the lifestyle is part of the job, it adds nothing. Lowkey, grounded and humble will always win.
Above all: stay honest, stay legit, stay hungry, stay true.