The Ancestors and the Dialogue of Religions

Source: timeslive.co.za

"My father was a man of few words, and I have always regretted that I had not asked him more questions. But I realize also that he took pains to tell me what he thought I needed to know. He told me, for instance, in a rather oblique way of his one tentative attempt long ago to convert his uncle.

It must have been in my father’s youthful, heady, proselytizing days! His uncle had said no, and pointed to the awesome row of insignia of his three titles. “what shall I do to these?” he had asked my father. It was an awesome question. What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?

An orphan child born into adversity, heir to commotions, barbarities, rampant upheaveals of a continent in disarray: was it all surprising that he would eagerly welcome the explanation and remedy proffered by diviners and interpreters of a new word [i.e., Christianity]?

And his uncle Udoh, a leader in his community, a moral, open-minded man, a prosperous man who had prepared such a great feast when he took the ozo title that his people gave him a unique praise-name for it: was he to throw all that away now because some strangers from afar came and said so?

Those two—my father and his uncle—formulated the dialectic which I inherited. Udoh stood fast in what he knew, but he left room also for his nephew to seek other answers. The answer my father found in the Christian faith solved many problems, but by no means all.”

Chinua Achebe (2009: 37), The Education of a British-Protected Child