Hello Hive Communities, and #crossculture community,
You are welcome to my blog. Traditions and the cultural heritage of a people is an inheritance of a people, beginning from the time you got to know yourself as a member of that your community and about the culture to an unknown times, it will keep rotating for an everlasting times. We all inherited our culture and it's beautiful backgrounds.
We all were born into our families and our cultures, no one chooses where he or she would be born. We just found ourselves in our families and then into our cultures and our cultural heritages which we started growing with knowingly and unknowingly.
These pictures are on the procession day before the actual day of the event. They're showing themselves to everyone, that they were able to meet up or able make it to the end finally. On that very day, the king of the village and his cabinet members, come up at the village square to address the, receive their finished project and bless the entire age grade and all the villagers, it's a big celebration indeed
These our cultural heritages include our behaviors, attitudes, kinds of food we eat, the particular clothings we wear as our cultural attires, the dance steps we display from our culture. Our kinds of beliefs, marriages, languages and dialects, our behaviors, artifacts. The shapes of our bodies and colours, the textures and colours of our hair and every other things, from known to the unknown.
We often practice all these on daily bases and are very proud to own them or to belong to these kinds of cultures too. We found ourselves here in our cultural heritages and historical facts and are growing with them or had grown with all these tendencies in life. And there are little or nothing at all, we can do about them. These are natural endowments and tendencies.
Though we may try changing some we don't like or believe in on our own, but our cultural heritage, background and historical facts remains the same from our roots. We may not do much about changing them totally, and actually.
Even in christiandom, there are foundational traditions and cultural inheritances that the people look up to or that is governing and monitoring behaviors, attitudes and characters of the people which give directions on them for what to be done at every moment for proper identifications of where they came from or where they belong.
Most of the times, we could find faults in those traditional ways of dealing with our environments or our relationship with God. Some may buy those ideas while others may not, the reality is that every people has their traditional ways of doing things about all of these.
In my own local government area, Ohafia local government area in the South Eastern part of Nigeria, we develope and build our villages, communities and towns through community labour, everyone is meant to know and join your own age grade or groups. We have twenty seven villages in Ohafia local government area of Abia State, in Nigeria.
People that are born within the intervals of three years are grouped into an age grade in our culture. So long as you are not from the same father and mother, but you could be step brothers or sisters, if you are born within this age bracket, you are age grade, or age mates. This is the culture we met
From age thirty, you people will begin to align yourselves by having meetings, doing little contributions and having registration fees and every little others. Activities performed include identification of yourselves and anyone amongst you that lost someone, or any member that dies, participating in weddings of your members as a group of growing age grade or age mates. We value ages and their alignments in sections of the village or in the general meetings, every member must belong.
Doing certain community repairs or creating new developments in the villages, we don't totally depend on government to develop our villages or communities, if government does, it's ok,...if they don't, still ok, we fortify our communities, having vigilantes to guard our villages and communities in the day and at nights. The anouncement usually comes from the king's palace that so and so age grade should be on guard in the village from this time, to this other time.
If you did not participate with your own age grade, you will pay fine for your own fault. This one is for men in all age groups that are resident in the villages. But in our general or sectional meetings both men and women come together to participate in every aspect of the involvements. We know ourselves and each other. If you fail to come, you will pay fine.
There's a significant celebration for everyone members of every age grade at their 65 years of age on the earth. This is a significant age of retirement from the active village services and performances. The king and his cabinet members and the village in a whole will do what we call general age grade birthday for all the members of that particular age grade at this age limit
Community retirement from active service, in my dialect, it's known and called. Ipu Ogo Igboto nma, Ikpa Ota Omu. These three names I mentioned here are referring to the same thing. Community age grade retirement/ an age grade community birthday celebration
At this point, the king of the village known as "Eze Ogo" and his cabinet members will allocate a particular project for them to start and finish by this very age grade for their final community active service retirement from the village. This very age grade will now cost the project, share the amount of the cost in an equal proportion to everyone of the age grade, they will contribute money and perform the job.
It could be the construction of a new road, building class rooms for the schools in the village or any, controlling an errotion menace or any project at all that will benefit the village and help to develop the village and the entire villagers and everyone.
It's a glorious birthday celebration by everyone in the village and in the respective communities, to show them appreciation of being alive, and going through all hurdles of life to come up to this age of retirement to celebrate with your beloved age mates.
Everyone is excited and extremely happy for them
They will have two or three types of uniforms to wear on those particular events that lasts two days, at 31st December of that very year and on the first day of the in coming year, that's first January of the next new year. On the 31st December, the whole age grade members that were able to complete their own portion of the share monies for the construction of any projects given them by the king and his cabinet members, we be on their agreed uniform attires and march through every hooks and cranny of our village with joy, music and trumpet blaring, people will come from wherever they're celebrating them, their families friends and well wishers they had invited would come home celebrating and dance with them giving them money as gifts of joy. It's a very beautiful occasion. Pictures and videos everywhere.
Early in the morning on the first day of January of the new year, they will build a little castle in a little space in the frontage of their houses, with a typical cloth wrapper known as gorge material as canopies, the hang the picture flex of the celebrant or , hang their enlarged picture for identification, put music or a life band making serious music, cooked all kinds of food, drinks, people will be coming to dance eat, give them gifts celebrating with them as they also will give you some gifts back
This is that very day everyone is focusing on, expecting and excited about. It's a phenomenal day, a day of jubilation, a gifting day, they give to you and you give them whatever you have come with, it's a joyous day of great celebration, you keep going around the village visiting your loved ones that are among them because before this particular date, you would have been told about it, they will be sending invitation cards to their loved ones, families and friends. Even our indigenous people in diaspora do come back to to join in this community/ village age grade general birthday celebration
Some families do gifts their loved ones cars, money, all kinds of reasonable gifts and the celebrants will give you as well good gifts in return and with joy that you have come to appreciate them on this excellent and exceptional moment of their joy reasons being that they are alive both to participate and to retire with their own age grade
This monumental occasions happens every two years. In the olden day they usually celebrate it in every seven or five years but has been reduced to only every two years. When the celebrants are still strong and very capable to perform this lovely community ceremony.
Thank you all the members of this awesome community, I especially thank the admin of this community and his team members for all they have been doing.
This is the cultural heritage from my own community, we are excited to have such a very rich culture.
See you all in my next blog, thank you all and let's keep engaging with one another.
All pictures are mine, captured with my Tecno spark 8 phone. This is me signing off,
@ijebest