What I heard while growing up but it all lies.
Like most Nigerian boys, I absorbed many supposed truths and words of wisdom during my childhood and teenage years. Elders, parents, aunties - everyone had nuggets of advice to share on how life worked. Some of it was helpful, but a lot of those teachings turned out to be half-truths or even complete fallacies.
For example, academics were stressed above all else. As early as primary school, my parents made it clear that getting perfect grades was my top priority. If I came home with anything less than the best test score, I would get lectured for hours about wasting my potential. My aunties also constantly reinforced that to succeed in life, I must be book smart and ace every exam.
So I buried myself in textbooks all through secondary school, often memorizing content just to earn top marks rather than deeply learning. I took advanced classes, stayed after school for tutoring - anything to keep up my flawless academic record. My family glowed with pride and praise over what an excellent student I was. In their minds, my straight As proved I was destined for great success in whichever career I chose.
You can imagine their shock when I scored poorly on the university entrance exams. Turns out excessive rote learning is not the same as true learning. In university itself, I actually struggled a lot that first year too. The brute force studying tactics I had relied on previously let me down. I realized academic success alone was an unreliable path to career success later on. There were big gaps in my functional, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
My family's narrow version of what "smart" looked like did me a disservice there. Of course education matters, but not merely to the exclusion of actually applying knowledge in real situations. I had to play catch up on those practical abilities in university through extracurricular projects and internships. I learned the hard way that the rigid academic path laid out for me since childhood was somewhat of an illusion.
Beyond school, the elderly also filled my head with traditional gender role expectations. As early as six or seven years old, family members told me straight up that my duty as an African man was to provide for a family someday. My career, financial success, community status - these were pre-determined to define my worth in society's eyes. Nobody ever asked what passions might genuinely interest me, only what prestigious job awaited.
At the same time, they prepared my sisters for motherhood and wifely obligations above all else. They learned to cook, clean, sew - training to make an honorable husband happy rather than dreaming big professionally. In my young mind, I assumed that was just the way of the world; traditional gender conventions seemed fixed.
Of course as an adult now, I see those norms for the limiting fallacies they always were. Plenty of women in my life work outside the home by choice today while men increasingly share caregiving duties. Rigid gender roles help nobody. Yet it鈥檚 still taking conscious effort for my generation to unlearn outdated social programming.
The illusion of effortless lifelong marriage also crumbled fast. As a blissfully ignorant child, I just assumed most couples stayed happily married forever. It was quite normal to attend 3-day elaborate Nigerian weddings growing up. Rarely did I stop to question whether the spark remained years later. My parents and aunties even bragged that divorce was shameful and nonexistent in our culture.
So imagine my dismay in university when I discovered nearly half of my Nigerian friends came from broken homes. Behind closed doors, far more couples suffered domestic troubles or went separate ways than our elders admitted. On the surface, staying married at all costs was preached. But the reality I learned later was much more nuanced.
There are quite a few other perspectives I internalized early on which life has since debunked. Of course I don鈥檛 blame my family, teachers and community elders for getting some things wrong. They simply passed down the same values taught to them. As I continue maturing, I鈥檓 learning to take useful bits of wisdom from my upbringing but also shape my own worldview. It鈥檚 an ongoing lesson that things are often not as black and white as they first appear through a child鈥檚 eyes.
Thank you so much for reading my post.
This is my response to Hiveghana prompt