IS AFRICA WORKING HARD TOWARDS “NO MANS LAND”?

I am not exactly part of the old generation considering that am in my earliest 30s. Looking back at how I was brought up, social morals were passed on by my grandmother, uncles, aunties and parents through storytelling and these stack.

Looking at today’s Africa, it looks like children sitting with a grand ma and listen to her stories is becoming less and less and TV and games are much more interesting. Reading a book or watching is what at most the children can constrictively do in their past time

Africa was mainly an oral education kind of society where one on one conversation and stories, knowledge was passed on to the next generation. Due to this, among other factors not many of African stories in which African social morals were passed on are published let alone documented or even enacted in dramas or films? To me, it looks like they are too minimal. Not even those little details about the history that makes us are documented.

Western media has affected these local values that were mainly passed on through traditional art forms like

•        Poetry
•         Story telling i.e. legends, myths, pebbles, riddles, proverbs...
•      Traditional dances (today traditional dances that are still exisistent lose their originality with each passing day in the name of creativity, without the care to preserve the original somewhere for future reference and intact history)
•         Drama
•         Music etc

Today TV morals are way contrary to the values of unity, oneness, respect, and justice...the youth today must almost die to belong, starve to suit the standard beauty as defined by the fashion TV. Adapt fashion clothing that does not necessarily match their own society values and so end up being judged and all that comes with it. Most youth in Africa now have become strangers in their own land; they don’t know their roots to the point of basics like language. What is even worse is that they don’t know even that TV culture they want to belong to. In America, they are strangers and in Africa they are even more strangers.

Question that puzzles me is

If the youth in Africa allow Hollywood to define their way of social life, considering the difference between America and Africa in all ways, is this TV life style, realistically achievable for these African youth? Is it sustainable? Is it worth striving for at the expense of our own? Or will we finally realize we are straining and can’t make it when it is too late to achieve any? We can’t be American enough and we can’t return to our home values and social lifestyle because neither did we preserve it nor ....then what? Is there anything like no man’s land in life where such breed of a generation can belong?

Note: OPEN to debate and share any information that disapprove of or are for this thought and observation shared. Let us together contribute to the time capsule and peep into the future of African cultural values.