By
Obododimma Oha
Community is you being with others. In other words, you have to enjoy their presence, learn from them, teach them, endure them, inspire them. Your creator desires that you be with or interact with others. That is like an experiment : let us see how one human being interacting with others would become.
That is very wise and exciting. One person alone is a great achievement. But one interacting with another is even a step forward. It is a greater achievement.
But humans are killing community. They have made all kinds of wicked rules to devour their kind. And what has been happening to community spirit? Even though some have been trying to bring it back, they are not succeeding. Many, especially young ones, have tried to escape to online platforms to see if they could reimagine community and recreate relationships.
But, can they escape? No. Their problems in real-life interaction have followed them. The online community is just fiction. With time, this type of community would cause us greater pain than before. It is one thing to idealize being with others and another thing to really be with others.
In the real world, tell some young people to phone or say howdy to their relatives. No way! Relatives? Do they tell me to avoid vehicles on the road? Ha na-achara m ụgbọ? Do these young ones belong to your village? Do they even speak your Mother Tongue, not to talk of your dialect? Is there any link in the chain?
There is warfare in the existing networks. War in every family. Families are torn apart. War and suspicion in the village. War in the town. War in the ethnic group. War in the country. Country? That one is obvious. Its community is no longer there! It is no longer a community.
So, it appears that people want to be divided. This one in Lagos, Nigeria. The other one in Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo and Lagos can no longer communicate, even though they have the convenient means. It is as if they agreed to cut ties.
There are also excuses. You are redeemed and your new religion says that you must not go near your kinsfolk. Only members of your religion are your kinsfolk now. Try to be rootless and ruthless to culture. So, you cannot belong to meetings. Meetings? Are they fellowships? Thus, we need to have religion as an important variable.
So, community has been dying really. It was not so in antiquity. You had or knew your uncles and aunties. That network is going, gone! And refugees have to move to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. They have to look for the living among the dead.
This is nostalgia, not a folktale. There was a time during festivals when the uncles and the aunties visited, with the several cousins. It was great joy and one was happy. The networks were serviced. The networks were working. One was alive.
Now, the networks are dead, only imagined. Hardly do uncles and aunties visit with the many cousins. Nobody services any relationship. Who would service a dead body? Is that person working in the mortuary?
Of course, we have human community in mind, but we know that humanity is not alone and is dependent on other communities. Humanity just has to understand this dependency and cooperate, instead of making other creatures its enemy.
One other important thing : this new life of preferring isolation to association seems to find support from the mobile phone. Somebody is in a privacy somewhere and hopes to be with the other or with the world. The person may even be crossing a busy road or in the market, but is alone. That is like being alone in a jungle! Anything could happen.
The excitement of sharing photographs of self and loved ones on Facebook and Instagram does not mean being with those in the photographs. It is an attempt to compensate for not being with them, for not appearing at the festivals in fine clothes to refjoice with the uncles and aunties and the many cousins. It is also an illusion and a nostalgia.
In your new privacy, nobody is qualified to tell you anything. You know everything and do not need any advice or counsel. Counseling was what they were doing in servicing the old network. Now, you are in the new network, free and isolated and fictional.
You do not need to be bothered at all. Even if you comment on Facebook or Instagram, it hide-and-seek and you are safe. Who knows whether you are not a virus unleashed on the world?
I know that some have tried to recongregate and form communities, using online platforms to weld membership. This is good but it is still fraught with problems. People still think that they have to exist alone.
Farewell, community. Humans now want to do without you. You belong to the past. You may relocate.
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