Myths and Truths
As we travel through life’s journey, the lesson we learn is that not most of the things we believed in are realities. Human beings as we know them seek to understand their surroundings and will usually interpret life by that surrounding. Life provides us with reality-truths- and then there are myths which seem actual conundrums and yet they are not.
Society has very many myths that assume a familiarity with the well known certainty. Such myths are then accepted as reality as they are said to convey "truth." Consider the following:
The Genesis of death
Myth: You have certainly heard some stories about how death came to the world. That the supreme god meant for humans to be immortal, but through an unlucky mistake, they received death instead of eternal life.
Some stories say god told a cautious chameleon to carry the news of eternal life to earth, but a faster lizard with news of death arrived first. While the Mende people of Sierra Leone for instance say that a toad with the message "Death has come" overtook a dog with the message "Life has come" because the dog stopped to eat along the way. Hence bad news is said to have reached humans fast.
Truth: According to biblical teachings, human beings pay for their sins through death. This is captured in the book of Romans 6:23 which states, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
Twins are a bad omen
Myth: in most African societies, many people regard twins as special, almost sacred, beings. Twins are a representation of duality—the tension or balance between paired or opposing forces—that is basic to life.
But some information I stumbled on recently made my hair stand on its end. It’s about the Malagasy people of Madagascar, astonishingly, the Malagasy people consider twins as taboo. They have a cultural superstition called fady which dictates that twins bring bad luck.
"Bad luck?" You sure must be asking. Yes, and it is such bad luck that families who are "unfortunately" feted with twins would have to get rid of one or both of them. In the event that the family refuses to do that, they are ostracized by their community.
I begin to hear you say, "These people are wicked!" And I sure share the same thinking. I am thinking: I want to keep my twins (that is if I am blessed with any) far, distant away from Madagascar.
The country is however implementing new efforts to change such backward beliefs. There’s a proposed legislation to give more powers to officials to intervene on behalf of parents and children to keep twins together in the same family.
Truth: Truth is, twins are not bad omen-they don’t bring bad luck- twins occur when two eggs are released and two separate sperms fertilize them. These are fraternal twins. Identical twins on the other hand occur when one egg is fertilized by one sperm, and during the zygote stage, the egg splits into two separate embryos therefore leading to two children who are the identical copy of each other. The same exact chromosome match. In the Malagasy case, I think somebody is finally waking up from a deep slumber.
Origin of elephants
Myth: There’s a myth among the Kamba that tells us how elephants originated. A poor man heard of lvonya-Ngia, (He that feeds the Poor.) He decided to take a long journey to find him.
On arrival, he saw uncounted cattle and sheep and Ivonya-Ngia, who received the poor man kindly, understood his need and ordered his men to give him a hundred sheep and a hundred cows.
The poor man declined saying he needed no charity. "I want the secret of how to become rich," he said. Ivonya-Ngia then gave him a flask of ointment saying: "Rub this on your wife's pointed teeth in her upper jaw, wait until they have grown, then sell them."
The poor man did as was told; he promised his wife that they would become wealthy. After some weeks, the canine teeth began to grow and when they had grown into tusks as long as his arm the man persuaded his wife to let him pull them out. He took them to the market and sold them for a flock of goats.
The wife's canine teeth had grown again few weeks later, now even longer than the previous pair, but she would not let her husband near them and near her body which became bigger and heavier, her skin thick and grey.
At last she snapped out of the door and into the forest, where she lived from then on. She gave birth to her son, who was also an elephant. Her husband visited her in the forest, but she would not be persuaded to come back and there she raised her children, all elephants. The Kamba believed that was the origin of elephants and hence the reason why elephants are as intelligent as humans.
Truth: The elephant is the world’s largest animal and is said to have evolved from an even bigger prehistoric mammoth which appeared millions of years ago. The mammoth is said to have roamed in great heard over Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. The oldest mammoth bones were discovered in India about four million years old. It became extinct at the end of the Ice age, and its only descendants-the elephant as we know them today-settled in Africa and southern Asia. But this is the evolution story. And of course you know the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:3, on the sixth day, "God created the animals to fill the earth. He also created man and woman (Adam
Boniface Manyala
Editor Watching Kenya
http://watchingkenya.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment