Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), was a must watch station in my family while growing up in the late 90's and the early early 2000's before we acquired cable televison.
Even though my brother and I did not like how my father made us watch the network news every night at 9p.m when we'd rather be sleeping, we got used to it eventually. However, we caught our own fun from the many educative and entertaining soap operas which were aired daily.
But my favourites were Super Story and This Life both produced by Wale Adenuga(MFR). They showed Thursdays at 8p.m and Tuesdaya at 5p.m respectively.
Half of the time, these drama series were so scary as they were culled from true life tragedies, cultural taboos, epic stories, myths and legends.
My cousins and I used to scare each other silly with some of the soundtracks from these stories at night when there was no power supply.
Because Nigeria has so many ethnic groups with over 250 indigenous languages each with its own peculiarities and myths, I thought the producers of those soap operas could never run out of storylines for their drama series. I still think so.
One of the drama series from This Life titled Two Gone... Still Counting was an adaptation from a novel by Oyindamola Affinnih and it has stuck with me till now.
It is about one of the cultural taboos of the yoruba people that states that a child strapped to its mother's back must never fall. If a male child falls he will lose his wife at adulthood and if its a female child, her lover will die on top of her when she grows up to have one.
The ritual to avert this curse is for the mother to walk round a highly populated marketplace naked at daytime when activities were at its peak.
This was too much for me to wrap my young mind around then but it's interesting, don't you think?
With the way African mothers carry their babies on their backs so that they can go about their domestic activities freely, it is easy for such accidents to occur especially when the wrapper isn't firm enough.
If the baby survives the fall isn't the consequence of this ghastly mistake too much as stipulated by the yoruba people?
Some of these beliefs have gone extinct but some others have survived in the minds of many till now like this one.
What do you think about this particular belief?☺
