Whenever I hear the word "culture," one of the things that first comes into my mind is music, then attires. For generations, music has been used as a way of cultural identity.
By one's dancing step and by the sound of the musical instrument, identity can easily be recognized even without the person uttering a word.
For someone like me, music was responsible for some of the things I know about my people. Through old songs that some of our ancestors made, I asked questions. During music and dancing festivals, I ask questions when I see or hear a word from a song and I get answers.
Music somehow stored that information for generations and luckily I benefited from it.
A lot of things about our cultures would have perished, a lot of historical events would have vanished as though they never existed if they were not captured in music.
In my culture, there are songs that are based on the stories of some heroes of our land, what they did, and even how they met their ends.
Songs like these preserve culture. Imagine songs were not made to store those histories, they would have been forgotten because, in the era of our ancestors, education was not a common thing, and some of them didn't know how to write some of those things down.
Some people think music is just for entertainment but it's far beyond that, it might be so in our day but in the days of old, music was a means of education and storing information for future generations.
Everything captured in cultural songs, from dancing to the sounds and the song itself has a history attached.
My dad used to play a particular tribal song everyday, I got tired of it and decided to ask why he loves the song and to my surprise, he started telling a story.
I thought it was just a song like any other, all I was hearing was the sound of a traditional song and a strange language because I didn't understand a word from the song. I never knew it was such an expensive song.
Messages were packaged in songs by our predecessors and today we are learning from them. Funny enough, our children and the next generation will also come and meet them. The advantage music has over every other means of storing history is that other things can be destroyed but music is almost eternal, almost indestructible.
If you search, you can find songs sung thousands of years ago. Unless no one learns that song, if not, it will always be alive.
There are several ways music preserves our culture that I can't exhaust talking about.
One thing that still keeps me in awe is how you would barely hear a cultural song that is exactly like another, you would never see any cultural dance and style of beating musical instruments alike, and sometimes even the musical instruments differ.
This makes it very easy to differentiate one culture from the other. No matter the similarities in tongues, their music and dance is always different.
We have over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria yet their music is not the same, their dances are not the same, and the way they beat their musical instruments also differs.
If not for music, there would have been a mix up in a lot of things. Our ancestors probably considered these things and created a musical pattern for us to follow.
Today, anyone can detect their culture when their song is played, that's a great plus for us. With the diversity in culture through music, it would be easy for anyone to familiarize themselves with any culture and be able to spot the differences.