Showing posts with label French flag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French flag. Show all posts

Oct 9, 2021

Understanding France’s Social Character

French Flag
When I was a student, my French lecturer invited me to the field to answer, by practical demonstration, a question I had asked. I invited my closest friend. We had become riveted by the love of music.

We were still adolescents in our mindsets. Hence, the issue of music came in. My friend proposed to come along with a mobile cassette tape player. We would play Fela’s classical Afro Beat while in the field. Fela is the inventor of Afro Beat, which fuses Jazz and southwestern Nigerian music rhythms.  

When the French man heard it, he welcomed the idea, pointing out that Fela was very popular in Europe (he must have noticed Fela was not all that popular in Nigeria.)

While reading Time Magazine, an article referred to the highly social character of France. It was the statement that kept resonating in my mind, the picture still not getting clear to me, nevertheless.

I am an avid fan of international news. Radio France International is one news source I embraced. I noticed that each time there was an interlude, there was a good chance Afro Beat would be played.

I once watched a video of Ara performing somewhere in France. She is a Nigerian female music artist who carved a niche as a woman that plays the talking drum. As a Nigerian, playing to the French music fans a genre one would have considered exotic and obscure, the fans danced vigorously as if it was their invention.

Finally, when Emmanuel Macron became French President, he visited Nigeria. In his itinerary, there was going to be a visit to Fela’s shrine in Nigeria. He lived up to his travel plans. That was when, at last, the total picture of France’s profound social character became clear to me.

While in secondary school, we had a skewed understating of the word, “social.” To us, one who was social was him with a profound love for western music. Imagine the depth and enormity of our ignorance. We were to understand that one who is social is he who can tolerate and live with exotic cultures, no matter how remote they must have come from. Along this line, it is not America, as our ignorance had made us believe. It is France.

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