A Case of Different Strokes for Different Folks

We don't often realize how our children become urbanized until something comes up. 

The other day I was taken aback when my fifteen year old kid, Nasir Ahmad, who has lived in my Katsina home with his mother since he was born, told me he had never been to farm and he had never seen, live, farmers tilling the land: he only sees them in films and videos. He was, naturally, fascinated when we went to my farm in my home town and saw things physically. And early in the morning when we were going to the mosque, Nasir saw my car and the grass all covered up by dew and wondered whether it had rained while he slept at night. When I told him it was dew, he didn't know what it was. 

On the other hand, my other children who live with their mother in my country home in my home town, have become used to that since I turned farmer last year. They, too, were no less exhilarated when they started going to the farm with me last year. 

I had often told them stories of how, as a child, I used to accompany my dad, together with my siblings, like Abdulrahman Barau, to the farm and my dad used to pay us for participating in planting the seeds. They also wanted me to allow them do it by themselves. They were similarly amazed at the stories I told them of how we used to climb the mango trees and pluck the ripe fruit. They wanted to do a similar thing, but unfortunately, there were no mango trees in my farm. 

But because I grew up in the country side where everyone went to the farm, I took such things in my stride and for granted. What used to fascinate and greatly interested me and which I yearned to do was live in an urban area. I used to, very much, envy my cousins whose fathers were civil servants and used to be transferred from city to city. 

I remember when one of my cousins, late Mansir Muhammad, elder brother to Prof. Ahmed Mohammed of BUK, who came to Bakori on holiday, from Riyom or Numan, where his dad worked, spoke odd Hausa, very unlike a native speaker. He wanted to report his younger brother, Mukhtar, who had picked a horse tail and was playing with it, and he said in that peculiar accent, "Muntari ya doka maku suliyan doki"...🤣🤣🤣. We really teased and laughed at him because he couldn't speak Hausa as a native speaker did. 

Those were the kinds of things I yearned for as a child, very much the opposite of what my children now yearn for.