God Does Not Make Stupid
Just because it’s spoken, or commanded, by someone who knows more than you does not mean it’s right!
I hated being called stupid, useless and worthless. I am not stupid, I am not useless, I am not worthless; I am not stupid, I am not worthless, I am not useless, I used to chant inwardly even as my uncle’s wife spoke the words out aloud. It wasn’t that I consciously understood what it meant to be so degraded on a daily basis. I just knew, despite being only eight, that I wasn’t the ‘nothing’ or ‘less than nothing’ that Aunty said I was.
It’s funny how children think. Whatever someone who forms the core part of their parenting feeds them on from the on-go is exactly what they will relate to as they grow. Still, even though my mother’s sisters used to refer to me as The Bold One back in our village, my refusal to accept being called stupid by my uncle’s wife was not because I myself thought I was smart — I was just a child, after all; children my age don’t go around thinking I am smart, I am smart, I am super smart. And certainly, it also wasn’t because my teachers back home used to answer ‘ intelligent and bubbly’ whenever they visited our home and my father asked how I was doing in school.
My subconscious was just transferring to my consciousness what it had been fed by those who formed the core part of my upbringing. And so, somehow, I knew I wasn’t stupid, useless or worthless for two reasons. Firstly, because my father was a strong opponent of negative (or curse) words. No matter how angry you were, none in our family was allowed to call another stupid, useless or whatever. That was ingrained in my siblings and me even before we could properly speak. So being told I was stupid, useless and worthless was totally alien to my upbringing. And for that reason, something in me rejected it whenever Aunty said it. Secondly, and maybe even more importantly, my subconscious was refusing to be labelled stupid because of something both my mother and grandmother used to say whenever they lectured us children about name-calling.
‘God does not make stupid.’ The two used to say.
My mother’s, father’s and grandmother’s — these were the three voices that moulded me from infancy until I went to Lagos at eight. Theirs were the foundational voices that allowed me to know, even at such an early age, that I was not stupid.
