The Crisis of Identity

In a world where identity is the definer of inner peace, not knowing who exactly you are can be a truly excruciating social pain.   When a child is born, he wants to be told who his father and mother are. Having a mother without a father figure in the picture of things spoils the entire world of the African child. This is because most African societies are patrilineal and knowing who your father  demystifies your roots and makes a clear definition of your clan lineage.

      A boy will most likely identify with the past heroes of his clan because he knows that indeed, that is where he belongs.  In my village, there are kids whose identities have been stacked away in mystery by their mothers for some unknown reasons and these kids have grown up without ever knowing their biological fathers. These are kids who have no heroes to sing about. They know life without a father reduces them to bustards and that is a very insulting reference which no boy child can take without heartache.

      My best childhood crony, Denis grew up into a real man with kids of his own before he discovered his father. He was a stout,quiet mechanic who had carnal contact with Denis’s mother but thought that was the end of his responsibility. We went to the same neighborhood primary school with Denis and played football, hide and seek, athletics and wrestling together. The difference I noticed between those of us who lived with our fathers around us and this young man Denis, was that the reference about our fathers came quite freely both in words, mental direction and our other concerns.  He appeared subdued and generally reluctant to pursue topics about fathers because he had no idea who his father was and his mother would not divulge the clues about this fact.

      His mother tried in vain to play the double role of mother and father. She would provide for Denis’s needs, but somehow, Denis still felt he wasn’t at home. His misery would escalate when other kids derided him over his unknown identity. These remarks such as “whose son are you?”….. would physically and mentally deflate his ego.

      He was a great wrestler who was no match to any boy his age, but each time he threw down an opponent in wrestling contest, instead of earning praise and honor, the defeated opponents would throw up the remark, “whose son are you?”  At this point Denis would simply cry and I was always there to console him, sometimes without success.

His relationship with his mother was worsening because Denis never wanted to live without knowing his father. In 1986 when the war broke out in the North, Denis was a father of four kids and  had two wives. He was displaced into a garage of a stout well-built man whom he was meeting for the very first time.

      The man gave him shelter and probed who his mother was and where he came from. After those questions, Denis was shocked to learn that his host, a mechanic owning a garage knew his mother rather too closely and he tried to investigate more about this man. As it turned out, Denis, in a most unexpected way, discovered his father at a garage workshop. He was well received by his father-he lived happily with him till his premature death in 2003 and by his death-bed was his loving father.

I am quite sure he died having resolved his crisis of identity. Many other children are not this lucky. They never get to know from whose loins they found their existence. Some mothers are so brutish that they simply throw their one-day-old kids into the garbage bins. Dogs devour some while others get picked by humanitarian folks who convey them to orphanages. With this category, they neither know their mother nor father. They are  completely kinless mortals who keep wondering how they came to be such rootless individuals on this planet. They live with the crisis of identity till they die and this hurts so deeply.