article on traditions heritage value and practices are roots Of a nourish
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We have heard comments that our cultures and traditions are old-fashioned; they hold back progress in nation building and that we should completely forget about them and adopt new ways of life. Some say they are ‘dirty’ and ‘primitive’. They are perceived as negative by the new generation. Adding on all these claims, a report by the Pacific Women Against Violence (Volume 1, Issue 10) stated that Pacific Islands cultures and unequal relationship between men and women contribute largely to violence against women in the region. But the report then challenges its own findings that domestic violence is an international problem that is thriving locally – not alone grown by Melanesian way of life.
Many of us do not agree with all these comments because some of us are living examples of what our cultures and traditions did for us when we were young. They helped us develop and mould our attitudes and characters to be productive, useful, purposely and progressive lives. Many of us reject immoral living and corruption, laziness and conning. Hunger for wealth, power and glory are unknown in our cultural and traditional ways of life. This is complemented by a jewel of thought coined by Thomas Burke: “I wish it would possible for every child to spend its first 10 years close to the soil, tracing the cultures and traditions. If I had had children of my own I would, at any convenience to myself, have moved to the country – in the village just enough to grasp the atmosphere of the practices of the cultures and traditions, and not alone for considerations of their physical health.
I would have them brought up in the country so that for the rest of their lives they should have had a mental background of the fields and trees and wide skies and the smell of the earth and the riches of cultures and traditions. Upon this basic culture all that they might later acquire would, I know, have grown more readily and more richly than it grows in the town child. The town child has no roots. He has quick brains, sharp moments, keen understanding of men; but he is an unfinished product.
“To have no cultural and traditional and country background to your memories is equal to having no education. Lover of town as I am, I realise that I owe a dept to my early country life. Again and again, in hours of disquiet, I have gone back in spirit to those country days of childhood, and have always found something in recollected smell of the earth and picture of my old village to rest upon”.
Many of us do not agree with all these comments because some of us are living examples of what our cultures and traditions did for us when we were young. They helped us develop and mould our attitudes and characters to be productive, useful, purposely and progressive lives. Many of us reject immoral living and corruption, laziness and conning. Hunger for wealth, power and glory are unknown in our cultural and traditional ways of life. This is complemented by a jewel of thought coined by Thomas Burke: “I wish it would possible for every child to spend its first 10 years close to the soil, tracing the cultures and traditions. If I had had children of my own I would, at any convenience to myself, have moved to the country – in the village just enough to grasp the atmosphere of the practices of the cultures and traditions, and not alone for considerations of their physical health.
I would have them brought up in the country so that for the rest of their lives they should have had a mental background of the fields and trees and wide skies and the smell of the earth and the riches of cultures and traditions. Upon this basic culture all that they might later acquire would, I know, have grown more readily and more richly than it grows in the town child. The town child has no roots. He has quick brains, sharp moments, keen understanding of men; but he is an unfinished product.
“To have no cultural and traditional and country background to your memories is equal to having no education. Lover of town as I am, I realise that I owe a dept to my early country life. Again and again, in hours of disquiet, I have gone back in spirit to those country days of childhood, and have always found something in recollected smell of the earth and picture of my old village to rest upon”.
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