Before the Drums Go Silent: Why Nigeria’s Heritage Needs Saving Now
By Empress Ewa
Every culture tells itself it will last forever. Ours is no different. Yet somewhere between the village square and the smartphone screen, something has been quietly slipping away: the proverbs our grandparents spoke without thinking, the festivals that once gathered whole towns, the fabrics and masquerades and songs that carried who we are.
Nigeria is home to more than 250 ethnic groups. That is not a statistic; it is a library. Each language carries knowledge no textbook has ever fully recorded, about medicine, farming, marriage, grief, joy, and the proper way to greet an elder. And when a language or a custom disappears, we do not simply lose a word or a dance. We lose an entire way of understanding the world.
The threat is not invasion and it is not foreign. It is forgetting. Our children can name a dozen foreign celebrities but cannot name their own ancestors beyond a generation. Our festivals survive as hashtags long after their meaning has faded from memory. A young man in the city may know the lyrics of American songs by heart yet struggle to recite a single praise poem of his own people. Culture that is not passed on does not die loudly. It dies quietly, one unlearned song at a time.
Consider what we stand to lose. The Yoruba have a worldview so rich in philosophy that a single proverb can settle a dispute that a courtroom would struggle with. The Igbo carry an entrepreneurial and democratic spirit woven through age-grade systems older than many modern parliaments. The Hausa-Fulani built centres of learning whose manuscripts still reward anyone patient enough to read them. The Tiv, the Efik, the Ijaw, the Edo, the Nupe, the Igala, the Yagba, each holds stories, skills, songs and recipes that exist nowhere else on earth. This is not smallness. This is civilisation in hundreds of voices.
And yet heritage has always had enemies: time, migration, modern pressure, and now the endless scroll of digital entertainment. An elder who dies without recording her stories takes a chapter of our history with her. A dialect spoken by a shrinking circle of old people is a candle burning down in a dark room. We mourn languages the way we mourn people, because in truth that is what they are.
But there is hope, and it is not a borrowed hope. The same technology that distracts us can preserve us. The phone in a young Nigerian’s pocket is a recording studio, a library and a printing press. A grandmother’s story can be filmed in the evening and watched by her great-grandchildren decades later. A dialect can be documented word by word before its last speakers are gone. Festivals can be archived in full, not just in fifteen-second clips. Communities separated by distance can gather around their own culture online the way their ancestors once gathered around the fire.
Preservation is not nostalgia, and it is not opposition to progress. A people who know where they came from stand taller wherever they go. Identity is not a cage; it is a root. The tree that grows tallest in the forest is the one anchored deepest in the soil.
So what can an ordinary person do? Plenty. Record your parents and grandparents while you still can. Learn your mother tongue well enough to joke in it, because a language that is only spoken in the kitchen is already fading. Attend the festivals of your people and learn what each dance means, not just how it looks. Cook the old recipes. Wear the traditional attire with pride, not only on the days it is expected. Write down the family names and their meanings before no one remembers to ask.
Our heritage survived slavery, colonisation and the pressures of a modern world. It would be a terrible irony if what it could not survive was our own indifference.
The drums do not have to go silent. But they will, unless we choose to keep them playing. And that choice belongs to every one of us, today, in our homes, in our speech, and in what we decide our children will inherit.
The time is now.
Written by Empress Ewa. For enquiries, call 08024242392.
