Raising African Children: USA Or Africa?
BY CHRIS ONUORAH-(AFRICAMESSAGE)-Africans living in the United States are confronted these days with a serious
question. Where is the right place to raise their children who were born in the U.S.A?
Africamessage.com interviewed several Africans who are facing this dilemma. Their responses showed a preference to
send their children back home at a certain time during their teens. But exactly at what age was a matter that most
could not agree on.
“You would need to raise your child in the environment that would achieve the best results,” Kahdija Williams told
africamessage.com. Miss Williams is a 43 year old Sierra Leonean single mother who raised her two children here in the
United States. Her teenage daughter and son made it through high school without getting into too much trouble in
their Baltimore, Maryland neighborhood.
Williams is proud of the job she did without the benefit of a live-in father for her children. But she regrets the absence
of a strong African identity in them. The two speak no African language and often fail to display the strong sense of
discipline and humility for which many of their peers raised in African are well known.
Children are easily exposed to the ubiquitous pop culture which America offers through the multiple channels of mass
communication. This is amplified by the pervasive presence of peer pressure which children encounter with the first
step they take outside their home.
For these and other reasons, Mrs Emiliah Umoh and her husband Robinson struck early, sending their eight and five
year old sons to live with their grandparents in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The Umohs have a one year old daughter,
Idara who plays alone in their Upper Darby, Pennsylvania home. It is hard to tell if she knows that she has two elder
brothers – Eno Obong and Edidiong.
Mrs Umoh misses her kids and would have them back if she could. She cried, (of course), when she and her husband
bade them farewell in Nigeria during a long Christmas visit last winter. But she could not deny the gains of this peculiar
arrangement. The boys are doing very well in school. They are now speaking their parents’ native Ibibio language. And
discipline rates very high on their score cards. Their time away also gave Robinson the extra time he needed on his job.
Even so, his wife who is pursuing a degree in medicine also went to graduate school in another discipline.
“Discipline is very important in the life of a child,” declared George Subah, a Liberian special education expert who said
that he owes his life to his African upbringing. He insists that many African children raised in the United States have
become the victims of “two much freedom and too little discipline.” Because you cannot discipline your children for fear
of prosecution by the American legal system, Subah explained that many African teenagers are now deviant. Some of
the boys drop out of school and end up in jail while the girls become single teenage mothers.
The American school system has witnessed a running period of high drop-out rating. Records indicate that while
children are striving to go to school in Africa, 50 percent of American school children are now known to leave school
before they graduate.
Popular television show hostess Oprah Winfrey is currently funding a girls school in South Africa. But she is the target
of many American critics who believe that the disturbing rate of school drop-out in the U.S. should have inspired her to
invest her money right here. The billionaire icon defended her actions when she said that while most African kids and
parents she asked the number one thing on their wish list said: school, their American counterparts spiced their
answers with cell phones, i-pods, play stations or sneakers.
Most African parents told africamessage.com that they are not against their children joining the technology age that
America offers. They simply hope to separate the good from the bad. This is a balancing act which many African adults
living the United States cannot imbibe themselves. So does shipping their children overseas come as a ready excuse to
shirk their responsibilities?
Uzo Nkenke, a businessman and Systems Analyst who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his family insisted that
parents have a lot to do in how their children grow up.
“Children learn a lot from their parents,” said Nkenke, a Nigerian who believes in the power of language and teaching
children who they are at the earliest age. “You must communicate with them in your native language,” he added. “They
can pick the English language on their own.”
For Nkenke, sending children back home is not entirely right or wrong. Like Mrs Umoh, Nkenke is aware of the danger
of sending your children thousands of miles away where you cannot monitor them effectively.
Still, experts are concerned that raising children in an alien culture like America often leaves them rootless and
sometimes with an identity crisis. It raises the question of whether the children grow up seeing themselves as Africans
or Americans.
Samuel Oyamo told a hilarious but instructive story of children born into this situation who try to split the cake. “I am
an American,” they say. Then they add: “My parents are Africans.” Which, in a sense, is true.
You can become an American by birth or naturalization. You can also hold the dual or more citizenships of your birth
and those of your parents. But for Oyamo, the situation becomes disturbing when American children born to African
parents discard their African origins because they are ashamed of the negative portrayal of Africa and Africans in the
Western media. Oyamo, whose country, Kenya just came out of a bloody electoral process declared that the continent’
s leadership owes the African children in the Diaspora a thing or two that should help them admire the people and
places of their ancestry.
True, Africa has today gained notoriety for under-development, disease, poverty and civil strife. These problems do not
spark the urgency or curiosity to visit or resettle back home even among Africans who were born and raised there but
now live in the U.S. Instead, American cities are littered with African adults who have overstayed their welcome and lost
touch with their cultures and homelands.
Though all the negative stories about Africa’s backwardness are not entirely true, there is enough evidence that the
continent is yet to take it’s place in an ever-evolving and fast-developing world. The result is a creeping feeling that
things might never get better in many African countries.
For now, Tony Ogbonna and his wife Eucharia would do by applying a simple solution to a complex issue. They make it
a point to drop off their two young daughters in the homes of babysitters who speak their native Igbo language. To
this is the added incentive of the kids meeting and socializing with other children of a similar culture.
“Children learn a lot just by watching and listening,” said Eucharia on telephone from their Chicago, Illinois home. As
she explained the difficulties of joggling work and school, Ijeoma, her two year old daughter was making a racket in the
background, her little but loud voice screeching enough to drown out the conversation.
“Ijeoma!” yelled mother to child. ”Mechie onu!” The baby got the message and kept quiet. Perhaps it was the addition
that daddy would hear as soon as he came home from work that did the magic. But this Nigerian couple strongly
believe in the efficacy of language and discipline.
Language, culture and discipline, according to Sarha Abdelgadir, are just a few of what Sudanese children living in
America need. And these are among the items on the agenda of a special school she said is serving the Sudanese
community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. Here, she said, children are taught Arabic language and Sudanese culture.
This school is similar to Chinese and Indian educational institutions spread all over the United States. The schools are
providing a great deal of support to the Asian families who have done a lot to raise their children with strong Asian
personalities. Many were surprised by the recent revelation by Sanjaya Malakar, the Indian-American boy from Seattle,
Washington who made a big splash on the pop show American Idol last year. Asked if he was following this season’s
episode, Sanjaya said no. At 18, he explained that his Indian parents still won’t allow him to have a television set in his
bedroom. His greatest pre-occupation at this time? To get a college degree!
Even so, the question remains, at what point should children born in the U.S.A. be raised back home in Africa, if at all?
The overwhelming agreement, africamessage.com found, is that children should do high school back home. According
to Subah, children learn habits fast between the ages of one and ten. They also forget as fast as they learn at this
stage of their development. Anything they learn up to high school graduation often sticks with them and helps to form
their lasting personalities, psychology says.
Most of the respondents believe that families should enroll their children in boarding schools in Africa because part of
the serious problems in the American school system is that students going to school from home find it hard to see the
line between home and school. Boarding schools in the U.S., they added, are not bad. The one draw-back is that they
are too expensive.
Mohammed Binda explained that the two thousand dollars he spends a year for his daughter’s boarding school
education in Ghana is nowhere near what it costs in America. Most of all, they neither teach African languages or
cultures in American high schools. These, he said, are two important parts in the early formation of the human being
that he would not want his daughter to miss.
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