The Bastard’s Blunder: How The West Scorns Its Legacy
Across Africa’s vast land, where family bonds endure and ancestral wisdom guides, the West’s headlong stumble toward cultural and demographic oblivion evokes a mix of pity and prescience. Like a wayward heir torching his inheritance, Western civilization falters under the weight of dwindling births, unchecked immigration, and a bewildering embrace of homosexuality, transgenderism, and fractured families. From Nigeria’s vibrant heart, an ancient proverb rings true: “One shouldn’t be surprised if neighbours use his abandoned and neglected bowl as a refuse bin.” By forsaking its cultural heritage, the West invites chaos, prompting a question that echoes from Enugu to Maputo: can it reclaim its roots, or is its legacy doomed to crumble?
The numbers tell a stark tale. Western fertility rates languish at historic lows: 1.5 children per woman in the European Union, 1.6 in the United States, and a mere 1.3 in the United Kingdom, according to 2023 World Bank data. These figures fall woefully short of the 2.1 needed to sustain a population. By 2050, Europe’s working-age group could shrink by a quarter, warns Eurostat, leaving pension systems creaking like an old bicycle on a bumpy road. Japan, with its 1.2 fertility rate, has already shed 12 million souls since 2010. Contrast this with Nigeria, where a robust 5.2 fertility rate fuels a demographic boom, poised to make Africa the world’s population powerhouse by 2100.
Why this barrenness? The West’s affluent citizens, well-fed and unburdened by the daily scramble for food, prioritize careers, personal fulfillment, or fleeting pleasures over the messy joy of raising children. Marriage, once a sacred covenant, is now an afterthought. The US marriage rate has plummeted from 8.2 per 1,000 in 2000 to 6.0 in 2021, according to the CDC. Across Africa, where bride price and communal blessings bind families, such a retreat from marriage would spark village gossip fierce enough to drive the culprit to exile. The West, alas, lacks such corrective chatter.
Then there is the almighty immigration, which has transformed Western cities into kaleidoscopes of cultures, vibrant to some, disorienting to others. London, once a beacon of Britishness, now sees its White British population dwindled to 36%, down from 60% in 2001. Across the Atlantic, 14% of Americans are foreign-born, the highest since 1900. While immigrants fuel economies, contributing 16% of US GDP, according to a 2020 National Academies report, their rapid influx, often without robust integration, risks cultural fragmentation. As social scientist Robert Putnam notes, diverse communities can suffer lower trust, like a village where neighbors forget each other’s names.
In Africa, from Ghana’s Ashanti markets to Kenya’s pastoral plains, communal roles endure despite diversity. Yet in the West, newcomers and natives wrestle with identities that strain shared values. One might argue that immigration, absent a cultural anchor, turns heritage into a museum piece, admired, but no longer lived. The West’s abandoned bowl, left unguarded, becomes a receptacle for discord.
Most egregious, perhaps, is the West’s assault on the family unit, a cornerstone that holds African society firmer than any cement. Western laws seem crafted to scare men from marriage. Divorce, initiated by women in 70% of US cases, often leaves men stripped of assets, with alimony payments that could fund a small village. Custody battles favor mothers 80% of the time, according to the Census Bureau. No wonder 40% of American men under 30 view marriage as a trap, (2023 YouGov poll.
Worse still is the glorification of fractured families. Single motherhood, now at 40% of US births (70% in Black communities), is hailed as a badge of strength. The “baby mama” phenomenon, glamorized in music and media, normalizes children born outside wedlock, yet 50% of single-mother households live in poverty, compared to 15% of married ones (Census Bureau 2022). In Africa, where children are communal treasures, such trends seem a perverse parody of strength. The West’s neglected bowl festers, filled with the refuse of broken bonds.
Add to this the West’s obsession with redefining gender. Homosexuality, accepted by 72% of Americans (Pew 2020), and transgenderism, enshrined in laws from Canada to Germany, are framed as rights but strike this observer as luxuries of a society too full to fret over survival. In Nigeria, our cross-dressers don women’s wrappers for laughs, not to demand exemption from warrior duties or yam fields. The notion of a man claiming womanhood to shirk societal roles would provoke laughter so raucous it might wake the ancestors. Yet in the West, such claims spark legal battles and pronoun protocols. A 2024 Rasmussen poll shows 55% of Americans oppose teaching gender identity in schools, suggesting even the West tires of this dance.
The Igbo proverb: “It is only a bastard who points to his father’s compound with a left hand”, captures the West’s folly. Its heritage, once rooted in family, faith, and shared values, is now a punching bag for elites who champion multiculturalism, secularism, and identity experiments. Affluence fuels this drift; with GDP per capita 35 times Nigeria’s, the West can afford to debate pronouns while Nigerian farmers toil for daily bread. The West’s pride on individualism has becomes its Achilles’ heel for prioritizing self over society.
The West teeters, but it is not yet doomed. Pro-natal policies, like Hungary’s tax breaks that nudged fertility from 1.2 to 1.5, could revive families. Immigration, if paired with integration (think Canada’s points system), might balance economic needs with cultural cohesion. Reforming divorce laws to protect men and curbing the fetishization of single motherhood could restore marriage’s allure. Yet these require a cultural U-turn, toward values Africa cherishes: family, duty, heritage. Without it, the West risks a slow fade, its global share shrinking as Africa rises.
From Nigeria, the West’s woes are a cautionary tale. Our laughter at absurdities, our communal bonds, our respect for the father’s compound – these are not mere traditions but lifelines. The West might borrow a page from our playbook, lest it dance itself into oblivion. For now, we watch, we sow seeds, and we chuckle, knowing that a society that forgets its roots is like a tree without soil: it may stand, but not for long.
Mr. Ozogwu is an Abuja based public affairs commentator. He is the CEO of Derasoft Consulting, a tech firm that specializes in enterprise systems.
Disclaimer: This article is entirely the opinion of the writer and does not represent the views of The Whistler.
The Bastard’s Blunder: How The West Scorns Its Legacy is first published on The Whistler Newspaper
