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Description

Digital Story from the Bawso Stories Project. In this story, Cynthia describes customs of respect between generations in Ghana and reflects on the differences with how things are in the UK.
 
English transcript: I’m from Ghana, the north side. The life back home is different than here. What I see here is a child five years, four years, a child can always speak about his mind, what he sees. Your mother do something that you don’t like, here the child will say to Mummy no, no, no. Back home, you can’t. Back home you can call my name. If you are older than me, you can call my name. But, if somebody is older than me, I can’t just call your name.
 
The tradition back home is to respect elderly people, and if you come to greet an elderly person, you can’t just stand and you say good afternoon or good morning, no, you have to bow down. You go down on your knee and you greet, good morning, good afternoon. You have to bow down and greet. You can’t just come and stand and say good morning or good afternoon, that means you don’t respect the person that you are greeting. If it’s like your colleague, you can just greet, oh good morning, good afternoon and walk in. But elders you have to bow down on your knees and greet. That person will say, or like in my language we would always say Gaafara. If they say Gaafara, it’s get up. That means the person answer the greeting, and you can just get up.
 
White people always say that everybody in Africa is our sister. It’s true. It is the way we grow there. A man, I will just say brother. A girl, a woman, I will say sister. The older ones I will just say mama. The way we grow in our family, it’s a large family, so if they are preparing food for us to eat, we, the girls, they always separate us. We eat together in one room, and the boys too also eat together in one room. So, the women, they’re like our mothers, they also come together. If they cook different, different food, they’ll come together and sit in one place. You will eat from somebody, somebody will also eat your food, that’s what they are doing. Even we, the children, I will bring my food, and someone will also bring his mother’s food. We will come together, sit down together and eat. The way that they told us is that if we are eating together like that, like we can have love with each other as a family. But if they separate us and your mother will cook and you eat your mother’s food alone, we can’t be together helping each other or love with each other. So African culture is different. I would say Africa, my side where I’m coming, my culture is different, Nigeria’s, other countries’ culture is differ

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