Tɔgbuiawo: The Ancestors

People don't always get along well with their parents and quite frankly the responsibility usually falls on the parents.

Children don't come with instructions and we parents often make missteps in child rearing that we don't spot until it's too late to correct. That's life.

However, in Vodou the errors of the parents does not relieve the child of their filial obligations and why should it? Vodou is an ancestral practice; it makes no sense to observe an ancestral faith and revile your closest living ancestors.

So why do we revere our ancestors? Why is that important to us and doesn't this contribute to tribalism and racial bigotry?

It is not water's responsibility to keep mud off your shoes.

When people are conceived it's at the ancestors request by God's design. We are born so that they can can return with us and at the end of our sojourn we return with them if we've kept their rules and it is our parents who will advocate for us on that day.

This is by design. A chain of being that connects us all at the root even as we mirror the diversity of the world we inhabit. The Human family that can only be appreciated by seeing where we connect. In the blood.

Ancestry appears to separates us in time and space. Freezing these human stories in the genes and history of any given people, but as you push through the mists of time you find that we come from One People. These stories, histories, ancestries, are the language of blood of the One People's journey across the world and even our reach beyond it if we ever achieve it. Each story is important, and each individual is the custodian of their part of the story.

So even without the reality of the ancestor that comes with us when we are born, reverence of our Ancestors writes each of us as individuals and groups of people into the human narrative. It could be poorly explained so as to be used as a tool to divide us into competing tribes, but considered holistically it accentuates how human diversity is essential to our species and should be preserved as each hold the keys to survival under every conceivable condition in the world.