A Culture of Blame and Acceptance By Lauretta Onwuegbuzie

Stop the blame game. Stop! Stop looking out the window and look in the mirror! – Eric Thomas

I believe that people are either made or destroyed by the beliefs that they have, and the mentality that they choose to embrace. What we don’t often realize is that, in the little things we overlook, we have unconsciously built a negative culture, normalized and rationalized as “acceptable”. Sadly, this has caused us more harm than good.

Particularly, I want to talk about the blame culture in our Nigerian, and in fact African society. To illustrate what I mean, let me tell you about my first encounter with this blame culture. It was while cooking with my mum when I was much younger, and I had cut myself with a knife. The first thing my mum said to a 10-year old me was, “What were you looking at?”. Yes you might say that it was just a question, but the mentality in which this question is rooted is very faulty. I wasn’t looking at anything but what I was doing, unfortunately for my finger, a miscalculation of some sort let me to cut myself. It was a mistake and it happened by no fault of mine.
She rarely ever told me “sorry”. Sometimes she would just leave me to deal with the pain saying “it will go it’s normal” and probably give me advice or some ointment to make it go away.

Only after deep thought from maturity did I understand that, this small experience is only a small shadow of the blame culture we practice in our society. There are many other instances I can give. A common one is when a woman’s husband begins to have an affair. The question that is often on people’s lips (even though this is gradually changing) is “what did you do to him?”, or they say things like, “you must have offended him in some way”, “maybe you’re not doing something right” etc

My point is this, instead of helping a person going through pain, by being empathetic and sympathetic if need be, society always finds a way to blame him or her for going through their present predicament.

Another typical example, is society’s response to rape victims who are more often than not ladies. Instead of being empathetic with them after they share their stories and help them overcome the fear and trauma that comes with the horrid experience, we question them brutally. We do this to the point of even saying that their claims are false and malicious, even when we KNOW that these things are possible and they do happen. Some people ask silly questions like “what were you wearing?”, “Why did you go there alone?”, “Why didn’t you scream?”. As if to say it was the victim’s fault!

The worst one for me is the pain that some women still have to endure in this 21st century under the guise of widowhood practices. Losing a spouse is traumatic enough and one should be entitled to deal with the pain in the way they see fit – this is only humane.

However such is not the case in “cultural” Africa. Together with dealing with the pain of loss, the widow has to engage in certain rites and traditions, often aimed at making her feel the impact of the loss she has suffered even more. Some people go as far as questioning the widows, accusing them of being bad wives when her husband, “their brother” was still alive, accuse her of having an affair which must have affected their brother “spiritually”, and a host of other crazy assumptions.

It’s a very pathetic situation and we are gradually getting to that stage where this blame culture has become very entrenched in even the little things we do. Instead of being more empathetic about people’s situation, we find a way to say that they should have known better and it’s their fault.

A lot of people go through things that we don’t really know about and it’s hard for them to talk about it. They find it difficult to express their hurt because society will find a way to blame them for what has happened, as if anyone deliberately plans to cause himself pain.

Maybe when we change this mentality we can now see, that blaming “corrupt” leaders for our woes as a continent is part of the culture of blame and acceptance. Now I’m not saying that we should be empathetic with corrupt leaders. The truth is that they were once like you and I, who blamed past leaders for the country’s failure instead of being proactive and solution oriented.

If we could do better as a society to restructure our mindset and direct it at helping to solve the problem instead of “blaming” another person for it, we will arm ourselves with a powerful weapon to lead the change we want to see, but if we don’t, then we will remain where we are.

It starts with you and I. Make a conscious effort to be a giver of empathy and a change agent in society today.