The difference between pikins and children

photo credit: google

I once heard my former roommates, Tomi and Igbagbo discussing the difference between pikins and children. Their main point was that children are the kids that look very healthy and are well dressed, they are likely to be intelligent, precocious and well behaved. Then they might not necessary be beautiful but their other features would compliment them.

Tomi concluded that that is not the case with the pikins, as according to her, they are usually unhealthy, bad speakers of English, dirty and ugly looking as even if some are beautiful, the dirty clothes they wear and the unsavory way they speak would be a turn-off.

She also talked about the difference in the games they play. Children play cool games on their phones, laptops, they skip and make cool jokes while pikins play with sand, run up and down the neighborhood dirty and only come back to look for their parents when they are hungry.

Their discussion was captivating and I stopped what I was doing to listen.

After that day, I did not even think about it until I watched a movie today where they juxtaposed between the two terms.

I decided to flashback to my former roomate' discussion. Here is Igbagbo's version.

She claimed that one busy Saturday, she had to go teach at a home class for two hours, and then head to her hairdresser's place to make her hair.

When she was done teaching, she went to see her hair dresser, but she was not around. There was a small hair dresser's shop near, so she decided to go since she would not have the chance to do so the next week. People call her Mummy Sayo.

While making her hair, she saw the way the woman's kids were displaying and she could not help but compare them to the kids she tutored.

She claimed that the difference between them was just like that of Leolpord Sedar Senghor's "New York" where he explored the difference in the lives of the white people of Manhattan and the Black people of Harlem.

photo credit: google

The set of children she taught were sweet smelling, precocious, polite and suave. Then as she was about to leave, their mother asked them what they would have for lunch, and they requested for Fried rice and chicken, but their mum said she was too busy to prepare it. They later opted for noodles and egg.

Although there was nothing so special about what they asked for, her point was that the so called pikins only eat food like that on special occasions like their birthdays, Christmas, New Year and Easter.

To buttress her point, as she was making her hair and thinking about all these, Sayo came to meet his mother claiming that he was hungry. At first, she pretended not to hear him, but when he started crying, she told him to go take cassava flakes (locally known as garri) as that was what his other siblings ate.

He was like, "ah! garri, garri all the time" He started crying that he wanted to eat chin-chin.

After begging for it for over ten minutes, she gave him #10 to buy it.

He angrily requested for #50 as he was very hungry, but she told him that was all she could afford. This made him cry.

He kept looking at his mother, and when he saw that she would not give him more, he combined his crying with rolling on the floor.

Igbabgo said she wanted to give him the money, but his mother instructed her not to, claiming that she would not always be around to indulge him, so he should learn to be contended with what she has.

He kept crying, till he became exhausted and slept on the floor with teardrops on his dirty face.

At that time, her phone rang which interrupted the discussion. She left the room and I forgot all about it, till I watched the movie.

What I think: I believe that children are blessings from God, and are the same everywhere. So regardless of if they are born with a silver spoon in their mouth or not, they should not be stigmatized.

What do you think?