The Greatest Of All Childhood Lies | Read Your Books So You Can Be Rich

I was literally laughing out loud when I saw this prompt just now because It make me remember how my childhood was and how we had to live with lot of things that I will call absurd, like I was even wondering how our parents, elders and even our teachers came up with such ridiculous lies just to scare us or make us do some certain things we plan not to do. We even thought as a child, we were doing the normal things, adhering to the societal and cultural norms, as a Yoruba boy, we started hearing this things right from when we started crawling, we all know how troublesome babies are at times, before they start crawling, they are the sweetest soul except the crying part but once they start crawling, they will make sure they crawl to every point of the house, even scatter things or touch what shouldn't touch, there are things said to scare the baby like when he want to touch something that is hot or not, they will say jo jo (burn burn) and immediately the baby wont touch it, I really don't know how we manage to understand that words as a baby, from there they will start saying ojuju calaba (like a scary spirit) just to prevent us from going somewhere in the dark, this actually made me scare me a lot especially after we watch a scary movie and my mum send me to bring something from the room at night when there is no light, I will be scared to go and at times I have to open the door wide, run inside and run out so the imaginary spirit won't catch me.

Or was the lies that we shouldn't eat while standing so that the food won't go down to our leg or we shouldn't just spit anywhere so that we won't have sore throat if someone mistakenly step on it. Even though they said those white lies, I believe it was to caution us from doing certain things, but the Greatest of all this lies was when they told us to "Read our book so we can wear sounding shoe and have an easy life", everyone have hear this in one way or the other even in school, it was the popular statement our teachers do tell us if we are slacking behind in school. They even form different songs to back it up and made us sing it all the time especially during assembly time, I would love to write the lyrics but I was able to search the song on youtube and find one so I will be sharing it here