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Like I always say, it doesn’t matter if I’m the last man standing on what I perceive to be the truth. I’m sure, sooner or later, – with emphasis on sooner – it will be apparent to most right thinking people.
In my elementary school days, the African mother tongues were derogatively referred to as vernacular. So many teachers of those days collected fines from us for speaking our mother tongues.
It took people like the late Professor Babatunde Fafunwa and several others to insist that a mother tongue is not vernacular. They even proved that children learn better in their mother tongues.
Classifying children as illegitimate is another problem.
Let’s start with the copulation that turns into pregnancy. What’s the difference between the copulation of married folks and unmarried ones?
Okay!
Maybe the married people had their own copulation on the bed while the unmarried couples had theirs underneath the bed.
Let’s look at the product of the copulation. Even the word, ‘legitimate’, sounds so smart and legit. So, it legitimizes everything about the children of wedded couples.
But the other one, given birth to by couples who are not married sounds so dirty.
The spelling is reflective of the child’s crime for choosing to be given birth to.
Ill-egitimate: of course the child is not authentic. Not authentic because the meaning of illegitimate is something that’s not authorized by law.
But then, such children are also referred to as, love children. If it’s agreed that the opposite of love is hatred, does it then mean those born in wedlock are products of hatred?
I just thought we should reflect on these issues and decide in our own minds.
Added to that is the common feature of fathers discovering that children whom they wrongly thought their wives bore for them are actually the issues of different men. At least, visa lottery is exposing some.
My summary is that it’s blatantly wrong to label children born out of wedlock as illegitimate!
To me, it isn’t logical!!
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