A few nights ago, after a morning rain had washed the dust from the compound and left the earth dark and fragrant, I found myself standing alone beneath a light bulb gathering termites.
Read Also: World Cup and the fading republic of humanity, by Stephanie Shaakaa
At first, it felt like nothing more than coincidence, the kind of ordinary evening that does not announce its significance. But the longer I stood there, bowl in hand, watching the insects circle the light in restless clouds, the more it became clear that what I was doing was not really about termites at all. It was about something that had quietly slipped out of reach.
When I was growing up, a morning rain carried a meaning everyone understood without needing to be told. By evening, the winged termites would arrive in dense swarms around every bulb in the compound, and the entire place would change character. Children would drift out instinctively, carrying rusted tins, plastic bowls, basins and anything that could hold water and movement. Nobody coordinated it. Nobody explained it. It simply happened because that was how evenings like that were lived.
Looking back now, what feels almost impossible is not the activity itself, but the shared understanding that made it effortless. We were not taught those evenings. We absorbed them by being present in them. We learned, without instruction, that certain moments in life were not meant to be observed from a distance but entered into collectively.
Later, the termites would be fried and shared, and we would return indoors with the smell of fire and oil clinging to our clothes. But even that was not the point. The point was that we were together in something that required no justification. It did not need to be useful or explained or defended. It only needed to be experienced.
A few nights ago, the same rain returned in exactly the same way.
Morning rain. Heavy air. A slow, familiar evening. Then the lights came on, and the termites arrived as they always had, gathering around the bulbs in thick, moving constellations.
For a brief moment, I expected the world to repeat itself.
I called out without thinking, a call that once would have been unnecessary.
One child looked at the scene and walked away. Another paused just long enough to decide it was not worth interrupting whatever held his attention. Even those who share my memory found reasons to remain indoors.
Then came Maddoxx.
He looked once at the swarm of wings and ran, as though the night itself had turned unfamiliar.
Within minutes, the compound had emptied. Doors closed. Voices retreated. What remained outside was only the harsh light of the bulbs, the constant movement of insects, and me.
I waited for something to shift. For recognition to return in someone else. For the old instinct to surface as easily as it once had. It did not.
So I began alone.
At first, I told myself it was harmless, almost humorous, a private act unfolding in a public space. But as the minutes passed and my hands moved through a rhythm I remembered too well, something in the meaning of the moment began to change. The action remained the same, but the world around it no longer responded in kind.
I was no longer part of a shared instinct. I was repeating something that had lost its witnesses.
That was when the realization came, not as an idea, but as a quiet certainty that settled without resistance.
The chain had broken.
We often imagine cultural disappearance as something dramatic, something that arrives with conflict or declaration. But most of what a society loses does not vanish in that way. It fades through non-repetition. Through convenience. Through the slow replacement of shared presence with individual preference.
What once moved easily from one generation to another through imitation and proximity now requires explanation. And the moment a tradition needs to be explained before it is accepted, it is already beginning to weaken.
It is not that children today are disconnected. They are connected to more than any generation before them. But connection no longer guarantees shared meaning. The world they inhabit is wider, faster, and more crowded with attention than the one we inherited. In such a world, older forms of inheritance become fragile, not because they are rejected, but because they are no longer automatic.
My generation stands in a strange position within this shift. We are close enough to remember what once required no effort, and close enough to now raise children for whom effort is required for almost everything we once absorbed naturally. We carry both worlds at once, and the distance between them is becoming harder to ignore.
That is not failure. It is transition.
But every transition carries a cost.
A compound that once would have been alive with noise becomes something quieter. Not empty, but differently inhabited. One person remains outside under a light, moving through a familiar ritual, while life continues elsewhere behind closed doors. Nothing dramatic happens in that moment, yet something essential has already shifted.
Not in what exists. But in what is shared.
By the time I finished, I had more termites than I needed. I had never needed them. That was never the point.
What remained was the silence around the act, the absence of a collective memory responding to something it once understood without instruction.
And in that silence, the truth arrived without ceremony.
Almost nothing important disappears at once. It stops being passed on long before it stops existing.
And that is how a generation becomes the last generation that passed nothing on.
