1. Self-respect comes by the identification of self-values that leads to self-love and acceptance and the loss of this results in a degenerated person of many evils. Hence, Jesus taught that you must love your neighbour as yourself, meaning that you must love yourself and extend it to others. Mark 12:30-31
• No two persons are alike in thoughts, feelings and action. Culture harmonizes a group of people for mutual benefit and gives them a sense of identity and being. The destruction of a culture is the destruction of their identity and drive for self-determination and creativity and they fail in life.
2. The preservation and growth of a culture is so important that Jesus set up himself to fulfil the law and not to destroy it. Matthew. 5:17.
3. In line with his culture, when Jesus healed the leper Mark 1:40-44, he charged him to go and perform the cultural requirements as stated in Leviticus 14:3-7. That ritual is similar to that of many African Traditional rituals.
4. Jesus observed the traditional Passover of his culture Matthew 26:18. ④Jesus showed that tradition and culture should serve the human interest Matthew:10-10; Mark 2:23-28.
5. Many cultural practices, especially, of Africans that are condemned are accepted in the Bible. For example, many love the African prayers but hate the libations that go with it. The Bible calls libation “drink offering’ and commands that as much as a quarter gallon of gin be poured in the holiest places unto God. Numbers 28:7.
6. To put down the cultures of Africa, its places of worship are called shrines and the Western places of worship are called altars; its linkage to the departed is called ancestral worship and that of the Western world is called saints and there is All Saints Day but no All Ancestors Day and the list goes on.