Different Tribes, Same Beliefs

I've been privileged to live in both the West Side and the East Side, and as expected, there are different cultures and traditions and different ways both sides do certain things. But occasionally, there are moments I've seen where I find both sides doing things the same way, or in this case, believing the same thing.

_{photo by Datingscout}

You see, as a religious country, we can be very superstitious a lot. Do this or this will happen to you, or don't do this and you will experience this. It is something that most people have a lot of belief in, and some will even go as far as swearing that it works for them.

And as you can tell, different parts of the country have different types of superstitious beliefs, but earlier this morning, I got to find out one superstitious belief that apparently both the West and East believe in.

This morning, after we were done with our usual Saturday morning cleanup, one of the guys had gone to the shop down the street with hopes of buying bread. The only problem with this was that he had no money on him and wanted to buy on credit. But when he returned empty-handed, we obviously could tell that the lady had refused to sell to him, but what caught my attention was what he said she told him.

You see, back in Lagos State, whenever someone goes to a shop to buy on credit very early in the morning, the market women would refuse to sell to you, telling you to go and come back some other time after they've sold a bit of their product, because it is believed that if the first person you sell to buys on credit, then you will find yourself selling on credit for the rest of the day.

So in order to prevent such a curse from happening, they ask you to go and come back after they must have sold to people who have cash to pay.

I've always thought it was a belief only people from the West believed in, but apparently I was wrong, because that was the exact thing that the breadseller had told this guy too. And finding that out was fascinating to me because it shows how far such superstition has traveled and how much these people believe in it.