Is he/she your mate?
In Africa, age is an important thing. It is in our culture to respect those born before us.
We often pay attention to who was born first and who was born later. This is evident in all our dealings.
A typical African parent dish out food based on age. Those older get something bigger and those younger get something smaller.
They mostly care less about your stomach. They don't think your stomach as a younger one deserves more food than your elders.
If they want to share meat or fish, they give the elders big ones and the younger ones small meat or fish.
Growing up, my mom already have measurement that we all deserve whenever we want to drink cassava flakes (garri).
My elder sister's measurement is bigger than mine while mine is bigger than that of my younger sister.
This has been a tradition for long and only the coming generations can stop that.
As kids, we can't protest that what we were given was small. Reason is, they were very quick with their response.
You will hear 'is he/she your mate'? Don't you know she's your elder sister/brother. So by implication, being elder means eating large food and getting some favours ahead of your younger ones.
Practically an unfair thing to do to kids irrespective of who comes first. The truth is, the younger ones might need food even more than the elders.
While they ought to share it equally and monitor to see who eat more to know how to share things, they just shared them based on age.
Reality check, this inequality does not reflect in real life. In real life, age plays no role in knowing who is older.
Money is the real determinant factor to know who is not anyone's mate and not age. If you like, be as old as Methuselah, if you don't have money your age is useless and an irrelevant number.
There is a need to move beyond this barrier that deprive kids of their right to food. The demarcation should be ignored as it doesn't count.
Children should get things equally or we should let equity takes it form. This way, every children will get what they want/deserve according to their stomach.
Thanks for your time.