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The Focus of Igbo Worldview By Prof. Donatus I. Nwoga
Introduction In spite of the lack of confidence which I appear to exude over this matter, I am consoled and encouraged by the fact that the tradition of attempting generalizations on the Igbo is a long one. As far back as 1789, an Igbo ex-slave wrote his autobiography in London and had it published as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written. by himself. Olaudah Equiano, who left us with such confusing clues that various scholars have put his birthplace variously as Nsukka, as Ashaka in Aboh Local Government Area in Bendel State, and as lsseke in the lhiala Local Government Area, felt confident enough to put his description in generalistic terms even though he was only twelve when he was captured into transcontinental slavery. He wrote:
Since
Olaudah Equiano, other people have felt free, both in writing and in speech, to
make firm and what they consider incontrovertible statements about the Igbo.
Such stereotypical statements range from the glorifying to the condemning. Dr
James Africanus Horton, an Igbo recaptive in The Igbo
cannot be driven to an act but with kindness they could be made to do anything,
even to deny themselves of their comforts. They would not, as a rule, allow
anyone to act the superior over them, nor sway their conscience, by coercion,
to the performance of any act, whether good or bad, when they have not the
inclination to do so. . . In 1982, a young Igbo man presented a
less generous picture when he warned the then Governor of Anambra State to
remember that "the Igbo man whom you are governing is good at forgetting
those good things his leader has done to him previously should the fellow fail
to fulfil any current obligations." In the same manner, Chinua Achebe, in
a moment of cynicism, spoke of the "inclination of the Igbo to jettison
his traditions (including his history) if he sees personal advancement accruing
from such abandonment." The English woman Sylvia Leith-Ross is
rather interesting to mention in this context. She admitted that "the Igbo
were cheerful, industrious, honest, very good to their children. They were
generous to their own people. . .” But she regretted that "it had
apparently never struck them that good manners were pretty things, graceful,
becoming, an addition to the pleasantness of life". (African Woman). During
the Nigerian civil war, one popular stereotype was embedded in the story which
said that if three Nigerians, one Igbo, one Hausa, the other Yoruba found
themselves under a ripe coconut, the Hausa would say, "If Allah sends down
this
coconut, I will eat
it", the Yoruba would say, "I will wait here and whoever brings down
the coconut, I will share it with him." whereas the Igbo man would look
for some implement for bringing down the coconut. A less flattering story was
one which the Nigerians were supposed to have been told to use to protect
themselves, namely, to shake some money in the ears of any Igbo person who
looked dead and never regard that Igbo person dead unless he did not rise at
the sound of jingling money. There are of course limits to the
validity of stereotype no matter how carefully constructed. Yet it is to say
what I am about to do is to create another stereotype. I intend however, not to
characterize a body of external actions, but to interpret the many varied ways
in which the Igbo manifest their innermost thoughts and values, in order to
synthesize the world view of the Igbo. 0
1.2 THE V ALIDITY OF STEREOTYPE A methodological question which must be posed
and answered at this initial stage in order to avoid misdirection is whether
the proposed world view is a synthesis articulated by the people being
presented, or it is that of the presenter. In other words, when I say that
"A" is part of the world view of the Igbo, do I mean that
"A" is what the Igbo articulate as what they think, or do I mean that
"A" is what I configure that the Igbo think? Is the explorer looking
for the theoretical explanations by the people of their experience or is he
formulating the conceptions of agency which he considers as lying behind the
patterns of behaviour of the people? Does he seek their "explanatory
categories" or their "effective agencies”? Failure
to confront the implications of this question has led to very intensive and
space and time consuming debates as to whether or not African societies could
be considered to have any philosophy and whether traditional thought could be
considered philosophical. The debate has taken dimensions ranging from book
size explorations as in Kwesi Wiredu's Philosophy and ail African Culture (1980)
and Paulin J. Houn-tondji’s African Philosophy:
Myth and Reality (1976), English translation 1983). to numerous essays
asking specifically, "Is There an African Philosophy?” (Ruch. Philip, Oruka,
Onyewuenyi). The pedagogical question has also been raised as to whether
traditional African thought presented enough philosophical challenges to be
incorporated into courses to be taught in a Department of Philosophy in an
African university. The intensity of the discussions, which have occupied many
issues of the What I am
about to share with you then is the picture which I have derived from
experience, research and interpretation, of the Igbo understanding of the
structure of reality in the world and how this affects the operations of man
both in society and within the inner recess of the individual person. I hope
the picture I present is such that gives rationality and consistency to the
behaviour of the Igbo as a people. One is
aware of the dangers of individualistic approaches to the exploration of the
Igbo world view. Some Igbo scholars have already given warnings on this
approach. Ụma Eleazụ decried "the present staccato method of
one person describing one village and labelling it Igbo". Mark Anikpo
called for an exercise "to eliminate arbitrary and selective interpretations
of Igbo affairs and thus ensure a better understanding of the Igbo as a
civilization in its own right." Personal efforts at interpretation of the
Igbo world view continue however till there is visible progress in the setting
up of a centre for integrated studies on the Igbo world. I am starting
this exploration with the premise that the Igbo, living in their environment
over the ages, have had to respond to their experiences and formulate ways of
handling them -understanding events, solving problems, accepting situations,
formulating statements encapsulating their own collective experiences towards
making these distillations available to future generations. They have had their
perceptions and their thoughts. They have generated patterns of folk-life in
agriculture and politics, in economics and religion, in technology, in cultural
structures and practices. They have evolved folklore, transmitted from
generation to generation to give expression to their thoughts and life. These
various facets of a people's activities must have rationality and consistency. In
discussing the world view of the Igbo, one is trying to synthesize into one the
meaning of life to a people living in a wide territory and in quite distinct
zones and units. One has to retain a consciousness of variations in patterns of
behaviour. This raises the question of IDENTITY. Can one really talk of the
Igbo world view? Are there not enough linguistic and cultural differences
between Agbor and Arochukwu, between Nsukka and Ikwerre, to make nonsense of
any proposition that claims to be descriptive of all the Igbo? Moreover, are
there not enough suggestions about the different migrational histories of
various sections of Igboland to indicate that the so-called Igbo are not really
one people but a progressive amalgam of people, whether they were from Another
issue which one must confront at this stage is that of the passage of time.
There certainly would have been internally generated modifications to Igbo
thought and behaviour over the ages. Human, social, and environmental factors
would have created situations with which established response patterns would
not have coped and these would inevitably have led to changes in the nature of
the Igbo world view. Moreover, through travel and through other forms of
external contact, the Igbo are bound to have been influenced by other peoples
towards transformations in their world view. Again an awareness of these
factors of change challenges one to a diachronic approach to presentation so
that time factors help to establish states of mind at a given time. For example,
the opportunity which the present times have given for the predominant
attributes of the Igbo to blossom into the ugliness of materialistic
indiscipline, and lack of grace and finesse, must not be taken to
represent the all-time behaviour of the Igbo. A characteristic which could have
been favourable and positive in one phase of the history of a people, which
could again be positive and beneficial in another phase, could present the
greatest negative consequences in a transitional phase. In practical terms, the
attributes which make the Igbo appear vulgar and materialistic at this phase,
could be the same attributes that made them achieving and titled people in the
past. The present could merely be revealing the impact of new, uncharted times
to the chaotic instinct in those who had been restrained by the limiting
structures and facilities of the ordered past. And it is important to retain
then the diachronic consciousness that transitional people have the handicap of
having lost the grace and poetry of their past, without yet acquiring the grace
and poetry, or at least the discipline and sanctions of the modern. 0.1.3 LANGUAGE AND WORLD VIEW Finally, the
problem of language, we are engaged in the complex process of speaking about the
innermost consciousness of the Igbo in a language, English, which shares
neither cultural background nor linguistic systems with the Igbo language. We
have therefore to retain a consciousness that we are engaged in a translation
exercise with all the tendencies to distortion of thought and emotion which is
involved in translation. One is aware, for example, of the misinterpretations
inherent in some accepted term equivalences. The Igbo nna m ukwu translates
to "master" and one knows that whereas the Igbo expression carries
implications of fatherhood, the English equivalent speaks of the slave and
owner situation. Whereas akụ nwanyị speaks of the show of
wealth and the exchange of benefits which marriage is, "bride-price"
concerns itself with marriage as a purchasing of a wife. These translation
problems have certainly led to some of the distortions that have existed in the
interpretation of Igbo cultural patterns. More than
this, there has been the problem of trying to express in English, patterns and
concepts for which that language has no equivalents. Even within the same
language we know that synonyms do not mean exactly the same thing, and yet
there has not been too much restraint in the use of apparent English
equivalents to represent Igbo thought. Perhaps this may not do too much damage
where we are dealing with objects and relationships where paraphrases would
help. There is no harm in using the phrase "my mother's first
daughter" each time one wants to refer to one's ada nne (though an
Igbo person can immediately feel the absolute destruction of intimacy involved
in that translation). But when we come to some of the key abstract concepts in
a people's life where symbolism derived from the environment is at the root of
meaning, the difficulties are multiplied many fold. I only mention this here to
indicate one of the peculiarities of the present exercise. The final problem I will refer to here
arises from the still predominantly oral use of the Igbo language. Since Igbo
is mainly a spoken language, it relies quite heavily on symbolic non-verbal
forms of communication. The problem which this poses is that symbolism is the
most private part of a people's culture and therefore a language and culture
still heavily symbolic will have immense difficulties of inter-cultural
communication. If I may
illustrate very briefly the importance and frequency of the use of symbolic
non-verbal forms to support the oral statement, I will tell a story. Perhaps
the song of the story will be adequate to make the point. A stream had expanded
and blocked the return path of a group of girls who had gone to fetch firewood.
Each girl sang the following song to put the blame on the girl responsible for
the river's anger so that the river contract and let her pass: Iyi na ọ wụghị mị sịrị Nganga, owe eh nganga, Wa Oromoko
sịrị Nganga, owe eh nganga, Ke nne ya
nọ nwee Nganga, owe eh nganga, Ke nna ya
nọ nwee Nganga, o.we eh nganga, Gba wa ụkwụ ọla gam Nganga, owe eh nganga, Gbafụgha asụ chịrị Nganga, owe eh nganga. There is much that one could say in
appreciation of this story in connection with the speaking to a stream and
obtaining results, about the prefix wa and its paradoxical effects in conveying
both affection and diminution, about the use of nganga both as a
meaningless refrain and also as a suggestion of the arrogance that was at the
root of the problem of the girls with the stream. What I wish to highlight here
is the factor of the use of symbolic non-verbal communication elements to create
substantive meaning. In the
name of the girl, the concept of pride is introduced with the implications of iro
oko. The lines which convey the girl's movement of her ring-decorated ankle-gba
wa ụkwụ ọla gam and the girl's insulting projection of a
spray of spittle-gbafụgha asụ, chịrị, depend
completely for their meaning on the symbolic implications within the culture of
those actions. Thus, if an Igbo woman complains that her husband pulled her
along the ground, or flogged her with a broom, the intensity of her reactions
could only be explained by the symbolism of those actions. A language then is not only a means of
communication but carries within its vocabulary, its structures, and its
contexts, much that is indicative of the meaning of life to a people. A
language is to a large extent the embodiment of a people's world view. Thus we
have to retain a consciousness of this state of reality as we proceed now to
speak of the Igbo world view in the English language. 0.1.4 AN APPROACH TO WORLD VIEW I do not
here pursue the problems of logic and epistemology which predominate in
contemporary philosophical discussions. In fact, I am not a philosopher for I
do not complete the assignment posed by Kekes when he defined philosophy
as "the rational construction and justification of world view". I do
construct and present a world view here but I do not defend it except in so far
as I show a preference for an open mind to a world view different from what is
predominant now in the so-called developed world. In the construction and presentation of the Igbo
world view I will need to pass through the territory of other scholars. I do
not plan to generate new speculations in those disciplines. I hope to seek
through these areas of learning and glean some clear articulations of ideas
congenial to and supportive of the wholistic statement that I am attempting to
make. I hope in the end to have proposed a world view that gives coherent,
consistent, and adequate explanation of the behaviour observable and predominant among the Igbo by exploring: (a) The Igbo perception of the
nature of reality. (b)
The ideas of Igbo social Life; and (c)
The Igbo Ideal of the Good Life. 0.2 THE NATURE OF REALITY A proper understanding of a people's attitudes to and
expectations from the various aspects and areas of life depends on an
appreciation of their general conception of reality. In seeking to understand
this framework of thought, one would try to find answers to questions like:
What concepts appear to govern practice in the areas of religion, social
organization and other areas of living? Into what categories do the Igbo group
their perception and experiences of reality? To what phenomena do the Igbo
attribute reality? The great scholar and humanist, the late J. Bronowski,
opened a valuable way for these questions when he declared that: The structure of reality is not self-evident. . .
No, we have to tease out the structure from the observational sentences when we
make them abstract sentences. How do we do that? Well, we do it essentially by
treating nature as, in Leibnitz's phrase, a gigantic cryptogram, a gigantic
series of coded messages. And we seek to decode it in such a way that entities
emerge which are conserved under various changes and transformations. How have
the Igbo decoded the world in which they live? By what processes do they
represent and react to this reality? What realities do they take into account
in their thinking processes, in their activities and in their relationships? The importance of urgency in this exercise in
primary exploration of thought is indicated by the imperceptible manner in
which patterns of thought derived from culture contact, and the language of
contemporary communication, that is English, are driving a wedge into
traditional thought system. Let me give a brief illustration of this. One of my
field workers in my project on "Igbo Religious and Mythical
Literature" collected a statement from a cult priest to the effect that Ahịajọkụ
ọ wụ ji na Here, I believe, lies the source of much of
the problem of understanding Igbo traditional culture and values in the past.
Writers have tried to reproduce the language and concepts of one culture within
the framework of another cultural thought pattern. Some foreign ethnographers
have even done better than some Igbo writers. In the particular case of Ahịajọkụ,
Talbot appears to have be conscious of the need to evolve a special
vocabulary when he wrote “Ajọkkọ-Ji or Njọkkọji - the
king (or Juju) yam, the biggest one of all the crops in which the yam spirit is
thought to take up its abode". He also avoided the usual words god,
fetish-and used expressions like "genius of the farm", and "farm
spirit". The
Igbo, like every other people, have observed their environment and interacted
with it. They have embedded their observations and reactions in their language
and literature, in their patterns of originations and relationships. It is from
these that we now attempt to derive the Igbo conception of the nature of
reality. 0.2.1. PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE The Igbo
have had to live in very close proximity and intimacy with nature. They have
had to observe in very close detail the things that have impinged most on their
lives. This can be deciphered from the detailed differentiations they have made
in the categorization of those things. It is surprising when one begins to look
into it, how much our people know about the characteristics and uses of the
shrubs and plants and insects of our bushes. They know intimate details about the
animals of our forests and hunt them with expertise. A villager's vocabulary of
rats can be quite impressive: in one session I was told ofoke, agu oke,
obosokoro, okotoko, ohio, odu, oguru/oginya/ọgịnị, oke ogwe,
oke okwe, oke nkwụ, oke nkwakpo, adụwa, wisu, wa ọta
korokoro. One has only to listen to proverbs sometimes to know how
intimately our people know the characteristic behaviour of the elements in the
environment. Whatever the meaning of the proverb in context, it is clear that
it required intimate observation of the oke nkwụ that is called adụwa
for somebody to formulate the proverb that "Adụwa sịrị
n'elu nkwụ daa sị ya gbawa ọsọ mgbe faa; sị
ya amaghị ihe onye gbufuru ya na nkwụ vu n’obi". (Adụwa
the palm rat fell from the palm tree and started running at once, saying
that he could not trust the intentions of the man that cut down the bunch that
brought him down). The Igbo
then made detailed observations of the elements of their environment and they
used this knowledge and lived by it. It is necessary however to distinguish for
our purposes here two kinds of observations. During the process of clearing a
piece of land a few years ago, I heard one villager exclaim with some
enthusiasm: "So this kind of plant is still here!" He described the
plant as very useful to farmers who might accidentally cut themselves when
they are working in the farm. If any twig or leaf of this shrub was broken off,
a chalky juice came out of it which when put on a cut, immediately stopped the
bleeding and sealed up the wound. The name of the shrub appropriately was anya
sọ ọbara.(literally, the eyes detest blood. Beside this shrub there
was a tall grass about which a companion exclaimed “Look at this, too. During
those days when we used to wrestle in competition, if you tied it in a knot,
and bound it under some cloth on the upper part of your left arm, the legs of
your opponent would soon twist under him and you were sure to win the bout”.
Whereas my first reaction to the first information was the excitement of
discovery, I first reacted to the second informant with a certainty he was
ignorant and superstitious. But to the villagers the same level of credibility
attached to both statements. I was told a
story one day by a raffia palm wine tapper to the effect that “Ngwọ ji anụ
ntị (the raffia- palm has ears and hears). He had planted a raffia palm
tree at his farm boundary. When it matured and he started tapping it, his
neighbour came and started disputing ownership, claiming that his dead brother
had told him that it was his raffia palm. They could not settle the matter by
swearing, since the local tradition did not allow swearing over property at
farm boundaries or over raffia palms. In both cases it is too easy to make
mistakes and the Igbo Community usually prevents its members from killing
themselves unnecessarily. What usually happens in the case of disputed raffia
palms is that each of the claimants in turn makes his claim and pours libation
of palm wine on the ground.
The tree hears the claims
and on the day of the person who actually owns the tree, it fills the gourd while wasting itself or not
producing on the day of the person who does not own it. In this
particular case, though my palm wine tapper was claiming the tree and doing all
that the tapper could do to make the
tree produce, on the days that he poured the libation the tree
carefully avoided the gourd and poured itself on the ground. In his own words,
on the second day: Chi abọwhuo. Mgbe anyị na-abịaruole,
ah! ya la-ebi, ańụ la-ebi ekwo rorororo. Ya alawhu elu hịọọ,
na-ata …. M arịruo.Ya wụ ngwọ m jiri aka m kụọ. Ma Sunday hị
ma nị hị si m ekpule hị chịchịrị ; m amaghị
sị nga a ọkọchị dị,
ho okomene awha ọkụ. M ewere otoo gbuhemecha ya, gheme ye ọnụ, kpude ya kpam,
chime. Mgbe m na-arịruole, ya ewere otoo lie udo kpoo; ụfụfụya
ewere otoo bịa kụpịa. Sị o-ruole mmịị. M agaru. Mgbe m kwatụrụ ebele
aka, nhe m nọrọ ebe ehị gwa hị sị, “lamanị!” Hị sị m “wedatama!”
“wedatama!” M ewedata ya. Out kọpụ mmịị dam! The next day
belonged to the other claimant. Declan the tapper did exactly what he had done
on his own days. The calabash was full. There was no further debate and Declan
tapped the tree for the other claimant till it was exhausted. The tree had
heard and given judgment. The Sunday referred to in the quotation above is
also a palm-wine tapper who produces very sweet palm wine. Sunday explained his
use of ọgwụ ngwọ (the medicine for palm wine). He had
to go and learn it from Ikeduru
and it consists of eight leaves
that have to be boiled in a slim packet for two days. When the leaves are ready
for use, they are placed at the point where the tapping incision was made. For
two weeks this bundle will keep the tapping point hot and clean, and clear
sweet palm wine can then come out of
the tree. The effectiveness of this medicine is attested to by all
those who take Sunday's palm-wine, that is those who have the taste for palm
wine and can distinguish good palm wine from bad. There is certainly a
difference between Sunday's palm wine and the wine produced by those who do not
use ọgwụ ngwọ or use inferior types of chemicals. How
is one to combine two types of information about the raffia palm? Chief S. U. Chukueggu, Director of the Mbarị
Art Centre at Eke Ngụrụ, Aboh Mbaise Local Government Area once
produced a piece of sculpture which he called Ajala Eziudo. The sculpture
represents a grove of trees, showing mushrooms, skulls, and a god towering
above the whole forest. Chukueggu's art is mythical, representing the meeting point
between religion and the imagination, the transition from doctrine to social thought. His explanation of the
symbolism of the sculpture referred to the contemporary events in Eziudo and
what was supposed to have happened when the sacred grove of Ajala Eziudo was
cut down. The key tree in the grove was an anụnụede
tree. It is reported that the anụnụede tree sent forth some mushrooms
which some people of the town ate. Thirteen people were killed by the
mushrooms. The story of the anụnụede tree was confirmed by a
well-educated Eziudo man who added that two women went to farm in that land and
one cut her toe in the farm and that evening the two women died. The story of
the anụnụede tree got even more complex. An Ọhafia
informant added that the anụnụede tree sometimes goes on a
walk and that is when the medicine men who come and wait beside the forest
enter the forest and pick up bits and pieces of the anụnụede,
strips of bark or
dried twigs or leaves,
with which they concoct very powerful medicines. These medicines are sometimes
used by thieves such that they could blow the powder of it towards your house
and you would fall deeply into sleep while they stole even from your bedroom. At other
times, with anụnụede medicine you could become invisible to your enemies. And if the
diviner tells you to go and offer a sacrifice to the anụnụede tree,
your luck will determine whether sacrifice will arrive when the husband anụnụede
is awake or the wife anụnụede.
The importance of which one accepts your sacrifice is that if it is the
man, he will do whatever you request and will not care whether it is for your
good or not; but if it is the woman anụnụede that is at home
she will make sure that what you ask is good for your home and compound before
she fulfils your wishes. An Ichie of Ogbunike independently wrote of
brother and sister anụnụede (Ọdụche). It would fill a whole lecture, such stories about
trees and their "strange" behaviour. I will conclude here about Igbo descriptions
of their experience with the story of Mazi Nwagu Aneke. Mazi Aneke is from Ụmụleri
in 0.2.2 INTERPRETATIONS OF EXPERIENCE Various attitudes could be adopted to these kinds
of reports from the Igbo experience. The standard and prevalent one combines
rejection of such stories as untrue and impossible, and dismissing them as
superstitious. The stories are said to be stupid and unscientific and to show
the extent of ignorance of our people. The literature of this kind of rejection
is too vast and needs not to be repeated here. In truth, a world that is dominated
by the mechanistic casuality principle of the western intellectual tradition has no place for
such inexplicable phenomena. The second
attitude is to find psychological reasons why people who otherwise are sensible
should believe in things like these. In this case, those elements of belief
which relate to non-physical agencies and processes are explained as ways by
which the people satisfy some crucial psychological needs. For example since
the time of Malinowski, British anthropologists have interpreted activities
dependent on such beliefs as means of fulfilling functions in other
spheres of life. Ritual, for example, was seen as facilitating some essential activity such as
agriculture, fishing or trade by raising morale,
enforcing the requisite values or giving organizing power to the
magi co-religious specialists. Ritual was also "useful as" a means of
enforcing tribal ethics, supporting authority, making possible the re-forming
of groups and the assumption of new roles after marriage, peace-making or death
(A. I. Richards). The objects of belief were not taken as
realities and were therefore to be explained from their social and
psychological usefulness. From all
directions of scholarship, they offer explanations. Whether they are
phenomenologists or radical empiricists, whether they are cultural or social
anthropologists, intellectualists or fidelists, all they are doing is offering
different kinds of interpretations for things they do not believe to be there.
For example, a great debate has raged among the philosophers and cultural
anthropologists studying the Nigerian belief and logic systems since 1967 when
Robin Horton published his long essay on "African Traditional Thought and
Western Science". Taking any of the opposing views at random, one may
consider the differences between Horton and John Beattie. The crux of this
disagreement could be attributed to the fact that Horton approaches thought
patterns with an emphasis on logic and epistemology and therefore conceives of
modes of thought and beliefs as stages in a continuum of a search for
explanation, prediction and control of reality. John Beattie on the other hand
is interested in thought patterns as the premises for effective systems for the
management of situations and events both physical and otherwise. Beattie then
attributes the effectiveness of science to its being based on "experience
and hypothesis-testing" while ritual is dependent on the "imputation
of a special power to symbolic or dramatic expression itself". It appears
to me however that the ideas and expressions used in this particular
Horton/Beattie debate proceed naturally from the perceptual framework of the
disbelieving anthropologist. In their quest for the most acceptable explanation
of how and why people believe in, say, spirit forces, they do not take into
account one key possibility, namely, that these forces do exist. I have
argued above mainly relative to European scholars. It is part of the tradition
in which most of us have been educated not to give any credence to the kinds of
belief systems popular among traditional Igbo people with regard to their
environment. In our contemporary fictional writing, there is some carefulness
not to be too committed to what might appear irrational. In Achebe's Things
Fall Apart, Chapter 9 is devoted to the exposition of the health problems
of Okonkwo's daughter Ezinma, and Okonkwọ's intense care for her in spite
of his known brusqueness. In the process, we are taken through the concept and
practice of the ọgbanje phenomenon in such a manner that we can
see the manipulative strategies of the dibịa who came to dig out
the iyi-ụwa. On the other hand, when Okonkwọ went into the
bush and came back with "a large bundle of grasses and leaves, roots and
barks of medicinal trees and shrubs", the novelist presented him as
providing a straight-forward treatment which was clearly effective. In his
own novel, The Great Ponds, Elechi Amadi takes us through a very
intensive and self-contained series of experiences of sickness, death, and
suspense, consequent on an oath which had been sworn over a conflict between
two villages. The great god of the area, Ogbunabalị, on whom the
oath had been taken, was believed to have sent a terrible sickness, wonjo, on
both communities in anger. It is therefore with a shock of realization that one
reads the last lines of the novel. In the end, Elechi Amadi wrote, after very
many people had died, "it was only the beginning. Wonjo, as the
villagers called the Great Influenza of 1918, was to claim a grand total of
some twenty million lives all over the world". The shock of realisation
not only involves one's sudden extraction from the exclusive interiority of the
novel, but also both the discovery that the people's explanation of their
predicament is based on ignorance, and that Elechi Amadi did not hold on to the
beliefs which he had presented with so much firm competence and involvement. Part of
the cynicism with which the educated African looks at the traditional belief
and knowledge systems has to be seen to derive from the way in which some
primary carriers of the traditions themselves operated this system. What was
one to do with the statement that if one swore a false oath he would die if one
found out that there was an attempt to poison the one who swore an oath? Did
the people themselves believe that a false oath swearing could lead to death?
Because, if they did, what was the need for poison? There is also the question
of rainmaking. A dibịa would take money with the claim that he was
going to prevent rain from falling when the client was celebrating an event.
The dibịa would be seen parading the environs of the venue of the
event, wielding a broom and chanting away with a string of irrelevant proverbs.
Is that how to stop rain? One would have been tempted to discard rainmaking out
of hand but for the discovery that often the dibịa parading the
venue is really a finder and that he might not himself be a rain maker. Having
taken his finders' fee he has paid the real rain-maker who is in the laboratory
doing whatever constitutes the process of rain-making or rain-stopping. Liberalism, tolerance, pluralism, incline many to
find pleasure in the idea of a multiplicity of men and visions; but the equally
reputable and enlightened desire for objectivity and universality leads to a
desire that at least the world and truth be but one, and not many. Whatever
theoretical stance one takes, the truth is that there has been a multiplicity
of men and visions. In the same place and time there have been differences
which have been given definition of the concepts of culture and anti-culture.
In the same place at different times we have had differences that are reflected
in the histories of culture and of knowledge. In different places at the same
time, the differences give rise to an area of learning called regional studies.
Even more clearly, then, there are differences between cultures in different
places at different times and so we study comparative cultural history. Even if there were to be only one truth, whose
truth should it be? The time is auspicious for the African scholar to look with
objectivity, and without fear of being described as a primitive steeped in
superstition, at the beliefs and practices of his people. Twenty years ago, this would not have been
possible. S. F. Nadel, writing on Malinowski on Magic and Religion, after
presenting the tenets of Malinowski on the topics, sums up his own reactions to
the attitudes implied in those tenets as follows: Magic, religion, mythology-they all had
to make sense. Malinowski would have claimed that this sense was a scientific
one. And there was only one science he considered relevant to social
enquiry-biology, more precisely, the biology at the beginning of this century,
still strongly evolutionary and telelogical, and dominated by the concept of
survival. The conception of a science which, by lay standards. is abstruse
and opposed to commonsense, was yet alien to the climate of thought of his
day(Man and Culture. my italics). The science which Nadel referred to is now
available to us. The scientists now debate on the language of observation and
the language of scientific theory. There have been revolutions in the sciences
that make ridiculous the scientific certainties of yesteryears and their
philosophical implications. Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s and
where classical physics had established that "the state of a system is
specified by a precise simultal1eous determination of all relevant dynamical
variables (position, momentum, energy, etc)", quantum mechanics introduced
the uncertainty principle. Philosophers and scientists have fought against it,
including Einstein, who, having created his own revolution with the Theory of
Relativity, could now say of the Indeterminism in quantum mechanics that
"God does not play dice". Whatever decision the scientists arrive at,
science has broached the question, and mechanistic certainties are no longer taken
for granted as the only approach to reality. The progression to the study of micro-objects and
processes has also generated new theories on the state of nature. Its findings
now demand that people, including scientists, should accept new approaches to
knowledge. Atomic Theory has exposed the possibility of what it describes as
"theoretical entities". Some scientists and philosophers of science
still deny the existence of such entities and "regard theoretical
assumptions about them as ingeniously contrived fictions, which afford a
formally simple and convenient descriptive and predictive account of observable
things and events". (Philosophy of Natural Sciences) But, again,
the matter has been broached by some of the most meticulous scientists and
philosophers of science. It would appear, then, that the present progress in
the sciences invites us to be open to admit the reality, not only of
"those things, properties, and processes, whose presence or occurrence can
be ascertained by normal human observers" with immediacy, but also those
that can be ascertained by "the mediation of special instruments or of
interpretative hypotheses or theories". And now for my hypothesis on the conception of the
nature of reality which accords with Igbo life and thought. What I have
laboured to say in this section so far is that its validity is not dependent on
how much it is close to or different from any other people's view but on how
much it explains what the Igbo say and how the Igbo react to the world. 0.2.4. THE STRUCTURE OF REALITY In order
to understand the Igbo world, it is necessary to accept that the Igbo recognize
three types of reality, namely, the physical, the spiritual and the abstract. I put
that statement here at the beginning because it is what 1 hope to have established
as a major part of my thesis. The first implication of that statement is that
the Igbo would not accept that every thing is made of matter. The second
implication is that the standard posture of contemporary African metaphysics
which divides reality into the physical and the spiritual would be considered
inadequate to explain satisfactorily the experience of the Igbo. To put it
another way, three forms of being impinge on a person's life-the physical that
can be touched, weighed, eaten, that can touch one through the usual sense.;
the spiritual which may not he seen or touched except by specially
"washed" eyes, but which all the same can affect the shape and nature
of physical being, and then the abstract which exists and may affect reality by
becoming realized in either of the other forms, physical or spiritual. Each of
these forms of being has reality. Each of them is capable of being transformed
into the other. The differences exist in the way they are experienced and the
kind of impact they have. They are the three tips of the triangle of being
which may stand on any side at a given time depending on circumstances.
Different permutations of these forms of being take place also at different
times depending on circumstances. I hope this becomes clearer as my
presentation progresses. Without going fully into the religious aspect that
will be discussed later, I will use For the
Igbo, the reality of an object emerges or assumes validity at that time when
the object is in the process of performing its function. Once, when a group of
dancers were at rest entertaining themselves, a well-recognized son of the land
met them and offered them some more drinks. In the middle of the drinking,
someone broke into song which was taken up to the effect: Anyị amarana ndị wụ nwoko
Nwoko. nwoko, Anyị amarana ndị wụ nwoko. Ọ
wụghị ọha wụ
nwoko. There is
also a variant of the song which goes with it and says: Anyị
amarana ndị wụ nwoko Nwoko. nwoko, Anyị
amarana ndị wụ ọbọ mma Ọ
wụghị ọha wụ
nwoko. All this reminds one of the scene in Things Fall
apart where Okonkwọ, full of
his achievement as a man in the community, retorted to a man who had
interrupted his discussion that "This meeting is for men". An old man
in the meeting commented "Looking at a king's mouth, one would think he
never sucked at his mother's breast". And Achebe the novelist commented:
"Okonkwọ knew how to kill a man's spirit". I am suggesting that the importance attached to
these statements derives, not from the purely metaphorical impact they might
have, but from the fact that they come within a cultural context in which such
expressions have ontological implications. The prevalent use of the epithet, ezi, in
the description of things when their reality is at issue is, I believe
significant. We apply the epithet in quite disparate situations so that it
qualifies people--ezi mmadụ, ezi nwanyị, ezi nwoko and so
forth; it qualifies things; it even qualifies words so that the concept of
truth is represented by ezi okwu, meaning "the real word". What
all these uses emphasize is the Igbo attribution of importance to "proper
states" of being, to things fulfilling the attributes of their being in
order to be considered real. Lack of understanding of this perspective, this
Igbo conception of BEING AS ACTION, could lead to misinterpretations. When in
1923 Basden spied out the shrine of Awnyilli Awra of Ezira he was quite
disappointed with some of the shrines he saw on the way where the icons
appeared to have been left to rot away. In his book on the Igbo, the only index
entry on mentality had to do with this scene from which he assessed that the
Igbo did not care for their gods. On the contrary, the Igbo should be
recognized as caring very much for their gods-but only as long as those gods
are effective. Any god that becomes useless has no right to expect the Igbo to
continue to serve him since the essence of godhead is power. By the same token,
a priest is a priest while he is in a state to perform the functions of a
priest, and if a priest breaks the rules of his god or defiles himself (merụọ/rirụọ agbara ya) he and his god become
discarded. When I visited Mazi Ekeh, an Enugu Ezike man, on the day he
was celebrating a feast, when it came to time for him to call upon his deity Oheh,
he picked up a calabash horn that had been lying on the floor, wiped it
clean, and it became
the sacred horn with which he called Oheh. When Mike Ejeagha sings that nkanka
nkata adagh abakwonụ n'ife, kalia mbọsị aja he might be
complaining but he is stating the fact of Igbo life. An Ọgalanya is
an Ọgalanya when it is time for those activities for which the
community requires an Ọgalanya but he need not expect that when
the kindred are sharing out the meat, they, will give him more than his share.
The ontological status of things in Igbo thought is determined and recognized
not by any static characteristics that the objects might have but by the action
that the object performs. From this
perspective, one may make a fresh assessment of some statements usually made about
Igbo ontology and see to what extent they fit into Igbo beliefs. I will take
here one statement which gives a certain hierarchical picture of the Igbo
world: According to Igbo ontology, everything that exists
has a chi-"a portioned-out-life-principle" given to it by the Supreme
chi, which is "Life per se". Though this self-same
"portioned-out-life-principle" is given to both man, animals, and
plants, it differs, however. in degree. For just as Chukwu is higher
than man, man is above the animals and distinguished from them by virtue of the
fact that man gets higher degree of this divine life; and the animal is also
above the vegetable. Similarly, the latter is distinguished from the inanimate. |
of people there is a time when they must consciously recognize the things that form the cornerstones
of their excitement and depression, the things that characterize them so that they see their true representation
in some forms of behaviour and not in others, the modes of intention which when attributed to them they will acknowledge
as valid. The hesitancy is provoked by the nature of the assignment. It is a risky activity trying to affirm the
motivation of a person. It is even more dangerous postulating the motivation of a group, especially of a group
as dynamic and individualistic as the Igbo. Moreover, the topic calls for expertise in a wide variety of areas
of learning and one would be presumptuous to claim such inter-disciplinary competence. And yet the assignment is
one that is so necessary that one has to undertake it even at the risk of inconclusiveness; one has to start it
even if the fulfilment of the intention cannot be in the lone efforts of the speaker. Only when a speculative synthesis,
no matter how outrageous, is offered, can scholars then get to tearing apart the offering in order to put it together
in a more efficient manner.