Soyinka, Language, and Ede Yoruba

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"I am the first and the last
I am the honored one and the scorned one
I am the whore and the holy one
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the barren one and many are my daughters. ...
I am the silence that you cannot understand. ...
I am the utterance of my name."

Julie Dash, 1991

Daughters of the Dust

Myths, Mythologies, and Modern Cultures

“The myths told by the [ancients] are as important as history for our understanding of what those peoples, ancestors of [modern] civilization, believed and thought and felt, and expressed in writing and in visual art.

The intelligible form of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and watery depths: all these have vanished.

They lived no longer in the faith of reason!

But still the heart doth need a language, still

Doth the old instinct bring back old names…

And so even communities professing that quite different code of beliefs which is Christianity have, after various struggles, found it impracticable to dispense with the classical stories. Today new political systems have fabricated their own myths which Coleridge, writing those lines under the Graeco-Roman spell, had never imagined. Yet twentieth-century writers, from tragic theatre to comic strip, have continued to employ the archetypes with renewed vigour. These dramatic, concrete, individual, insistently probing ancient myths still supplement the decisions of science as clues to much in the world that does not alter.

Ogbuide: The Lake Goddess of Oguta

"Ogbuide is the awesome water goddess of Oguta Lake located in Southeastern Nigeria. The goddess has multiple names and is also known as Uhammiri. A local divinity, Ogbuide is but one manifestation of the generic Igbo mother water goddess, Nne Mmiri....

The Igbo town of Oguta is located on a beautiful lake near the confluence of the rivers Niger and Urashi [or Urasi]. These waters are associated with divinities of the Igbo pantheon of multiple gods and goddesses. Oguta's lake goddess, Ogbuide, is the major reference point in the lives of the Oru-Igbo people of Oguta, Orsu-Obodo, and a host of other towns. This awesome goddess embodies the forces of nature that dominate life and death. Water is recognized as a divine power of dual faculties, both giving and destroying life. Locals worship the lake goddess Uhammiri together with her husband, the river god, Urashi, as a divine pair. These divinities existed before, until, and beyond the advent of Europeans, Christianity, and Islam. Recognizing the mother water goddess and her powers is altering our perception of and dealing with nature, power, and gender. ...

The water has emerged as the single most influential spiritual and existential force complementing the earth goddess Ani, or Ala, and the ancestral gods. ... Oru-Igbo culture and society, its economic foundations, and its major artistic expressions revolve around water, particularly the flooding and receding of the Rivers Niger and Urashi, and above all, Ogbuide, that is, Oguta Lake. This is evidenced in the local farming cycle, the timing and performance of the town's major Owu festivals, Agugu and Omerife, and other cultural activities, its underlying myths, religious beliefs, and customary rules. All of the indigenous deities and particularly the ever-present lake goddess are reflected in the people's daily conduct, their cosmogony, spirituality, aesthetics, and perception of the universe. The notion of the flexible, fluid female side balances the more static plane of the earth and male ancestral traditions."

Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, 2007: 1-2

The Water Goddess in Igbo Cosmology: Ogbuide of Oguta Lake

The Sacred Earth Among the Igbo

Photo credit: Herbert Cole

"In some African cultures, the Earth Mother is a divinity. The Earth differs from other nature spirits, being a chthonic force rather than an anthropomorphic figure. Ala or Ana [or Ani] is of central importance in much of Igboland. Many crimes are seen as abominations because they offend her. The whole body of inherited custom is Omenala, and ritual prohibitions are nso Ala. Those who died forbidden deaths, such as suicides or lepers, could not be buried in the earth, and their corpses were cast into the Evil Forest. Missionaries were sometimes given such areas for their churches, as a trial. ... Nri, dedicated to the earth, was one of Igboland's great ritual centers. Ritual specialists from Nri, their faces marked by distinctive scars, traveled from village to village, purifying the earth from abominations. Instead of weapons, they carried a staff of peace.

In the Owerri area, people honored the Earth in a different way, by creating mbari houses, shrines of clay sculpture that were allowed to disintegrate. It was the act of creation itself that honored the Earth. One of Igboland's great oracles was called Igwekala (Heaven Is Greater Than Earth). But in 1966, when village elders debated whether the Earth or Chukwu was supreme, opinion was divided.

The cult of Ala, apparently so universal, illustrates the impossibility of making valid generalizations about the whole Igbo culture area. In the Okigwe area, Ajala (the local form of Ala) was less dominant; in one community, she was recently introduced, and she was often less dominant that the yam god. In a village group south of Owerri, Ala is thought of as male. Ala is clearly linked with the Nri ritual sphere, though her cult is found well beyond it."

Elizabeth Isichei, 2004: 232

The Religious Traditions of Africa: A History

Prayer Doesn't Equal Understanding

Bishop Tudor Bismark