Of Money Ritual and Wisdom of A Seasoned Dibia

(By Wayo Guy) - The Igbo Family and the Ruinous Concept of Ogwu Ego 

My grandpa was a local medicine man. He was the earliest untrained psychologist who expanded my understanding of human nature beyond classroom education. A man of few words, grandpa punctuated his rare utterances with aku bu iro (wealth attracts enmity), a reference to his wealthy clientele who were rumored to be ndi ogwu ego.

He was the first person from whom I heard that Nwata kpaa nku karia ibe ya, a si na o kpatara ya n'ajo ohia (when a child brings home more firewood than his peers, he will be accused of fetching them from the evil forest). Looking back, I can clearly see the connection of this proverb to the ogwu ego phenomenon in Igboland.

If you are an Igbo adult, you know what the concept of ogwu ego is; it defies a precise definition simply because it is supposedly located in the realm of metaphysics or the supernatural.

If you appear to have more money than your peers and they are not clued into the secret source of your money, you are in danger of being branded onye ogwu ego. If you and your brothers are in the same type of business but you appear to excel over and beyond them, you are likely onye ogwu ego. If your townsmen and women are backward due to their laziness but you succeed by dint of hard work and industry, it is likely that very soon you will have become onye ogwu ego to some of them.

Of Coronavirus and Africa: The Illusion of Disbelief

(By Reuben Abati) - Corona Chronicles

… Throughout known history, whenever man faces a crisis of such unknowable nature, his tendency is to resort to religion, faith, and ego. … Religion … is precisely what many fall back upon in a season of distress and so it has been. As Corona Virus arrived in Africa, and made its landing in a few countries, the people trooped to places of religious worship in typical default response. Africans, victims of Karl Marx’s often wrongly contextualized statement that “religion is the opium of the people” usually blame God for everything. They regard God as the ultimate solution, indeed as the know-it-all-Being, the invocation of whose name can provide all answers to everything on earth. Richard Swinburne, a theist argues in his book – Is There A God? (Oxford University Press, 2010), that whereas the existence of God is “the ultimate brute fact”, human beings also have “obligations” or what he calls “supererogatory good actions” or “moral truths” to which they must abide even as they profess their love for God.

Africans often mix this up. As the Corona Virus pestilence spreads in the continent from one or two cases to over 1, 500 cases and over 50 deaths, more of the people rely on the assurances of Pastors and Imams who promise a cure or advertise the possibility of it. In Ghana, one Prophet said he had found an anointing oil to cure Corona Virus, and the Chief Imam of the same country reportedly announced that all Muslims are now free to consume alcohol to combat Corona Virus. While Europeans and Asians are in quarantine, Africans rush for anointing oil, alcohol and herbal solutions. When Trump [erroneously and carelessly] proclaimed chloroquine as cure, they obeyed him robotically. In Nigeria, pastors and all sorts have come up with passages in the Bible to justify the pestilence and how the cure is spiritual.

Soyinka Taught Me Traditional Society is Not Evil

"If Soyinka did anything for me, the most important thing he did was to [wean] me off the Christian notion that the traditional society is evil – evil in the sense that if you were not a Christian, whatever else you believe in is considered not so moral or straightforward. Everything about tradition which many people saw rather in distracted ways, Soyinka saw as a part of a very well worked out way of seeing the world and the mystic truth in Soyinka’s analysis of society enabled you to see that traditional society had a philosophical underpinning that was helpful in knowing the ways the world worked. I have my own decision on Soyinka’s position; his not allowing himself to be submerged by the grammar of Christian denunciations and the general Islamic assault on so-called paganism help me relate to my two families. My maternal grandfather was a Christian, who once they abandoned the ‘fetish ways’ of the traditional society, adopted Christianity without looking back. My father’s family, first because my father was a motor mechanic, had to be an Ogun worshipper and if you are an Ogun worshipper, you are required to observe tenets that derive powers from mythology and also indicate ways of treating your fellow human beings in a manner that helps a sense of collectivity in society. Myth making is therefore at the centre of the way Soyinka views traditional society. I have managed because I did not quite accept all the hoopla about Christianity; I learnt to see the interconnection between what was Christianity and what was supposedly traditional religion. All religions are the same – they are based on some form of worship which is to say that you have faith in what those who came before you had seen and done. … Soyinka was a strong critic of the religious ways of doing things. … [He] actually did something out of the usual because he took traditional religion on its face value. He took a philosophy out of it which may discount certain material elements but stuck to its core and its core is that the life we live can be understood by the knowledge that has been condensed from the prehistory to the present and that if we understand them well, we could live a good life in lot of ways."

Odia Ofeimun

Punchng.com, March 22, 2020

Imu Ahia: Traditional Igbo Business School

(By Biko Agozino and Ike Anyanike) - “There is an Igbo saying that the world is a marketplace (uwa bu ahia). This simple worldview can be explained literally to mean that the Igbo think so because trading is a prominent occupation among the Igbo (it could also mean that a market-place is the epicenter of community social and business interaction). That might be why the Igbo weekdays are named after their markets - Eke, Orie, Afo, Nkwo. Children born on any of these market days often assume the default name as in Okeke or Mgbeke, Okorie or Mgborie, Okafo or Mgbafo, Okonkwo or Mgbonkwo for male or female children, respectively, born on the corresponding market days. We are yet to come across another culture for which the market holds such a fascinating centrality in their worldview even while they see themselves as ruggedly egalitarian. The meaning of the thesis statement that the world is a marketplace is deeper than the literal interpretation. The deeper meaning is the suggestion that all the problems we encounter in this world are open to negotiation, haggling and bargaining. Some people come into the market place with greater resources than others and therefore are able to buy more goods and services just as some people are born or raised with greater resources, increasing their bargaining power in the global marketplace. When the Igbo say that the world is a market, they usually complete the sentence by observing that when one buys to one's content, one goes home. The home referred to here is the land of the ancestors to which the Igbo believe the spirits of the dead return to bargain for a better life in their next incarnation. If one's creator dealt one a raw deal in this life, one can still bargain with his/her personal God (or Chi) and haggle for a better break in the next life. In other words, the Igbo intend the paradox that the world is a market as a description of the global world and not simply just the Igbo world. … Are there lessons that other cultures could learn from the Igbo and are there lessons that the Igbo could learn from the social structure of modernist business school? ...

A Dethroned Emir: Neither A Saint Nor A Victim

"Monarchy is way past its sell-by date not just in Nigeria but everywhere. It’s an anachronistic, vestigial remnant of a primitive past that invests authority on people by mere accident of heredity. Any authority that is inherited and not earned, in my opinion, is beneath contempt. Emirship isn’t only a primeval anomaly in a modern world, it is, in fact, un-Islamic. In Islam, leadership is derived from knowledge and the consensus of consultative assemblies of communities called the Shura, not from heredity. Monarchies in the Muslim North, which have constituted themselves into parasitic, decadent drains on the society but which pretend to be Islamic, are grotesque perversions of the religion they purport to represent. Anyone, not least one who makes pious noises about equality, that is denied the unfair privileges of monarchy is no victim.

          Most importantly, though, Sanusi embodies a jarring disconnect between high-minded ideals and lived reality. He rails against child marriage in public but married a teenager upon becoming an emir. ... He expended considerable intellectual energies critiquing polygamy among poor Muslim men, but he is married to four wives. His defense, of course, would be that he can afford it, and poor Muslim men can’t. Fair enough. But transaction-oriented reformists lead by example. Sanusi habitually fulminates against the enormous and inexorably escalating poverty in the north, but even though he is an immensely affluent person, he has not instituted any systematic mechanism to tackle the scourge of poverty in the region in his own little way. Instead, he spends hundreds of billions of naira to decorate the emir’s palace, buy exotic horses, and luxuriate in opulent sartorial regality. And, although, he exposed humongous corruption during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and dollar racketeering during Buhari’s regime, he is himself an indefensibly corrupt and profligate person."

Farooq A. Kperogi, March 14, 2020

Notes From Atlanta

Religion, Men, and the Crime of Being A Woman

(By Sanusi Lamido Sanusi) - The Adulteress' Diary

November 2001

If you choose to read my diary you must forgive my often vulgar, some times irreverent language. I hope you will also find the moral courage to give the following entries wide circulation, my crude vocabulary notwithstanding. The world should know what injustice is being perpetrated by northern Nigerian Muslim males against their women in the name of Allah and under cover of Shariah.

You see, my name is Safiya Husseini, recently convicted for the crime of having been born a woman by a Shariah court in Sokoto. I know you have been told that my crime was adultery, not womanhood. I also know, being a mere woman, that you think I am most probably talking rubbish. When you finish reading this record of my own thoughts, possibly after my death, you will make up your mind.

My punishment is to be death by stoning at the hands of men. I cannot tell you where I am, because I am hiding from the men of the Hisbah corps, the fanatical Muslim militia saddled with the task of bringing Shariah offenders to book. I have been told by the scholars, the mallamai (who happen to be men), that I should give myself up and face death like a good Muslim woman. Doing this is a patriotic duty that will cleanse my society of corruption and purify me from my sins.

You see our society has become rotten. We are fast becoming like the Jews in the time of Christ. You know Jesus called them a "wicked and adulterous generation". There is too much adultery, fornication and homosexuality. Women, as our mallamai swear our prophet said, are the source of all this evil and our scholars are convinced that the only cure for the fitnah is to put us to death.

Nneka Ogwumike: Basketball Queen, WNBA Boss

UNINTERRUPTED Presents: Nneka Ogwumike

Of Being A Person of Faith and Critical of Religion

"I believe in God, Jesus Christ, and angels...
         I read my Bible every day (on my phone app, because: technology). I can quote my favorite Psalms (especially 91: "he who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty"). I feel like I am a product of God's grace. My point is, I love Jesus, and Jesus loves me, too, as this little light of mine shines. I am a person of faith, and it is an important part of my life. However, being a person of faith has not stopped me from being critical of religion. I am in it and I am of it, but I side-eye it from time to time. Why? Because religion has been one of the most powerful and often detrimental institutions in our world, and its abuse has been responsible for much of the hurt we experience. This is why I must judge us, for using religion as a tool of mass control, discriminating, oppressions, and hate-mongering for so long.
          You know one of the most ridiculous things about super-religious people? Some of us have the nerve to think that our religion is the one that's 'right,' or better than everyone else's. Whether we're Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, our faiths follow most of the same tenets: Do good. Love your neighbor. Pray to a higher power. Don't be Satan's minion."

Luvvie Ajayi, 2016, 140

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual