Mma: At the Heart of Igbo Cosmology and Culture

"To understand more fully the complex set of ideas behind Agu's charge of witchcraft, it is necessary to say something about the connection between and Igbo person's life, his or her productiveness, and the communal 'good.' Mma is arguably the most important, single Igbo cosmological term. It contains a complex bundle of meanings: not only 'good' but wealth, health, and beauty are also implied. The key to following the discussion below is that the reader must keep all of these meanings in mind, since the values expressed by the use of mma are central to Igbo thought, particularly Igbo thought about human worth.
          For the Igbo, personal mma is both a reflection on the mma of the community and a positive statement about, or a continuation through time and space of, that good. "Goodness" is thus an active property in the life of an individual as well as in the life of a group. In practical terms, this means that a productive person is a person who manifests 'goodness' through his/her actions, by working hard and creatively, by having children and by teaching those children proper values, by accumulating wealth and by redistributing that wealth to the community through participation in title taking, town and local credit associations, and the establishment of patron-client relations with the less fortunate.
          One of the most important signs of 'goodness' for the Igbo is children. Children are, on one hand, the visible continuation of the lineage into the future, but they also represent material and spiritual wealth in the present. This is why murder and robbery are so closely linked in Igbo thought. The death of any person implies the loss of his/her productive and reproductive potential for the community at large.
As the Igbo person goes through the life cycle, he/she is expected to accumulate material wealth, first then to accumulate spiritual wealth through material redistribution and through the dissemination of equally valuable life experience to the community. This spiritual accumulation and redistribution is necessary for the successful transformation of a living human being into the more powerful but still human form of the (dead) ancestor. Premature death disrupts this life process, robbing the community of both the present, material contribution of the individual and the potentially more important future ancestral intervention.
          The witch is an improper accumulator, an eater of blood instead of a redistributor of wealth."

Misty L. Bastian, 1993, 129-166

"'Bloodhounds Who Have No Friends': 

Witchcraft and Locality in the Nigerian Popular Press."

 In Modernity and Its Malcontents: 

Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, 

edited by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff