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? ...

"Chi" in Igbo Cosmology, by Chinua Achebe

There are two clearly distinct meanings of the word chi in Igbo. The first is often translated as god, guardian angel, personal spirit, soul, spirit-double etc. the second meaning is day or daylight but it most commonly used for those transitional periods between day and night or night and day. Thus we speak of chi ofufo meaning daybreak and chi ojiji, nightfall. We also have the word mgbachi for that most potent hour of noon that splits the day in two, a time favoured in folklore by itinerant spirits and feared by children.

I am chiefly concerned here with the first meaning of chi, a concept so central in Igbo psychology and yet so elusive and enigmatic. The great variety of words and phrases which has been put forward at different times by different people as translations of this concept attests to its great complexity and lends additional force to the famous plea of Dr. J. B. Danquah that we pay one another’s gods the compliment of calling them by their proper name.

In a general way we may visualize a person’s chi as his other identity in spiritland – his spirit being complementing his terrestrial human being; for nothing can stand alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it.