Chinua Achebe: Nneka - "Mother is Supreme"

Wole Soyinka: From Ake to the World Stage

Nollywood, Stereotypes, and Misrepresentations of Igbo Culture

(By Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu) - There was that billboard of a certain West-African president who was dressed in an Igbo traditional attire. A loud caption gave meaning:"Igwe!" It was easy to locate the source of that cultural benefaction, credit rightfully placed at the feet of Nollywood, Nigeria's largest exporter of culture and values. Books and social media can tell the Nigerian story, but none can boast the compelling, even hypnotic power of the movie.

Which is why we should worry about the competence of movie makers—their cultural intelligence and sense of sensational restraint. Their products speak to millions, most of whom are illiterate and poor, but powerful. Powerful in their sheer number, in their capacity to spread a social or religious poison. They are the very agencies often punctual at lynching scenes, consumers of wild superstitions on whom depends the fate of that fellow accused of manhood theft in the local market. 

For the most part, the Old Nollywood is run by Igbo scriptwriters, directors, and producers, who are businessmen more than they are artists. For too long we have watched their cultural illiteracy ruin the integrity of much of what stands for Igbo culture and values; we have watched them distort historical facts, fixate on and promote ugly, exaggerated stereotypes, even invent cultural obscenities that do not exist. We have seen Igwes who do nothing all day other than look like frogs on shiny thrones, flanked by two able-bodied human fans, as they condemn villagers to evil forests, when they do not order their deaths outright. We can tolerate such cultural inventiveness for its decorative value, aware that fiction need not be exact and realistic.

A Worshipper, His Maligned Gods, and Hypocrisy of Christians

Dede Ege, man, and the art of gods by Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu

I have seen a lot of foolish gods. Grandmother once told me about one who complained that teenagers that often played around his shrine gave off smelly farts, to his eternal suffocation. Poor, lazy dude, he wouldn't move an inch. Another wiped out an entire family for the sin of a member he left unhurt! There is no category of foolishness that has not been practised by some god somewhere, even in ancient Rome and Greece.

I have seen a lot of gods--and that is because, to read Homer, Herodotus, or Plutarch, ancient purveyors of the Greek and Roman gods gist--to read them is to be an eye-witness seated cross-legged at the scene of the event. Ancient Greece probably had more gods than humans, some of them thoroughly silly--and I shall not attend to your lingering suspicion that perhaps man, often unwise, made the gods in his own image; that the foolishness of the gods can be explained in the social genetics between man and what he created--I shall not attempt such a sacrilegious thinking, gods forbid!

Why Nigerians Pray More

(By Nk'iru. Njoku) - "Many people pray more when they're in Naija than when they're out here. Because being in certain parts of the world, you do not need to pray for basic amenities. They are there, they work. You know they will work. If there's a problem, it will be fixed. 

Back home, my people pray so much because the country is broken and the only way some of us get to feel like we are doing anything about it is when we physically engage ourselves in vigorous prayer, for OURSEVLES. 

Whether prayers are answered or not, the energy that leaves us during prayer is enough to make us feel like we've done something. 

Plus, prayer makes our people hopeful. Sometimes things are so incredibly bad that hope is all a person has."

"My Great-Grandfather, The Nigerian Slave-Trader"

Illustration by Angelica Alzona

(By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani) - My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Soyinka, Language, and Ede Yoruba

TundeKelani.tv

Black Expressive Style: Deep, Direct, and Vivid

"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

Negotiating Orunmila: His Mask, His Wisdom

"A mask of Orunmila stared down at him from the wall, or at least the artist in Osogbo had said the large eyes belonged to the god of wisdom. His mother would have been horrified by the serene wooden face, angered even, by what she would dub apostasy.
     When he prayed, he prayed to Allah the most merciful. But what was he to do with all these gods and goddesses and spirits and ancestors that had peopled his village in Kwara before the first cleric arrived with a Koran? He did not worship Orunmila but he thought to himself, this wooden embodiment of wisdom hung on his wall."

Chibundu Onuzo, 2018: 145

Welcome to Lagos

Igbo bu Igbo: Culture, Language, and Gender Relations

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "Igbo bu Igbo" - Keynote at 7th Annual International Igbo Conference

How to Become an Invisible Woman in Lagos

(By Sisi Lucia) - Do you want to become an invisible woman? I have found the perfect vanishing cream, immediately you slather in on your body, fiam, you just vanish.

So I live in an estate, every morning or evening I pass by the only gate in the estate. Depending on my mood, I either smile and greet, or just wave at security men at the gate. On Fridays or during any celebration say Christmas or Easter, they razzle me for ‘something for the boys’ and also depending on my mood, I give them ‘something’ or not. So you would think they know me, yes?

Well, they know me until they see me with a man and that’s it, the vanishing cream. Men are the vanishing cream. The presence of a man makes women invisible. The other day I took a cab home, they greeted the cab driver and totally ignored me. I wasn’t even expecting the greeting because I knew the presence of the cab driver has already made me evaporate. The cab driver had to ask me “did you just move here? Abi na new security?” I just smiled. It was not the first time. If my male friends are visiting, they do it and it is not as if the greeting adds any naira to my account, so shrug, right?