A MATTER OF IDENTITY

By: PROFESSOR MICHAEL J.C. ECHERUO,

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND DEAN

POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN

Ọha na Eze,

My task, as I understand it, is quite a simple one, I am to share with you such thoughts and reflections as I have concerning the history, culture and civilization of our people, the Igbo people. I am also to relate what I say, wherever possible, to the wider movements of world history and human civilization. I have entitled my lecture "A Matter of Identity", in our language, I would call it Aha m efula.

When a moment ago I described my task as simple, I did not intend to suggest that it was an easy one. It is perhaps not too large an over statement to say the Igbo people are the most important people in the world today, and (unknown to themselves) have probably always been! We have a language which is so efficient in its structure that some say it was first spoken in Eden. We are a people who should have disappeared from the face of the earth a long time ago from a multiplicity of vicissitudes but have miraculously avoided doing so: from famine when the soils suddenly failed us; when the slave raiders carried us away in our thousands, and we laboured and wasted in the oil Delta and in the Americas; or when only a few years ago, we were massacred and bombed and shelled almost out of existence. It cannot be an easy task, therefore, to attempt any serious reflection on the Igbo people; certainly not before an audience as well informed and as committed as the one I have before me today.

Therein precisely also lies the unique privilege of this occasion. There must certainly be older, abler and more influential people than myself to assume this honour. If I had it in me - and I still do not know why not - I would have started this lecture the proper way by admitting how immensely honoured I feel to be asked to give this first lecture in the Ahịajọkụ series. If I also had it in me, I would have wanted to commend the Imo State Government, especially the Culture Division of the Ministry of Information, Culture, Youth and Sports for its foresightedness in inaugurating this series of annual harvest lectures. If I however proceed directly to the subject of my lecture, I would not want to be misunderstood. I am, of course, not ungrateful for the honour which has been done me; and certainly the Government of Imo State deserves to be congratulated on its initiative. I refrain from saying more than this only in order to avoid being under stood to be setting myself up as any kind of judge of the quality of vision here at Owerri; or it being thought that the glory of this occasion has, as we say in Igbo, "eaten my head", that is overwhelmed me.

No, this honour cannot overwhelm not now. There is an Onitsha proverb (quite appropriate to this occasion because it involves the yarn whose god, Ahịajọkụ, is the patron of today's business) which says in effect that Abu onye ji so okolobia ka oji alụ ji. I believe in the truth of that proverb. My life has been one sustained effort to preach whatever I know and whatever I believe in, in as frank (some say, over serious) a way as I can manage - in a sincere effort to woo people gently to a fuller awareness than is conventional of the dimensions of the problems they face or the issues that confront them This kind of approach does not make instant friends. But I know no other method, no other work-song. I, therefore, offer no apologies to any one if, on this occasion, I remain your masquerader whose every act will be one pompous ceremony. Today's dance is all mine. And for this occasion, my dance will be the dance of the ijele masquerade. My pace, God permitting, will (in Achebe's phrase) "perforce be slow and deliberate." I will lift and lower each foot with 'weighty ceremony."

Ceremony is something our people are a little impatient of; a decorative detail which they regard as cosmetic and so almost valueless. But ceremony, as Shakespeare put it, is the sauce to the meat. It is ceremony that adds grace and dignity (ugwu) to an occasion like this one. We celebrate Ahịajọkụ, not because it would be impossible to acknowledge the new yam without the festival but because we become a little more aware of the larger significance of that event for our lives by celebrating it. Ceremony takes the rough edges out of communal il1teraction, and allows practical minded people such as the Igbo people are, a little respectable frivolity. For many other peoples, ceremony is at the very heart of culture. For them true culture is represented in those details of communal behaviour which are added to pure function. The presentation of the kola nut is a functional event in our society; but ịgọ ọji is ceremony; and it is not uncommon to find commentators who assume that a people who devote some of their time to ceremony have a more genuine interest in culture than those who do not. There are absurdities in such conclusions, but it is probably true to say that it is to these details of ceremony that we have to go for concrete evidence of the life styles and values of any given society. The Igbo people, because they do not always cultivate ceremony, and are instinctively suspicious of mere decorativeness, are more liable than most other people to the charge of lacking culture and civilization. Today, as we celebrate Ahịajọkụ, we are doing at least two things: giving formal recognition to a festival which we were almost in danger of losing, and taking the opportunity for serious reflection on ways of understanding the deepest cultural values of the Igbo people.

There are about ac. many accounts as there are old men of t he (1rigins of both the yam and the New Yam Festival in Igbo land. According to one account, the yam was the reincarnation of the first son of an Afikpo woman sacrificed on the orders of the oracle, Ibu Ụkpabi.

The woman first sacrificed a slave and the community quite appropriately got a bastard yam, ji abana; when however she sacrificed her own son, an amadi ji a man's yam, sprouted up, a gift of the god to his starving people. There are variations on this story, and they all remind us of similar stories told about staple crops in other civilizations. Wheat, among the Romans, was an incarnation of Ceres herself, the goddess of agriculture. Perhaps the most familiar of the stories about the origin of the rituals surrounding the eating of the new yam is the one that tells how, when it was first brought into our communities, yams were an untested food item. In fear of the entire community dying from food poisoning, domestic animals, slaves and bonded men (in that order) were forced to eat the yam first. Not until it was thus established as a safe food item, did the leaders of the community allow the generality of the public to partake of it. Even then, according to some accounts, the new yam was eaten in a fixed sequence, beginning with the youngest of the most junior line ages.

These stories must be regarded as re-constructions, pure and simple. For one thing, they presuppose a more recent date for the introduction of yams into our region than the available scientific evidence would support.

The large-scale introduction of iron in West Africa dates from about 300 A.D. At least four hundred years before that, several species of yam and oil palm were already firmly established in the forest and woodland regions of West Africa, long before the introduction of other species of yams (or yam proper), plantain, banana, maize and cassava. It, of course, needed the advantage of the metal hoe and machete to make the large-scale cultivation of yams possible.

Nor must we forget the place of ede and akpụ in hi scheme of things. Ede, cocoyam, is now regarded as the women's crop for which there is an appropriately modest Ima Ede festival. The cocoyam must have been an early staple crop among our people, not only because of the many uses to which it is usually put and the many ways it can be eaten, but also because even in competition with cassava, it appears to have been relegated over time to a very secondary position. In fact, it is the cassava that has revolutionalized traditional food habits. From being a poor man's meal, it has over time made famine easier to avoid by making the failure of the yam harvest a less decisive event than it used to be.

It is worth our bearing it in mind because the New Yam Festival which we are celebrating today is not an exclusively Igbo phenomenon. There is, as many of us may know, what has been called the West African Yam Belt which stretches all the wav from the Camerouns to the Ivory Coast. The New Yam is celebrated throughout this zone. That this Festival is celebrated so extensively over much of West Africa would suggest that all local explanations for the Festival, including our own must be taken advisedly. It would perhaps be simpler to believe that the seasonal year, coinciding with the first Yam harvest, made July and August the true beginning of the season of plenty - or at least, the end of the season of scarcity.

To this we must add the fact which we are becoming increasingly aware of, that the yam is a most un economical crop to cultivate. For one thing, there is only one harvest a year. For another, cultivating yams is truly a man's job: ọrụ okorobia: only the able bodied and persevering can successfully do it. Moreover, unlike the cassava, the yam depends on its own tubers for propagation. This means that a substantial part of each harvest is earmarked for the next year's planting - a rather heavy literal wastage of both capital and profit. In consequence, the yam has become a very precious plant, indeed; and if, for any reason, its harvest failed, the community was doomed, as it were, to starvation.

Chinua Achebe tells us in his Things Fall Apart of Unọka who went to consult Agbala over his perennially poor yam harvest.

Every year, he said sadly (to the priestess), ‘before I put any crop in the earth, I sacrifice a cock to Anị, the owner of all land. It is the law of our fathers. I also kill a cock at the shrine of Ifejiọkụ, the god of yams. I clear the bush and set fire to it when it is dry. I sow the yams when the first rain has fallen, and stake them when the young tendrils appear. I weed...'

Many readers of that novel will remember the reply he got: 'Hold your peace!' screamed the priestess, her voice terrible as it echoed through the dark void. 'You have offended neither the gods nor your fathers. And when a man is at peace with his gods and his ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm. You, Ụnọka, are known in all the clan for the weakness of your machete and your hoe. When neighbours go out with their axe to cut down virgin forests you sow your yams on exhausted farms that take no labour to clear. They cross seven rivers to make their farms; you stay at home and offer sacrifices to a reluctant soil. Go home and work like a man.

Our harvests, then, can only be as good as our labour. Only when we have worked like men can we hope for a proper harvest and for a stock of yams with which to celebrate Ahịajọkụ. Annual celebrations and propitiations make sense only against the background of all full and thorough season's labour of both hand and brain.

But, as we also realize from Achebe's novel, even the hardworking can be unlucky, Okonkwọ, trying to redeem the bad name his lazy father Ụnọka had made for the family, borrowed 800 seed yams from a family friend to add to his planting stock. He planted the: first set of yams immediately after the first rains. That was a disaster. “The rains lasted only a brief moment. The blazing sun returned, more fierce than it had ever been known, and scorched all the green that had appeared with the rains. The earth burned like hot corals and roasted all the yams that had been sown." Later when the rains came back, Okonkwọ planted the other 800 seed yams he got from Nwakibie.

But the year had gone mad. Rain fell as it had never fallen before. For days and nights together it poured down in violent torrents, and washed away the yam heaps. Trees were uprooted and deep gorges appeared everywhere The yams put on luxuriant green leaves, but the farmers knew that without sunshine the tubers would not grow.

That year the harvest was sad, like a funeral, and many farmers wept as they dug up the miserable and rotting yams. One man tied his cloth to a tree branch and hanged himself.

There can be little doubt that a crop as precious and as demanding as the yam would in time acquire this "status of a god of life.

Times, however, change. Probably fewer people commit suicide today because of the failure of the yam harvest than because they lost a lucrative government contract. In the past, no one dared eat the new yam before the proper rituals have been performed. The exigencies of life are beginning to dictate new approaches to the rituals of the New Yam Festival. Families desperate for food will quietly harvest and eat the yams planted in their backyards (or their mgbala o mbubo); but these yams will only be eaten, they say, by women and children. It is just an easy step from women to not so prosperous men who have exhausted their stock of the previous years' yams and have large families to feed. There is a lot of common sense in the story told about Ogidi people that they buy and eat the early yams from their Atani and their Anambra neighbours before the New Yam Festival. And they do £0 on the very elegant conviction that the taboo only applies to yams harvested from one's own farm. This foreign yam the Ogidi people call O bu m kolu.

I spoke earlier of a West African Yam Belt. Let us not forget that in very important respects, we that is, the Igbo people - differ from many of the communities of the West African coastlines which celebrate the New Yam Festival. We are unlike the Yoruba or the Bini of Nigeria, or the Ashanti and Fante in Ghana in our political organisation. Whereas these other societies are imperial aristocratic or hierarchical in their traditions, we are (as they say) egalitarian and democratic. In this respect, the one West African community within the Yam Belt which shares this tradition with us are the Ewe people of Ghana. Without overstating the importance of this difference, we must surely not want to forget that we are perhaps the only major ethnic group in West Africa that lacks the monolithic cohesiveness that is usually the characteristic of people with a long history of communal interaction. All the earlier travelers who visited our part of the world never failed to comment on the fact that there did not appear to be any kind of central pan-Igbo authority among us. Every man, they said, was a god in his house; every village was an autonomous community; federations and alliances, were exactly that: affiliations of convenience which did not pretend to be new political entities capable of transforming the primary pattern of political sovereignty in the federating units.

We are now beginning to understand the nature and value of this political organisation as developed and practiced by our people. Professor Isichei has argued that we must look to other spheres than a centralized government for unifying institutions among the Igbo - to language, social institutions and customs, and to philosophical and religious values. Whatever we do, we will still come face to face with a certain radical independence of mind, a certain basic sense of individual sovereign-ness which co-exists with the communal sovereignty of ikwu na ibe obodo, and mba. Oluidah Fquiano, an Igbo man who was sold into slavery in the eighteenth century wrote a book about his recollections of Igbo society, and in that book, which was published in 1789, he remarked that "everyone contributes something to the common stock; and as we are unacquainted with idleness, we have no beggars." A French traveler of the nineteenth century, quoted by Professor Isichei, saw in Igbo society the embodiment of true liberty, "although its name was not inscribed on any monument."

Contrast this picture with another. Archbishop Crowther, for example, war disturbed by the nature of Igbo independence. He saw this independence as a "great drawback." "It is not too much to say that the moral conduct of the Ibos generally is characterised by a something approaching lawlessness.

The people as a rule are impatient of control. "Crowther specifically contrasted this characteristic with patterns among the Yorubas, his own people. "It is no tribal partiality" he wrote, which induces me to say that in this respect (the Igbo) form a striking contrast to the Yorubas, whose respect for lawfully constituted authority is often shown by a loyalty which maybe equaled, but can never be surpassed, by the most loyal civilized nations." This picture is repeated in a way by a report of 1890 by the Agent General of the Royal Niger Company which spoke of the Obosi people as a "wild and savage race of cannibals and apt to be troublesome."

There is no doubt in my mind that Igbo society, at least in the nineteenth century, was a harsh and even brutal one to live in. Traditionally hard-working, the Igbo man found the chaos of the changing world around him both seductive and disorienting. Labour is inseparable from strength. "We are all habituated to labour from our earliest years," Equiano wrote. That habit was given expression in the lean infertile years in a certain basic communal indiscipline founded on raw: strength. A man was a man only if he could both cater for his family and defend that family. In the changing environment generated by the slave, trade, a man could also boast openly of his own individual prowess, not now in the farm, but in the oil or the slave trade. Arising directly from this, each man (and each community) assumed sole responsibility for his own (or its own) defense. Violence was inevitably involved in this expression of power and provision of defense.

Igbo independence, therefore, was both natural and circumstantial. In Sierra Leone where many re-captives were settled in the nineteenth century, the Igbo segment of the community continued to express their independent character without the associated violence reported by Crowther.

Fyfe describes the Igbo people in Sierra Leone as "less clannish" than the Aku or the Yoruba who he said were "particularly noted for their solidarity." But even in Sierra Leone the Igbo would not compromise their independence. In 1839, an Igbo clerk who was alleged to have shot his white manager was burnt to death. The Igbo community could not accept the processes involved in this brutal execution. They threatened revenge on the Freetown maroons who were responsible for the crime and would have carried out their threat but for the intervention of British soldiers.

In 1859, another Igbo in Sierra Leone signed a strongly worded petition to the British Government on behalf of "National Society of the Liberated Africans and their Descendants." But curiously enough, the Igbo community would not define itself exclusively as Igbo. I was thoroughly dismayed to find that in 19th century Sierra Leone., the name Ibo, spelt variously as "Eboe" or "Heebo" was used (again according to Fyfe) as "a group name for peoples who in their homeland lacked the coherent nationhood their name implied.

"Here again we are dealing with a characteristic paradox. Most of those African slaves who wrote on behalf of their fellow slaves were themselves Igbo, though they never made much of this fact. Equiano's story was a major tribute to Igbo culture. Another Igbo slave, known to us as Aneaso, (Ani ASO] who became an assistant to the Jamaica Mission at New Carmel recorded his impressions of Igbo life in 1853; so, nearer home, did David Cekparabietoa Pepple from Isuama who was sold into slavery at Bonny about 1869. One recalls with pride the fact that in 1848, Mr. William Henry Pratt, a former Igbo slave was called to Britain to give evidence before the Parliamentary Committee investigating the slave trade. "His answers," according to one account, "displayed the easy self confidence of the successful businessman." With equal pride one should mention that the first African to take a B.A. at Oxford's University College in 1876 was Christian Cole, the grandson of an Igbo ex-slave. The point, really is that though the Igbo presence was felt as early as the 18th century, no particular honour was bestowed on the Igbo people generally. It all seemed as if there was really no coherence to the world from which these men came, that they had no identity.

The explanation – or part of the explanation for this may lie in our own refusal to acknowledge a common ancestor, in our centripetal search for origins. It does not really matter where we begin. From Onitsha and across the Niger, the claim is of Benin ancestry - which allows us to share in the glory of that well-known empire, But the Bini in turn claim an Ife ancestry. Or is it the other way round? To complicate matters further, the original Oba of Lagos is said to have been a Bini prince. Because we do not know how seriously to take these claims, we find a recent writer wondering whether the Ofala might not have "descended from or been modeled on the Igue festival at Benin. When it is remembered that for many years 'the Onitsha people were living in the realm of the Oba of Benin', the possibility is not far fetched."

Flattering as this association with Benin may be, there are others in Onitsha who reject it and claim affinity with the Igala people farther north. Indeed, many well known families in Onitsha assert with pride that they are the descendants of Igala princes. If we did not know of the frequent wars between Onitsha and Igala, we could dismiss these claims outright. As late as the 1870's the Igala's were still raiding Onitsha; so that it is almost in keeping with our search for origins from outside the Igbo heartland that a theory of Igala origins has its strong attractions. Further north in the Nsukka area, the Igala influence is obviously much stronger to the extent that, as some now claim, the Nsukka people are the warrior descendants of the Atta of Igala's noblemen. Here, the chief priest is atta-ama and a noble man is not simply an ogbu efi as in Onitsha, but an ogbu inyinya in the tradition of the Igala people. The Onitsha and Nsukka traditions of origin came to a head in the Nri tradition of Kingship and priesthood which some people insist is not '"originally" Igbo and exhibits features brought it to the area by Igala princes and their priests!

To the northeast of Igboland and immediately below it we have another set of traditions tracing Igbo origins to the Ogoja and Ekoi people. Nowhere is this search for origins more dramatic than in the case of the Aros who, according to Humphrey Eni of Ujari (in his book The Ujari People of Awka District) "might have associated with, but not descended from, Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella." This view is no less fanciful than the view that the early Portuguese, perhaps as far back as the Middle Ages, had children by their Cross River mistresses and that the Aros are the result. Arochukwu itself is said to owe more to its Akangbe and Ibibio ancestors than to the Igbo. The irony of all this is that according to their own traditions, the Efik lived first at Ibọm in Aro District and were probably descendants of a union of an Igbo man and an Ibibio woman. Professor Afigbo has examined these problems in some detail and concludes, more in exasperation than satisfaction, that it "seems not only possible but probable that, despite the agreement of all variants of oral tradition in the question of the (Aro) ethnic heterogeneity, we are in fact dealing with solid Ibo stock."

Professor Afigbo's exasperation arises from a curious fact of Aro history namely, that “nearly all the names involved in the legendary drama that led to the foundation of Aro Chukwu are Ibo names”, with the exception of Ndem, Loessien, Kakapu and Uruk which can however be explained by the fact of the Aro system of naming. “An Aro man usually names his first son after his own father, his first daughter after his mother. His second son he names either after his uncle or after his wife's father or after a friend who was useful to him during his occupational wandering beyond Aro Chukwu and whose memory he wanted to commemorate.” Whence it is that among the founding fathers of Aro Chukwu were people like Ezeke whose son was Ndem; Ndem's first son was Okpo who seduced Nachi's wife and had a son called Oke. We must, of course, add such classic names as Toti Nwa Toti, Ijeoma nta Ijeoma Ebulu and the most classic of them all, Uruk Nta, son of Uruk and father of Nachi.

To the south and southeast are the Ikwere people who say they are neither Igbo nor Ijo, but a totally new species of blackmen tracing their ancestry over the heads of their immediate neighbours to, perhaps, Egypt Or Israel. The issue clearly goes beyond the puny political compromises and calculations of this year or last. Indeed, the very circumstances which make the ancestry of the Aro a matter for controversy apply with greater vividness to the Ikwere and indeed to the Ijo people of the Eastern Delta. Because there is so much else to talk about today we will not go into any details. Suffice it to say that none of the neighbours of the Igbo people has been known to gladly assume names or claim Igbo ancestry. On the contrary, it is the Igbo who are indifferent to what names they are called or to what nationality they are attached. Consequently nothing is less likely to be true than a people, immediate to the south of Igboland and occupying territory immediately to the north of Bonny, itself a settlement of not later than the 15th century presumably first by Western Ijo migrants and subsequently by an influx of Igbo settlers - nothing, I say, is less likely to be true than that such a people bearing names like Amadi and Wali etc. and having a language so differentiated from both Ijo and Efik/Ibibio could be of other than solid Igbo stock. And this is putting things mildly.

We are concerned today with the matter of Igbo identity, and even if for no other reason, we should dwell a little longer on our connection with our Ijo neighbours of the Eastern Delta. The Ijo people are (or were) a matrilineal people. One consequence of this was that children reverted to the maternal grandparents rather than to the patrilineal line. Such a system, with all its many peculiar advantages, came under very severe pressure during the three hundred years or so of close contract with the Igbo people. First this matrilineal system was almost completely disorganized from the 16th century as a result of the intense commercial rivalry which developed between the various Ijo clans and families, or "houses", as they were called. Both as a result of manpower of the oil trade with the hinterland and of the equally taxing trade in slaves the Ijo "houses", which had virtually became a combination or the family and the 1imitedJiability company found that it was bad business to allow one's sons to marry the daughters of one's trading rivals since a man with several sons and grandsons would in practice be helping build up the manpower of his rivals. The result, as even our Ijo neighbours fully acknowledge, was a massive search not only for able-bodied Igbo youths to serve as porters and trade assistants, and slaves, but also for marriage age Igbo girls who would become wives to their sons. The children born thereby would remain within those houses or clans. Quite as conveniently, many of the so-called Igbo slaves married the daughters of the Ijo house lords and bore children who also remained within the clan. A very convenient cross matching of bloods!

No people on earth including the Igbo, can lay claim to racial purity, and the comments I have just made must not be misinterpreted. The crucial point to bear in mind is that in spite of this massive infusion of Igbo blood into the Ijo system, a process that is still going on no Igbo scholar has made any serious case for regarding the Ijo people as essentially Igbo. Quite as important, too, no strong traditions of Igbo origins have been cultivated among the Ijo people who were products of this major historical event. True to their Igbo upbringing, our women remained faithful to their Ijo husbands and named their children after their Ijo traditions. The Igbo man, too, named their children, not after themselves, but, after their hosts, in conformity with the requirements of the Ijo house tradition. They just simply gave up their identity. Nevertheless a survey of all the Eastern Ijo people with Igbo ancestry would bring in an astonishing (and possibly traumatic) result. The blame is not that of the Ijo people, but of the Igbo people who say Aha m efula, but seem at every turn of their communal history to have made every effort to ensure that that name does not survive.

Hence it is that if the question were really asked, who are the Igbo? Most so-called Igbo communities would point to the community next door. We appear to lack the cohesiveness which a common theory of origins provides for a people. I am not of course, thinking here of the detailed patterns of migration which historians and archaeologists are now establishing for this region. I am rather interested in the folk sense of common origins; the notion that though over centuries there may have been some parting of ways arising from contact with other peoples who are now officially recognized as Igbo and those others who for the time being find it inconvenient to claim to be Igbo.

A crisis of origins inevitably leads to a crisis of institutions and ultimately to a crisis of identity. Professor E.A. Alagoa who has studied Ijo history quite extensively, was very much struck by some of the cultural characteristics of the Apoi people of Okitipupa Division of Ondo State. These people are apparently' the "most westerly group separated from the main body of Ijo" in Bendel and Rivers States. They have adopted the language and manners of their Yoruba neighbours. Alagoa reports; yet they have maintained a strong interest ill certain Ijo rituals and have preserved these rituals in a form almost indistinguishable from those of the Kolokuma region of the central delta. According to Alagoa the Apoi proudly tell traditions of their Ijo origin.

Among the Igbo, the situation is different. Discontinuity, rather than identity, would seem to be the norm. In place of the unifying phenomenon of the Ahịajọkụ or Fejiọkụ festival, our main harvest festival, we now have in several communities in Anambra and even in Imo State, the phenomenon of the Ofala of which Marius Nkwo, in a moment of deserved confusion, said that "it does not appear to be an Ibo name, though it sounds like an Ibo word." The Ofala is fast becoming an institution distinct from and even actually replacing the Ahịajọkụ or harvest institution; and the Igbo people, quite characteristically, are indifferent to this development.

But if Ofala does not appear to be an Igbo word, what of ji itself? Igbo names usually do not begin with consonants. In fact, if we allow for such words beginning with the nasals m and n there are just three exceptions to this rule, namely, di ji and chi, and such derivatives from them as dike (di ike), and chukwu (chi ukwu). It is a simple phonological rule of Igbo that words like fada and foto and monki are clearly borrowings. Exceptions prove the rule, but they raise problems. We either assume that these exceptions are later phenomena in the history of the language, or in the alternative propose a pattern of phonological change (that is, of sound change) which will explain their emergence and survival. We will leave di and chi out of consideration for the moment. Ji; for its part, would appear to simply refer to most tubers. What the English call the common yam (discorea) is our ji; of course. But in the perversity of linguistic logic what the English call cocoyam we call ede, and what they call cassava we refer to as ji akpu or simply akpu. In addition we have ji awa and ji oko. Moreover, in the names Ahiajioku and Fejioku, we have a ji segment which, paradoxically enough, does not operate as if it had any original connection with the name ji. To compound it all, we have to bear in mind the general opinion that the yam tuber, or some variety of it, was (like the oil palm) indigenous to the West African area before the introduction of the Malaysian variety. All this means that a serious skeptic would wonder if the word ji owes anything to shu yi, the Chinese name for the yam discorea opposita, a name which friends who joke about such matters believe is a corruption of ishi ji.

Whatever we think, the point stands out clearly that neither Ahịajọkụ nor Fejiọkụ provides that linguistics link with ji that would suggest that the god and the tuber were generated in the same linguistic environment. If either name referred to the new yam, the affix would be ọhụụ, ọfụụ rather than ji ọkụ. A possible explanation may lie in the original Igbo way of roasting rather than of pounding yams. If so, we are dealing not simply with the new yam but with a hot (roasted) yam: ji oku. In fact, in every tradition I have come across, it is the usual routine for the authorized official to roast and eat one new yam very new moon till he exhausts the stock of sacred yams on the eve of the new moon which accompanies the Yam Festival. There is a humorous but relevant support for this conjecture in the story which Mr. J:E.N. Nwanguru tells in his book Aba and British Rule 1896-1960. According to his account, the original ancestors the Ngwa people were camped on the Owerri side of the Imo River, preparatory to crossing it in their big migration south. Some of the Ngwa leaders who were rather in a hurry did the most unorthodox thing of boiling their yams in a pot, eating .the yams as soon as they were done and crossing the river at low tide. The others followed custom and chose to roast the yams.

By the time the yams were ready to be eaten, the river had risen too high for them to cross, according to Nwanguru, these Ngwa people are regarded as the ohuhuu those who still roast their yams!

What has survived in an undisputed manner is the fact that men devoted or dedicated to the Igbo yam god have a name all to themselves: Ajọkụ, Njọkụ, Fejiọkụ, etc. We must take this as rather strong circumstantial evidence for insisting that the ji sequence in Ahiajiọkụ has a necessary linguistic connection with the Igbo word for yam. In fact, we are dealing with a deity whose name, as is so often the case, ordinary mortals can take, gladly or perforce.

What we are dealing with therefore, is .the familiar difficulty of being unable to explain an institution because we cannot explain its origins. One of the early colonial logists said the Edda were not Igbo because they "adopted the prohibition of eating new yams before the feast day" only after “the arrived at their' present habitat from the Igbo village of Uturu.” On the other hand, in an attempt to prove that the Igbo institutions are mostly imported, another anthropologist, Palmer was willing to accept Chineke as the Igbo word for God; Chukwu, however, appeared to him “doubtless only another dialectic variation of the deified ancestor” of the Jukun, N'yaku or N'yakang. If there is any relevance in all this it is perhaps that the other name for this Kings, N’jokun, is very close to the Igbo God Njoku and that the crisis surrounding our origins and institutions makes it difficult for us today to know who we are or what we celebrate.

Divinities are often the most ancient and most cherished of the institutions of society. Temples, churches, shrines, pagodas and similar structures are built in their names and for their worship. It is in my view par of the peculiar quality of Igbo life and part of the explanation for the crisis of identity which surrounds that life that the Igbo do not appear to care about churches and temples, and even about gods! This statement will shock many people who would want to simply hear that the Igbo people are very deeply religious people which is true. What is equally true is that we are a thoroughly iconoclastic people; that we keep our gods in our hearts and have only an appropriately respectful attitude to the circumstances that surround them. We respect the gods, but, as the proverb says, we also expect the gods to respect us humans. We acknowledge the power of the gods, and cultivate that power; but when these gods consistently fail to prove themselves powerful, we reserve the right to discard them and seek out new gods. In fact, circumstances greater than the gods themselves will take care of the matter.

One divinity, however, was beyond the capriciousness of Igbo men: that divinity is neither Igwe, nor even Chukwu, but Ala, the goddess of the earth. She was the one deity which no man or woman and no community could afford to offend, much less discard. If ever there was a supreme god among the Igbo it was Ala. A crisis in our institutions has obscured this fact; and on an occasion like this, perhaps a Word or two of explanation or reflection is called for.

Our early anthropologists, believing that we all owe our civilization to some ancient spark from Egypt or thereabouts, have propagated the idea of a sun god among the Igbo people, especially of the northern borderlands. Nri, was unequivocally associated in the publications of MD. W. Jeffrey's for example as founded by a sky god, Eri. The symbols of royalty and priesthood were said to confirm both the idea of a sky-god and the foreign character of these institutions. If such a sky based divinity had to have an Igbo name, it would be Igwe, the sky. And the Igbo do have that name and that god.

However, as many of us know, at Umunneọha there did develop a religious cult that went by the name Igwe ka ala. Both Umunneọha and Igwe ka ala would have been household names throughout Igboland if we had taken ourselves seriously as a people. In Achebe's Arrow of God, Ezeulu says of Nwodika's son that he is "not a poisoner although he comes from Umunneora." The comment is full of insinuations, and Ezeulu's companion, Akuebue is quick to draw out one of them. "Every lizard", he advises, "lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache." The point, of course, is that Umunneoha, the home of Igwe ka ala had quite a reputation throughout Igboland. When Ezeulu refused to call the new yam festival and a delegation of ten of the most distinguished elders went to see him over it, Nwaka of Umunneora who otherwise was eligible to attend, stayed away. His absence, Achebe comments in the novel, "showed how desperate they all were to appease Ezeulu."

Igwe ka ala was quite simply not only a devilish sect but a heretical one. Its very name was a daring - a consciously daring - challenge to the supreme deity of the Igbo people. This cult placed Igwe above Ala, and claimed him as supreme. To propose that was in itself an abomination, that is to say, a defilement of the Earth, imeru ala. In short, Umunneora and Igwe ka ala must be seen in the history of our institutions as phenomenon which came closest to setting up a god cult above that of Ala herself, the ultimate sanction to morals.

Where Igwe ka ala failed, another system succeeded. That system was the Chukwu cult of Arochukwu. Historians and ethnologists some of them tell us that on the Cross River, "each village has its secret society and society meeting house." This custom, it is argued, "spread to the adjacent Ibo divisions." In like vein, they argue that the cult of Chukwu derived from the Ibu Ukpabi cult, supposedly originally that the Ekoi people. Professor Isichei sums it up quite simply by saying that "the famous oracle grew out of a local Ibibio shrine, Ibritam." Whatever the exact history of this oracle, we cannot avoid noticing its name as a compound formed from chi and ukwu, a compound which, translated into English, would become the Big Chi. There can be no gainsaying the fact that, for all its excesses, the oracle gave the Igbo people a new name for God, and a name which, as I hope to suggest in a moment, they were quite happy to accept. That achievement was made possible by three considerations, namely, the integration of chi into this religious system, its avoidance of conflict with Ala and, finally, its decisive separation of Eke from Chi in the Igbo metaphysics.

I will not have time to go into details here. I will however want to assert that unless I am mistaken, there is no capital letter god among the Igbo outside Ala. God, among the Igbo, is certainly nothing like the God of the Christians. That is to say, as I tried to argue with members of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, some two years ago, our god is not the ONE towards whom all creation aspires, to paraphrase Plot inus and St. Augustine. He has no heaven and no troop of angels and saints ministering to him. He has promulgated no decalogue, and he has not appointed a day when he will judge the living and the dead. In fact, the dead are not dead in the Christian sense, because among Igbo people, there is a continual coming and going from this life to the other and back. What we have is CHI, probably one of the most complex theological concept ever devised to explain the Universe. It is a concept which both accounts for the Universe, explains Good and Evil, tragedy and good fortune, order and conflict, character and destiny, free-will and metaphysical order. There may he parallels in this idea with Christian thought. In fact, one Catholic priest who discussed the subject with me went so far as to suggest that perhaps CHI is Christus, the intermediary, an African anticipation of the revealed Saviour and mediator. An Igbo woman sings:

I don't have a child of my own

But don't blame me;

Don't ask me why not

Blame my chi, ask my chi.

The woman's relationship with her chi is a very complex one. Her chi, on the other hand, has questions to answer. Her chi may have been lazy and irresponsible. If so, the woman's ill luck is really profound, though nut necessarily absolute since her chi can be taunted and harassed into activity on the woman's behalf. A bad chi does not necessarily come with sin. An otherwise good woman can have a bad chi and the world will easily recognize this and pity her tragedy. In the same way, a person may have a very active and enterprising chi. Chi ya na edu ya: His chi leads him; smoothens his way for his. chi ya di ike: His chi is strong.

A woman with a bad chi prays for a better chi the next time round when, after death, she will return to the world, have a second life on earth, lọ ụwa ọzọ. In fact many Igbo people do not despair about their chi even in the present life, and have no intention whatever of waiting for change the next time round. Their prayer is to their chi for help in this present season. Chimokpolaom ugwo: May my Chi never come to hate me. Hence, also the malediction Chi gi kpọọ gị oku: May your chi set you on fire and burn you up in ashes. Prayer is therefore not an attempt to win back God's goodwill through confession and repentance, but to exhort chi to action. Sacrifice is to appease those spirit forces interfering with this fulfillment.

What the Aro cult of Chukwu did was to build on this thoroughly Igbo foundation and to propose a universal chi parallel to (though more powerful I than) the individual chi. That idea blended beautifully into the Igbo world view. Chi was separated from chi ukwu which then became the standard Igbo name for The Almighty. And yet, Ala was undisturbed; in fact it was through chukwu the Ala could best be appeased; and the priests and charlatans who propagated Chukwu's powers knew they had the good will of a la working for them. Chukwu survived; Igwe ka ala did not. It could never really have. The Ngwa People, when they decided to cross the Imo River took with them both Ekwensu and Ala. At a place then called Umuokike, they set up a shrine or okpu for Ala. Today, that place is Okpu Ala Ngwa.

If the picture I have just painted is essentially true, then We can understand why priests and kings have such a fragile tenure in Igboland. Theirs was a double-handed responsibility to serve god and man, both of them impulsive, temperamental and often ungrateful. The early missionaries who wrote about the dibia, as they called all priests, were dimly conscious of this situation. Crowther believed that the dibia were very highly respected. It was through them, he wrote, that the gods Speak and their word had to be accepted and could not be denied, They were, "in fact, the chief .ruling power among many superstitious tribes." This combination of spiritual and temporal power was neither as absolute nor as secure as many thought. The tragedy of a man like Ezeulu in Achebe's Arrow of God is to be found in his crisis of realization that his people and his god could both abandon him. At the end of the novel, the demented Ezeulu had to learn the bitter lesson which the people called the "wisdom of their ancestors", "that no man however great was greater than his people; that no man ever won judgment against his clan." In fact, as Ezeulu's own people saw things, "their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest."

I will return briefly to these two adjectives "headstrong" and ambitious" in another minute. For now, let me draw attention to the immense responsibility and utter helplessness of Ezeulu's position. It was his responsibility and privilege as the Chief Priest of Ulu to announce the date of the New Yam Festival. He knew the immensity of the power which this involved; but he often wondered "if it was real."

It was true he named the day for the feast of the Pumpkin Leaves and for the New Yam feast; but he did not choose the day. He was merely the watchman. His power was no more than the power of a child over a goat that was said to be his.

Nothing reveals the predicament of power in Igbo society than this priest's own internal conflicts. Whereas no man in all Umuaro could stand up to say Ezeulu dared not refuse to name the day of the festival, he himself knew he could not actually refuse. Man, god and priest-king were thus locked in a firmly wrought chamber of self-correcting contradictious. Two of the elders, in discussing Ezeulu's refusal to announce the New Yam Feast, saw the potential for mutual destruction.

'Let me tell you one thing. A priest like Ezeulu leads a god to ruin himself. It has happened before.'

“Oh perhaps a god like Ulu leads a priest to ruin himself.”

At the very end the god, the priest and the people lose out and the New Yam (Ahịajọkụ) festival is held not on Ezeulu's orders but in the yard of St. Mark's Church under the superintendence of the cathechist, Mr. John Jaja Goodcountry.

I now, as I move to a conclusion, wish to return to those two words "headstrong" and "ambitious." No two words can better define that quality in Igbo character which has been its primary source of strength and of disaster. We are a headstrong people -sensible but headstrong. When people shook hands with Ezeulu, "he tensed his arm and put all his power into the grip, being unprepared for it, they winced and recoiled with pain." In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwọ did what a headstrong Igbo man would want to do He took his machete off its sheath, chopped off the court messenger's head, and walked home, proud that he had acted like a man but disillusioned to know that his people had allowed the other messengers to escape.

Every phase of our past history has confirmed this cult of individual daring. A certain stubbornness seems to be built into our psyche; an instinctive preference to break when perhaps it is possible only to bend. There is strength, of course, in that resoluteness; and I acknowledge in all humility, a poem I wrote in honour of one of our headstrong and valiant youngmen who fought and died in the last great war.



THE BLADE

Who? He who was,

rots, rotten,

where blades, sharp,

of grass grew two years secure

from foot of man

and woman

cropping for tubers

and hoppers that nourish.



ii

He, now mean, was

Man, hard-headed

adjutant

wielding blades, sunlike,

with fierce thrusts

that made them meat

for hoppers and maggots

by bladeroots

in fields of war.



iii

He, he man

bold blade of palm,

erect,

thunder-maker man of mine,

whose feet stood the sacred

ground of fatherland

and flung revenge

to west and south and north

till woods, marsh and men

learnt his footfall who

awed both beast and man



iv

He, who was Man,

now rots on fatherland

for glory

where watch! these blades,

glad, of grass

how green they shoot

to face

God and his good men

and ways

in the mad tumult of our loss.



v

They, all fatherland's men,

will here crop tubers,

harvests on harvests.

And to who there asks, Who?

will all men, everlasting, say,

He, Dike!

It is not this valour that I fear. It is the cult of individual ambition for power, that refusal to allow one's mind reflect that awkward assurance which was Ezeulu's doom. "No man in all Umuaro can stand up and say that I dare not. The woman who will bear the man who will say it has not yet been born." Unhappily, not only the Ezeulu but every Igbo man says the same thing of himself and exercises himself as if the nature of authority is not proverbially ambivalent in Igbo society. Our history strongly suggests that we need to moderate strength and power with discretion and diplomacy, not only among our leaders but also among the generality of our people. It is not weakness to recognize the value of discretion. It is foolhardiness to choose death (or something close to it) in place of life. Here, again, permit me to refer to Achebe's Arrow of God and to the advice given to Ezeulu concerning his son Obika who, everybody said, was a disgrace to his family. '... You are blessed with a great compound. But in all great compounds there must be people of all minds - some good, some bad, and some fearless ane some cowardly; those who bring wealth and those who scatter it, those who give advice and those who only speak the words of palm wine. That is why we say that whatever tune you play in the compound of a great man there is always someone to dance to it. I salute you.'

The challenge that we all face today is that of re-establishing our identity. As is perhaps evident from my rather oblique presentation of my subject, no simple prescription is being proposed, only an understanding of our predicament and a willingness to pay the real high price dictated by our circumstances. For centuries we have been slaves to our own people, unable to shake off tyranny except by radical and costly action. No subtler, more gently modes of redress seem applicable in an environment which has apparently no room for gentleness. For centuries we have been slaves to other cultures, or have been seen as being such slaves. In the various countries to which our brothers and sisters were carried, we laboured as other people's slaves. Today, we still labour as if we were slaves to a larger community of peoples. Let us learn from the lessons of this history and resolve to be ourselves again. We have begun well with the Ahịajọkụ lecture.

Now that I have spoken before this distinguished gathering of elders, protected by the goodwill of our Governor, and his army of his special assistants and commissioners, I must admit to change my mind.

Imo State is the heart of Igboland. It is a state of very wise and learned people; it is also a state which takes its slowest care before according public recognition to gods and people. It must have been a singular act of graciousness, indeed, for the Government of this State to accept to recognize the feast of Ahịajọkụ as worth celebrating. Modesty prevents me from also saying how immensely kind the Government of this state must be to give me the opportunity of delivering the first of the annual lectures in honour of Ahịajọkụ. That is the irony of life, and (paradoxically) my own good fortune.

Ọha na eze, me me nu.