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1
Nnebedum, Chigozie. "Empirical Identity as Dimension of Development in Africa: With Special Reference to the Igbo Society of South-east of Nigeria." Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (March 1, 2018): 195–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/mjss-2018-0039.
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Abstract Identity, as discussed in this paper, is seen as a phenomenon which is constantly changing under certain circumstances. From empirical point of view, the identity of man is influenced by the environment through experience and unconscious socialization; it is continually modified by the individual’s encounter with the world. The aim of this work is to analyse the intricacies involved in understanding the situation and mentality of the Igbos as far as identity is concerned and to determine how this hampers or helps in the development of the Igbo/African society. In this work ‘identity’ as a means of development with regard to the Igbo people of South-East Nigeria is treated. The work is methodically qualitative. It analyses literatures and different views on identity and tailors the discussion of development along the lines of hermeneutical approach to subjective experiences. The Igbos and Africans find themselves sometimes in the danger of a mixture of identity. This is the case with most of the Igbo people who are scattered all over the world and who are becoming more foreign in their trends and ways of life. Being unable to maintain a definite identity, one is lost in the politics of development. Those who still hang on to pure imitation of the western life are jeopardizing their autonomy and by extension, frustrating development of the African society. Rediscovering the Igbo/African Identity and putting it to the service of development in the African continent is the task of the Africans themselves.
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Abigail, Nzoiwu, Azuka, and Mmaduabuchi, Obinna Chekwubechukwu. "African Identity and Christian Faith in Igboland: A Critical Evaluation of EGWU IMOKA Masquerade Festival." International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology 11, no. 5 (May 31, 2023): 368–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2023.51450.
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bstract: Christianity as a way of life among Africans (The Igbo people precisely) is believed to have shaped and influenced African Culture. African religion and culture according to Okoro, "stand a better chance to offer an alternative method awareness, which is imbedded in different indigenous languages, myths, folklore, cultural heritage and rites and rituals of African traditional faith" (Cultural globalization: 26-37). The identity of the African can be clearly seen in their cultural, anthropological features. The cultural, anthropological features of the Igbo people is influenced by both Christianity and African Traditional Religion. In an attempt to further understand the values behind this cultural influence as it is manifesting itself in the life and thought of the Awka people through Egwuimoka in the contemporary time, the searcher became interested in this- study. However, the influence of culture on Christianity is seen in the attitudinal disposition of the Igbo people towards the Christian faith. Now the question is does Christianity support the Igbo culture which is emerging in the modern time? Does the comparative study of Igbo traditional morality and Christianity ethical concepts clarify a bit of this confused background? if this work helps to answer these and other questions, in any small way, and further helps in clarifying the confused background of our morality today, then, it is not useless effort after all. Our culture is fluid today, because it is rapidly changing. Therefore, this work tries to point to some aspects of the Igbo peoples basis of traditional cultural patterns and beliefs, that can be applied from the values and the beliefs of the past so that the change in culture may not continue on a speed lane and, therefore becoming e confusing as to moral basis of worthwhile existence.
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Islam, Momtajul. "The Role of Native Weaknesses and Cultural Conflicts in Escalating Colonial Supremacy in the Igbo Society, as Perceived in Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe." International Linguistics Research 4, no. 2 (April 27, 2021): p19. http://dx.doi.org/10.30560/ilr.v4n2p19.
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The colonial invaders and their repressive means of governance in Africa were not the only reasons that could be solely held accountable for the fall of indigenous African society during the colonial invasion. Native weaknesses, socio-cultural conflicts and hegemony were equally responsible for the falling apart of native social setups when confronted with colonial alternatives. Native people had had their own covert religious and cultural limitations long before the colonizers entered their soil. The colonial powers cleverly used such inherent societal flaws of African people as excuses to impose European religion and traditions on them. Chinua Achebe does not blindly idealize native African traditions in his writings. He frequently narrates his doubts on flawed socio-cultural practices and moral dualities in the native society, too. This paper is an attempt to explore how innate weaknesses of native Igbo people, socio-cultural conflicts and domination in the native society have also made it easier for the colonial administration to prolong their supremacy in the Igbo land, as depicted in Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. It also elaborates how Ezeulu, the chief priest of god Ulu, falls from dominance in his society because of his intent to execute personal desires which jeopardize his societal role in the Igbo land.
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Kanu, Ikechukwu Anthony. "The philosophical operative conditions of healing shrines in Igbo-African worldhood." Journal of Religion and Human Relations 14, no. 1 (November 16, 2022): 187–206. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jrhr.v14i1.10.
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This paper has studied the philosophical operative conditions of healing shrines in Igbo-African societies. The concept of philosophical operative condition is introduced into the study of Igbo-African healing shrines with the purpose of pointing out the philosophical principles behind the activities in these shrines. This philosophical dimension of African healing shrines is possible because of the nature of the relationship between religion and philosophy. This work, therefore, studied healing and healers in traditional African societies and the place and nature of healing shrines in Igbo societies. Though so much has been written about healing shrines and sacred places in traditional African societies, there is a seeming insufficiency of documents or literature on the Igbo-African healing shrines and the roles they played in restoring well-being to the people. More so, there is hardly a literature that focuses on the philosophical spirit behind the activities in Igbo-African healing shrines. This is the gap in literature that this present work fills. For the purpose of this study, this piece adopted the phenomenological, hermeneutic and historical approaches. This study is a qualitative research that has used both primary and secondary sources of data. It discovered that there is an inescapable element of philosophy in every dimension of African religion.
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Nwauwa, A. O. "The Dating of the Aro Chiefdom: A Synthesis of Correlated Genealogies." History in Africa 17 (January 1990): 227–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3171814.
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Precolonial African historiography has been plagued by historical reconstructions which remain in the realm of legend because events are suspended in almost timeless relativity.Igbo history has not been adequately researched. Worse still, the little known about the people has not been dated. It might be suggested that the major reason which makes the study of the Igbo people unattractive to researchers has been the lack of a proper chronological structure. Igbo genealogies have not been collected. The often adduced reason has been that the Igbo did not evolve a centralized political system whereby authority revolved round an individual—king or chief—which would permit the collection of regnal lists. Regrettably, Nigerian historians appear to have ignored the methodology of dating kingless or chiefless societies developed and applied elsewhere such as in east Africa. In west African history generally, there has been an overdependence for dating on external sources in European languages or in Arabic, and combining these with the main regnal list of a kingdom. Even within kingdoms, genealogies of commoners and officials have rarely been collected or correlated with the regnal lists. Among the Igbo, the external sources are rare and the regnal lists few. Even the chiefdoms—Onitsha and Aboh, Oguta and Nri—were ignored for a long time after modern historiography had achieved major advances elsewhere. Arochukwu has been another neglected Igbo chiefdom. Most of these states with hereditary leadership were peripheral to the Igbo heartland. Nevertheless, they were important because of their interactions with the heartland and the possibility of dating interactive events from their genealogies.
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Ihejirika, Cardinal Chinanu. "An Epistemic Survey of African (Igbo) Notions of Knowledge in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." Journal of Law and Social Sciences 5, no. 3 (2023): 37–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.53974/unza.jlss.5.3.1086.
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This study undertakes an epistemic survey of the notions of knowledge among Igbos of Nigeria as couched in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In this work, Achebe relives the vibrant world of Igbo people before the advent of colonialists in Nigeria. The study therefore unveils the roles and significances of knowledge among the Igbos, the beauty and depth of the people’s values system as enshrined in their culture and traditions. It also exposes the place of elders and oral tradition as both purveyors and repository of knowledge hence, their relevance in Igbo knowledge acquisition process. The work showcases that life among the Igbos was chiefly communal. Knowledge in this society, was acquired through collective experience and wisdom by individual persons’ participation in the community’s rituals, myths and folklores. However, the researcher adopted the hermeneutical and textual analysis methods of inquiry which enabled us to interpret and analyse the Novel, Things Fall Apart. In line with our hermeneutical method, we clarified the meaning of Omenani (traditions) of the people and its’ influence on the epistemology of the people. Our study found that any strongly held beliefs or cultural values which bring only crises when people of different cultures interact necessitates the need for the cultivation of proper epistemological modesty instead of a tenacious attachment to customs and traditions. Lastly, our study recommends a relevant epistemic change as panacea to cultural and social rifts. This more balanced knowledge system being recommended has the capacity of engendering inter-cultural interactions and ensuring social harmony even in the face of the challenges of cultural globalization. This novel problem-solving system is located in our idea of epistemic inter-culturalism.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "Missionary Knowledge and the State in Colonial Nigeria: On How G. T. Basden became an Expert." History in Africa 33 (2006): 433–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0006.
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Between 1931 and 1937, the Anglican missionary G. T. Basden represented the Igbo people on the Nigerian Legislative Council. The Igbo had not elected Basden as their representative; he had been appointed by the colonial government. Basden's appointment seems remarkable. In 1923 the Legislative Council had been expanded to include seats for Unofficial Members, representing a number of Nigerian areas, with the expressed aim of increasing African representation on the Council. In selecting Basden the government went against their original intention that the representative of the Igbo area would be a Nigerian. However, the government decided that there was no “suitable” African candidate available, and that the appointment of a recognized European expert on the Igbo was an acceptable alternative. This choice throws light on a number of features of the Nigerian colonial state in 1930s, including the limitations of African representation and the definition of what would make a “suitable” African candidate.In this paper I am concerned with the question of how Basden became recognized as an expert by the colonial government and also, more generally, with the linkages between colonial administrations' knowledge requirements and missionary knowledge production. Missionary-produced knowledge occupied a central, but also somewhat awkward position in colonial society. On the one hand, colonial governments and missions shared a number of common assumptions and expectations about African peoples. On the other hand, there also existed tensions between missions and government, partly reflecting differing missionary and administrative priorities, which means that the missionary expert was not often recognized as such.
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Densu, Kwasi. "Omenala: Toward an African-Centered Ecophilosophy and Political Ecology." Journal of Black Studies 49, no. 1 (September 7, 2017): 29–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934717729503.
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This article seeks to contribute to the reconstruction of an African-centered ecophilosophy and political ecology. Employing Cheikh Anta Diop’s theory of African cultural unity, it considers the Ndi Igbo philosophy Omenala, its paradigmatic implications for Africana studies, and its capacity to demonstrate the continuity of indigenous African socioecological praxis cross culturally. In addition, it explores the relevance of Omenala to the development of an authentic social history of African people and as a theory to analyze contemporary problems in the African world. Three key issues are addressed. First, the article accounts for the absence of ecological theory within Africana studies. Second, it explicates the cultural and philosophical basis for an African-centered ecophilosophy and political ecology. Third, it envisions new approaches and areas of inquiry within Africana studies.
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van den Bersselaar, Dmitri. "Creating ‘Union Ibo’: Missionaries and the Igbo language." Africa 67, no. 2 (April 1997): 273–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1161445.
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AbstractThe literature of ethnicity in Africa indicates a major role for Christian missionaries in the creation of languages in Africa. It has been argued that certain African ethnic groups owe their existence to the ‘invention’ of their language by missionaries who created a written dialect—based on one or more vernacular(s)—into which they translated the Bible. This language came to be used for education in mission schools and later also in government schools. The Bible dialect consequently became the accepted standard language of the ethnic group and acquired the function of one of the group's prime identity markers.In the case of the Igbo language, the history of the CMS missionaries' efforts at creating a written standard Igbo shows that the process was not always straightforward. The article describes the problematic process of creating a written language. The missionaries undertook continual attempts on the basis of several dialects, but it was half a century before they produced the first translation of the Bible. They complicated matters by working in different dialects, but eventually created a standard dialect which they named Union Ibo, a mixture based on several Igbo dialects.The missionaries were also confronted with resistance from at least part of the Igbo population, who contested their choice of dialect. However, it appears that the majority of the Igbo were simply not interested. The Igbo population were far more interested in education in English, and although the CMS missionaries forced some vernacular education upon the people, actual interest remained limited. It is thus not surprising that the Bible language did not become the accepted standard language of the Igbo ethnic group. The spoken Igbo language does nevertheless function as one of the prime identity markers of the group. The article argues that the importance of the Igbo language to Igbo identity is partly the result of the missionary activity.
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Majeed Kadhem, Suhaib. "Conflict between Tradition and Change in Chinua Achebe's postcolonial novel Things Fall Apart." Al-Adab Journal 1, no. 124 (September 15, 2018): 81–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.31973/aj.v1i124.115.
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In studying the history of Asian and African countries, the colonial period plays an important role in understanding their history, religion, tradition and culture. Things Fall Apart is an English novel by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, published in 1957, which shows the African culture, their religious and traditions through the Igbo society. This novel captures the colonial period and its effect on Igbo society. It is a response and a record of control of western colonialism on the traditional values of the African people. This paper treats the novel as a postcolonial text, by focusing on the clash between occupied and colonizers, the clash between tradition and change, and the clash between different cultures, The Europe Empire and the African natives
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Samuel, Osipeju, Babasola. "Pragmatic Analysis of African Proverbs and Idioms in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart." CLAREP Journal of English and Linguistics 4 (October 10, 2022): 247–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.56907/gc8q9sut.
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Africans don’t just talk; they have a way of saucing their sayings with ‘pepper’ to make what they say appealing and interesting to the ear. This is exactly what Achebe achieved in his first novel: Things Fall Apart. Proverbs, he said, is the palm oil with which words are eaten; and he allowed his characters to utilise them to show the wisdom in African culture, beliefs and tradition. What we did in this work was to consider those proverbs and idioms identified in the novel and subject them to the context of their usages, as well as examine the meanings these proverbs and idioms have among the people; in other words, their communicative relevance, meaning and implications. We adopted speech acts theory and pragmatics to aid our analysis and also did direct translations of the idioms from their original Igbo dialect to Achebe’s localised English translation. Our conclusion from the study shows that proverbs and idioms reveal the characters as deep thinkers; people who do not just talk, but talk only to achieve results. That aside, our findings also reveal the characters, represented by the Igbo people as thinkers, philosophers, rich in wisdom and experience. We see them as people who beautify conversations with words.
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Chuks, Madukasi, Francis. "Ozo Title: An Indigenous Institution In Traditional Religion That Upholds Patriarchy In Igbo Land South-Eastern Nigeria." International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention 5, no. 5 (May 3, 2018): 4640–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.18535/ijsshi/v5i5.02.
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In Igbo land, the institution of Ozo title has underpinnings of male chauvinism and often used by men to remind those who appear to be very forward of their subordinate place in the society. Among the Igbo people, the Ozo title is an indigenous institution that is regarded as a central aspect of African indigenous religious practice through which they engage questions about the meaning for life. Through an ethnographic study conducted in recent years, I propose to explore the origin of the Ozo title and the symbolic significance of this indigenous sacred institution with specific reference to its religious, cultural, political, ethical and social significance, a method by which the indigenous communities keeps in constant religious communication with their deities and ancestors. However, I propose to not only examine the various ways in which Ozo title as a sacred institution has been used by their initiates to mediate religious beliefs and practices in African religion, but to specifically focus on its members as agents or ambassadors of different communities. Through an evaluation of significant Igbo religious practices involving Ozo title as a sacred institution performed by initiated men only which upholds patriarchy, I wish to suggest that the Ozo title as a sacred institution has two significant and related functions. The first one is that it enables the initiates to bridge the gap between the visible and unseen world of the ancestors and thus making possible an Igbo understanding of those forces that are believed to control the destinies of man. Secondly, Ozo title as a sacred institution of the Igbo is believed to uphold and sustain the Igbo religious system, and a complex of traditional religious rituals which uphold the privileges of those men who have been initiated into the ancestral cult. This paper point to particular understandings of Ozo title as integral to African religion, and proposes to illustrate this through an examination of Traditional Igbo Religion through the mediation of Ozo title as a sacred institution as part of the broader socio-sacral order.
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Pinto, Cristina Ferreira. "Things Fall Apart de Chinua Achebe — texto orgulhosamente negro." Cem, no. 17 (2024): 25–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/2182-1097/cem17a2.
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Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author, has been considered by critics as one of the most impor-tant founders of African literature, in reaction to the literature that until then had been produced on Africa. In the sequence of the most diverse colonial literary texts and the arguments that validated colonialism in Africa, always in a dimension of affirmation of white superiority and black savagery, and in which any value, history, or notion of culture was denied to African peoples, Achebe begins a mission to show the western world that pre-colonial Igbo culture had beauty, philosophy, dignity and viable social, political and judicial structures, and that it was by no means an example of the «blank slate» that many Europeans wanted people to believe. In this sense, Achebe publishes his first novel, Things Fall Apart, still in a colonial context (1958), to make his culture known, realistically and based on internal knowledge, in a counterpoint to this prejudiced and racist European devaluation.
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Okafor, Eddie E. "Francophone Catholic Achievements in Igboland, 1883-–1905." History in Africa 32 (2005): 307–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0020.
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When the leading European powers were scrambling for political dominion in Africa, the greatest rival of France was Britain. The French Catholics were working side by side with their government to ensure that they would triumph in Africa beyond the boundaries of the territories already annexed by their country. Thus, even when the British sovereignty claim on Nigeria was endorsed by Europe during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, the French Catholics did not concede defeat. They still hoped that in Nigeria they could supplant their religious rivals: the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the other Protestant missionary groups. While they allowed the British to exercise political power there, they took immediate actions to curtail the spread and dominion of Protestantism in the country. Thus some of their missionaries stationed in the key French territories of Africa—Senegal, Dahomey, and Gabon—were urgently dispatched to Nigeria to compete with their Protestant counterparts and to establish Catholicism in the country.Two different French Catholic missions operated in Nigeria between 1860s and 1900s. The first was the Society of the African Missions (Société des Missions Africaines or SMA), whose members worked mainly among the Yoruba people of western Nigeria and the Igbos of western Igboland. The second were the Holy Ghost Fathers (Pères du Saint Esprit), also called Spiritans, who ministered specifically to the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria. The French Catholics, the SMA priests, and the Holy Ghost Fathers competed vehemently with the British Protestants, the CMS, for the conversion of African souls. Just as in the political sphere, the French and British governments competed ardently for annexation and colonization of African territories.
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Tembo, Nick Mdika. "Ethnic Conflict and the Politics of Greed Rethinking Chimamanda Adichie's." Matatu 40, no. 1 (December 1, 2012): 173–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-040001011.
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The African continent today is laced with some of the most intractable conflicts, most of them based on ethnic nationalism. More often than not, this has led to poor governance, unequal distribution of resources, state collapse, high attrition of human resources, economic decline, and inter-ethnic clashes. This essay seeks to examine Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's through the lens of ethnic conflict. It begins by tracing the history and manifestations of ethnic stereotypes and ethnic cleavage in African imaginaries. The essay then argues that group loyalty in Nigeria led to the creation of 'biafranization' or 'fear of the Igbo factor' in the Hausa–Fulani and the various other ethnic groups that sympathized with them; a fear that crystallized into a thirty-month state-sponsored bulwark campaign aimed at finding a 'final solution' to a 'problem population'. Finally, the essay contends that Adichie's anatomizes the impact of ethnic cleavage on the civilian Igbo population during the Nigeria–Biafra civil war. Adichie, I argue, participates in an ongoing re-invention of how Africans can extinguish the psychology of fear that they are endangered species when they live side by side with people who do not belong to their 'tribe'.
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Zahid, Sazzad Hossain. "Cultural Diversity in Igbo Life: A Postcolonial Response to Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God." International Journal of Social Sciences 5, no. 23 (June 20, 2021): 69–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.52096/usbd.5.23.5.5.
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In his book Chinua Achebe, David Caroll (1980) describes the novel Arrow of God as a fight for dominance both on the theological and political level, as well as in the framework of Igbo philosophy. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1990), famous Achebe critics C. L. Innes and Berth Lindforts consider Arrow of God as a novel with conflicting ideas and voices inside each community with the tensions and rivalries that make it alive and vital. Another profound scholar on Achebe Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu (2001) in Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels assesses Arrow of God, which depicts a community under imminent danger of cultural genocide unleashed by agents of Western imperialism who have recently arrived in the indigenous society. However, the author in this study attempts to see Arrow of God as a postcolonial response to cultural diversity that upholds its uniting and cohesive force in Nigerian Igbo life. The goal is to look at how Achebe, in response to misleading western discourses, develops a simplistic image and appreciation that persists in Igbo life and culture even as colonization takes hold. This paper also exhibits how the Igbo people share their hardships, uphold their age-old ideals, celebrate festivals, and even battle on disagreements. This study employs postcolonial theory to reconsider aspects of cultural diversity among the African Igbo people, which are threatened by the intervention of European colonialism in the name of religion, progress, and civilization.
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Harlin, Kate. ""One foot on the other side": Towards a Periodization of West African Spiritual Surrealism." College Literature 50, no. 2-3 (March 2023): 295–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902220.
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Abstract: For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern worldview as fantasy or "Magical Realism." "West African spiritual surrealism," as defined in this essay, offers a generic rubric that both attends to the literalization of Igbo and Yoruba cosmology in fiction as well as the ways these cosmologies can give rise to literary devices that resist hegemonic, Anglo-American centric literary interpretation. Through close readings of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018), this article historicizes West African spiritual surrealism as a geographically and ideologically diasporic genre that cannot be properly understood through frameworks of globalization alone. This genre and its writers require critics to read both deeply and widely in order to understand how West African spiritual surrealism places African cosmologies and people always already at the center of literary production.
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Nnaemeka Onwuatuegwu PhD, Ignatius. "AN OVERVIEW OF THE IGBO COSMOLOGIC-ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPTION AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD: A PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION." International Journal of Advanced Research 9, no. 5 (May 30, 2021): 25–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.21474/ijar01/12803.
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Practically speaking, the way people understand reality (ontology) cuts across the nexus of their thought pattern, belief system and consequently their general attitude to life. Hence, ontology and cosmology are at the basis of Igbo conception of reality and also the spiritual and physical operations of the human world. It is an established fact that a traditional Igbo would like to hold tenaciously to the already established concepts by the Igbo forebears. Hence, any attempt at a critical analysis of these accepted concepts are quickly waved off with such statements as: it has been so and has to remain so. For the Igbo, it is morally wrong to question the wisdom of the ancestors. The wisdom of the ancestors is to be cherished, preserved and propagated to the future generations and not to be questioned or criticized. But materiality is part of reality. As such, neither the created beings nor the universe in general are static but rather dynamic. Dynamism is the natural condition of existence in the world of the moving and sensible reality. Hence, peoples concepts of reality should be necessarily subjected to constant evaluation and re-evaluation in order to ascertain their validity. Thus, the main purpose of this research is to challenge and encourage Igbo-African scholars to delve into many traditional concepts as to critically evaluate them either to discover the truth hidden in them or to make possible the attainment of certainty. However, the research adopts primarily the method of philosophical appraisal to reach to the goal of the research.
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Kanu, Ikechukwu Anthony. "Igwebuike theology of Omenani and the missionary bifurcation of horizons." OGIRISI: a New Journal of African Studies 16 (October 2, 2020): 127–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/og.v16i1.8.
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African theology points to the fact that every particular situation or context calls for a particular theological reflection, that is, if the theological reflection is to make meaning within that unique circumstance. It is within this context that Igwebuike theology of Omenani emerges in relation to the understanding of culture as the Seed of the Word of God, which already pre-existed in Africa even before the emergence of the Western missionaries. The purpose of adopting this idea of culture as the Seed of the Word of God is to enhance the reconciliation between the African and Christian/Western ’worldhoods’. This piece presented the African culture as an important element in evangelization in Africa, as it is the spirit that animates the African people. It, therefore, located the Seed of the Word of God in the Omenani (the law of the land) of the African people through which they were able to achieve holiness even before the advent of the gospel. It observed that the failures of the missionary enterprise were majorly because of their lack of openness to the African religion and culture. The purpose of this study is to bridge the bifurcation created by the missionaries between the Christian and African ‘worldhoods’. The theoretical framework employed in this research is the Igwebuike sympathetic and non-derogatory framework, which emphasizes evangelization with a sense of understanding.
Keywords: Omenani, Logos Spermatikos, Culture, African, Igbo, Evangelization, Igwebuike
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Afigbo, A. E. "The Spell of Oral History: A Case Study from Northern Igboland." History in Africa 33 (2006): 39–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hia.2006.0003.
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My case study is taken from the northern Igbo of Nigeria and focuses on the village-group of Ihuwe, which name is today rendered as Ihube— thanks to its Anglicization during the period of colonial rule. This not-withstanding, the people still call themselves “Ihuwe,” the form I use in this paper. The Northern Igbo area, especially the area around Awka, Orlu, and Okigwe, is commonly regarded as the heartland of Igbo culture and civilization. Ihuwe, in that portion of old Okigwe Division known today as Okigwe Local Government Area (LGA), lies in a region of southern Nigeria that has been identified as having witnessed human activity from very early times, at least from the period of Acheulean culture. It also lies on the geographically and historically prominent Nsukka-Udi-Okigwe cuesta, which archeology tells us entered the Iron Age quite early in African history, no later than about the eighth century BCE. We are thus dealing with one of the areas of ancient human occupation, as well as an area known for its dense demographic profile. It is these features–early human settlement and occupation with its attendant consequence of severely attenuated oral history, dense demographic profile, and being the cradle land of Igbo culture—that help to define the Northern Igbo and mark them out from the Western, Eastern, Southern, and North-Eastern Igbo, believed to be relatively more recent descendants from them.Perhaps another feature that calls for mention here is their political culture. Although, like their other Igbo kinsmen, they could boast of having evolved only micro-, and therefore weak, states (what social anthropologists of the colonial period refused to refer to as states), they had their own special model of these micro-states.
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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.
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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.
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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.
Full textAbstract:
Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.
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Aniga, Ugo. "Cultural Sentinels: Ọkọnkọ Society's Watchdog Role in Conflict Resolution and Cultural Preservation in Umuahia Community." Journal of Contemporary Rituals and Traditions 2, no. 1 (January 24, 2024): 19–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.15575/jcrt.348.
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Purpose of the Study: This study investigates the diverse roles of the Ọkọnkọ Society in Umuahia, Nigeria, particularly its use of Igbo language and cultural practices in conflict resolution and cultural preservation, challenging the conventional view of the society as merely a secret male cult. Methodology: The study employs qualitative, ethnographic methodologies including in-depth interviews, FGDs, and non-participant observations in Umuahia, supplemented by scholarly literature, with analysis grounded in hermeneutics, semiotics, and conflict management theories to emphasize the role of language and culture in the Ọkọnkọ Society's practices. Main Findings: The research uncovers the crucial role of the Ọkọnkọ Society in Umuahia as a guardian of peace and cultural sentinel. Key findings include the society's use of Igbo proverbs and semiotics (e.g., ọmụ palm frond, uhie drum) in conflict mediation, and the societal respect and trust they command. The society's conflict resolution role extends beyond mere mediation, effectively acting as an appellate court within the community, especially in land disputes. The study also highlights society's role in preserving and enforcing cultural norms and practices. Applications of this Study: This research has practical implications for understanding indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms in African communities. It offers insights for policymakers and social workers in designing culturally sensitive conflict management strategies. Additionally, it contributes to preserving the cultural heritage of the Igbo people by documenting traditional practices and societal structures. Novelty/Originality of this Study: This study is original in its comprehensive examination of the Ọkọnkọ Society, linking Igbo language and culture with conflict management practices. It fills a significant gap in academic research by shedding light on the societal and cultural dynamics within the Umuahia community, thus providing a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between language, culture, and social governance in an African context.
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Nwafor, Matthew Ikechukwu. "The living-dead (ancestors) among the Igbo-African people: An interpretation of Catholic sainthood." International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 9, no. 4 (April 30, 2017): 35–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.5897/ijsa2017.0719.
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Calilhanna, Andrea. "Amapiano music and a psychoacoustic approach to analysis through the Ski-hill graph." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 153, no. 3_supplement (March 1, 2023): A40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0018079.
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Local artists in African countries' use of computer technology to produce work is inevitable. The effect of popular commercial music on traditional musicians increases the genuine possibility of further extinction of local music, particularly in regional areas. The importance of preserving this music is underacknowledged as, like language, music is an essential form of communication and part of a person's identity. New developments can cast shadows over everyday music during modernisation, and young people seek new sounds. For others, especially those who have witnessed the slow disappearance of cultural practices unique to regions, the loss and damage are akin to whitewashing and theft. In many parts of the world, scholars and locals are scrambling to preserve music and transmit accurate cultural heritage accounts for future generations. Amapiano music, like so much music of the Nigerian diaspora, owes its traditional heritage to the ancient roots of the Igbo people of Nigeria. Through the psychoacoustic approach of mathematical music theory of the Ski-hill graph (Cohn, 2020), it is now possible to produce accurate, inclusive, and ethical representations of Amapiano and traditional Igbo music.
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Tuaderu, Yohanes. "Reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart from Césaire’s Perspective on Anticolonialism." Lire Journal (Journal of Linguistics and Literature) 8, no. 1 (February 29, 2024): 71–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.33019/lire.v8i1.239.
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This research aims to obtain a deep notion of what stands beyond one of Achebe’s prominent African trilogies – Things Fall Apart – from the concept of anticolonialism promoted by Aimé Césaire. It examines two main subject matters i.e.; the reason why African people struggle so hard to oppose the oppression of the colonizers and what efforts they develop to react to the bad treatment. The harassment of human values - what Césaire called "thingification", trampled culture, damaged socio-cultural foundations, destroyed native religions, and confiscated ancestral inherited lands have apparently become the trigger for the struggle against colonialism. Meanwhile, the real way and effort made to fight the arrogance of the colonialists was to strengthen cultural identity and maintain the noble values that had united all tribes. In this way, the Igbo tribe and the Nigerian people finally gained their independence on October 1, 1960 - 2 (two) years after the novel Things Fall Apart was published.
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Ejiogu, EC. "Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe: A Tribute." Journal of Asian and African Studies 57, no. 1 (November 14, 2021): 150–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00219096211054917.
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The brilliant and erudite scholar and public intellectual of the state, genocide and ‘wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch, beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966 to 12 January 1970’, which he aptly designated as ‘the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post (European) conquest Africa’, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, who passed in 17 October 2019, was one of the select slate of scholars who were invited to contribute to this Special Issue of the journal. Characteristic of him and his dedication to the seriousness of purpose in scholarship, he was the first to complete and submit his contributed piece, which appears here in the Special Issue under the title, ‘Africans had no business fighting in either the 1914–1918 war or the 1939–1945 war’. That was a mere 4 months prior to his passing. This is a deserving tribute to him that captures his scholarship in all of its essence and complexity – Ekwe-Ekwe wrote more than 15 insightful books and published numerous articles in top-ranked academic journals and general interest publications in both the English and Portuguese languages, all of which are well-received in the communities of scholars and lay people. Rethinking Africa is the ‘forward looking blog’ that he founded and ‘dedicated to the exchange of innovative thinking on issues affecting the advancement of African peoples wherever they are’. It is indeed a medium that he used to provide ‘rigorous and insightful analyses on the issues affecting Africans and their vision of the world’. He was until his transition a ‘visiting professor in graduate programme of constitutional law at Universidade de Fortaleza, Brazil’.
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Newell, Stephanie. "Remembering J. M. Stuart-Young of Onitsha, Colonial Nigeria: Memoirs, Obituaries and Names." Africa 73, no. 4 (November 2003): 505–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/afr.2003.73.4.505.
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AbstractColonial Onitsha provided the stage for John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939), a Manchester trader and poet, to perform the role of an educated gentleman. In his autobiographical writing, Stuart-Young created a host of famous metropolitan friends and constructed for himself a past through which he invited African readers to remember him. The extent to which Onitsha citizens accepted his version of his life is explored in this article, for during the period of Stuart-Young's residence in town, from approximately 1909 until his death in 1939, different sectors of Igbo society observed him closely, read his publications, worked with him and witnessed his patronage of young men. Local people, including the children, studied his behaviour over time and produced a range of African names and watchwords by which they remembered his life.
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Adebayo, Akanmu G. "Currency Devaluation and Rank: The Yoruba and Akan Experiences." African Studies Review 50, no. 2 (September 2007): 87–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/arw.2007.0077.
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Abstract:Jane Guyer has clearly demonstrated in Marginal Gains (2004) that the ranking of people historically was linked to quantitative scales of money. Guyer's study focuses on the Igbo and Ibibio, two societies in which ranking was by achievement rather than ascription. How do ranking and money interface in other African societies with strong monarchical or centralized social systems? What impact does currency instability have on rank in such societies? This paper examines these questions. Focusing on the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Akan of Ghana, it evaluates the degree to which ranking has been affected by currency devaluation and economic instability since the mid-1980s.
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Okwuobi, Charles. "The long lost Ebionites. A relook at the Ibo region of West Africa." International Journal of Modern Anthropology 2, no. 20 (November 24, 2023): 1346–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ijma.v2i20.4.
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The Ebionites were a Jewish sect that knew Jesus intimately; had their own Nazarene Gospel; but held immovable beliefs that challenged key tenets of Christianity. They disappeared in the fourth century leaving a vacuum physically and ideologically. About a millennium later, the Portuguese reported of a people in West Africa with a Pope and Papacy similar in structure and veneration as the Roman Catholic Pope. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, missionaries and anthropologists scouring the region confirmed those reports, as well as the presence of other Levitical influences amongst the Igbos of Nigeria. This paper researches those similarities with a focus on the religious cosmology of the Ibo people of Asaba. It applies ethnographic qualitative research, then places the findings over the tenets of Catholicism with respect to their organizational structure; sacraments; rites; and steps to becoming sons of God. The results show that the ideologies of the Ibo and the Romans were deeply intertwined in every area of the study. The paper posits that the only way the religious ideologies of the Romans and the Ibos could have so closely mirrored each other, is if they were both in the same place at the same time. Thus, concludes that the Ibos [Eboe, Igbo] are the Ebionites. The paper offers hypotheses to explain the role of the ego in creating the core tenet of this unifying cosmology, and possibly how the convergence occurred. The paper could form the basis for renewed research in Hebraic-African studies; Black-American dispersion; Mary Magdalene; Jesus’ crown of thorns; the sequence of biblical gospel events; and even a template for future religion in this ego-driven civilization.
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LAW, ROBIN. "Ali-Ogba: A History of Ogba People. By FRANCIS J. ELLAH. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing Co., 1995. Pp. xiv + 226. $18.00; £9.95 (ISBN 978-156-400-8). (Distributed by African Books Collective, The Jam Factory, 27 Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HU.)." Journal of African History 38, no. 1 (March 1997): 123–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853796496906.
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The Ogba are an Igbo-speaking group, situated in the extreme south-west of the Igbo area, in the modern Rivers State of Nigeria (though the maps in this book, which depict only the Ogba country itself, do not convey a very clear sense of its location). This history of the community, written by its current Eze (king), sets out to cover the entire sweep of its history, from ‘the origin of the Ogbas’ (attributed to the fourteenth century) to the colonial period (post-independence history being treated only cursorily). It is based mainly on local oral traditions, taken partly from colonial Intelligence Reports, but also including extensive new material collected by the author; some use is also made, for the colonial period, of contemporary documents from British and Nigerian archives, and for prehistory, of archaeological evidence.
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Mahfuza Rahat Oishy and Mahbuba Sarker Shama. "Things Fall Apart: Tracing the Tools and Means of Constructing Colonial Historiography." International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 7, no. 7 (July 25, 2024): 42–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2024.7.7.6.
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History is a political tool. It is a tool of power either to the exploited or to the exploiters based on the narration of it. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart witnesses the pre-colonial, under-colonial and post-colonial phases of Igbo society, a territory that represents colonized Africa or to some extent, all the colonized societies. This paper aims at illustrating the tools and the means incorporated to strengthen the base of imperialist interests marginalizing the historical narratives of the local “other” people. Therefore, this study explores the tools, like religion, education and administration, and the means, like the church, missionary and administrative system which are used by the colonial rulers to prevail hegemony in the novel. To this end, Edward Said’s Orientalist Discourse and French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s article ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ in which he has discussed discourse of State Apparatuses like Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus which will constitute the cornerstone of this study. Thus, this paper will contribute and enrich the existing African, Caribbean and postcolonial literatures and come up with a new approach – Things Fall Apart: Tracing the Tools and Means of Constructing Colonial Historiography.
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López, Marta Sofía. "Border gnoseology: Akwaeke Emezi and the Decolonial Other-than-Human." Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 13, no. 2 (October 29, 2022): 77–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2022.13.2.4669.
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The underlying assumption when speaking about the postcolonial nonhuman is that the other-than-human refers to what could be called, broadly speaking, the “natural world,” as opposed to “the human-as-Man,” but still usually understood in (Western) secular terms. Nevertheless, from the perspective of African onto-epistemologies, the nonhuman can also refer to the spiritual world, or to the diverse assemblages between the “natural,” the human and the sacred. Freshwater (2018) and Dear Senthuran. A Black Spirit Memoir (2021), by Akwaeke Emezi, open up a space of “border gnoseology,” where contemporary Anglo-American discourses on transsexuality intersect with African ontologies and epistemologies, specifically with the well-known figure of the ogbanje and the sacred python as an avatar of Ala, the Earth goddess in Igbo culture, to produce a radically subversive embodied subjectivity. The ideas of movement, transing, tranimalcy and (transatlantic) crossing conspire to dismantle conventional Eurocentric humanist views on selfhood and identity. Reading Emeke on their own terms also requires revisiting alternative notions of temporality beyond secular, cisheteronormative, modern time, as well as an understanding that the sacred and the spiritual are indeed essential to the worldview and the processes of subjectivation of millions of people across the globe.
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Fardous, Shahrin. "Dissent in Things Fall Apart:." Crossings: A Journal of English Studies 8 (August 1, 2017): 37–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.59817/cjes.v8i.123.
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Widely read and discussed author Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) has created dissent in Okonkwo out of the cultural clash between native African and traditional white culture of the archetypal colonialists — the British traders, missionaries and government officers – in his groundbreaking novel Things Fall Apart (1958). From the very outset, Okonkwo is placed as an acute follower of his tribal customs and norms while dissenting against everything that disagrees with his Igbo heritage. This study aims to ascertain the route of a dissenter by rationalizing Okonkwo’s suicide as an act of ultimate rebellion to remind his people of their traditions and to inspire resistance in the face of impending colonization. The study intends to show Achebe’s projection of Okonkwo as a gradual uprising dissenter, setting up other characters like Unoka, Nwoye, and Obierika and their deeds as a foil to Okonkwo. Through Okonkwo’s resistance, the author insightfully claims that the fall in the title is not the fall of a dissenter, but the rise of an undying rebellious spirit who embraces death instead of accepting British subjugation
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Nweke, Kizito Chinedu. "The Renaissance of African Spiritualities vis-à-vis Christianity: Adopting the Model of Mutual Enrichment." Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 48, no. 2 (June 2019): 237–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0008429819830360.
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Christianity has been dominant in many parts of Africa especially since its colonial contact. Recently, however, there is a surge of interest in reviving indigenous spiritualities among Africans, both in Africa and in the diaspora. In Lagos, Nigeria, for example, shrines compete with churches and mosques for adherents and positions. Among the Igbos, a form of convenient interreligiousness has been developed in the society. When issues of practical expediency arise, the Christian would have the option of referring back to his/her traditional religion. Beyond Africa, the rise of African spiritualities has become conspicuous. For various reasons, ranging from Afrocentrism to anti-religious tendencies to the popular religions, from racial animosity to politico-economic ideologies, a lot of people, Africans and non-Africans, are embracing the neo-African spiritualities. This article is a study addressing this revival, by critically analyzing the reasons for its re-emergence, the challenges that have accompanied the revival and the implications of it in the Christian–African spirituality relationship. Can this renaissance in African spirituality bring forth or support a renaissance in Africa? Africa has about 450 million Christians, about 40% of the continent’s population. People of African origin equally make up a good number of Christians outside Africa. In other words, Christianity is decisive, ideologically and structurally, not just as a religion but also in the socio-political life of Africans. Finding a way to harmonize Christianity and African spiritualities, especially in the face of this renaissance, for the growth of Africa, is the aim of this article. Hence, it suggests the model of “Mutual Enrichment.”
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Nwakoby Nkiru Peace and Ihediwa Augustina Anekperechi. "IGBO CULTURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN MANAGEMENT THEORY." International Journal of Management & Entrepreneurship Research 5, no. 12 (December 28, 2023): 1109–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.51594/ijmer.v5i12.672.
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The impression that Africans had no roots or contributions to modern-day management practices has persisted for a while. However, the Igbo people in Nigeria had their own management practice and leadership styles that were peculiar to them before the emergence of the management theories, which was why the Igbos were able to survive the indirect rule and brutal economic exploitation during the colonial era, and immediately after the civil war. This study, therefore, examined the role Igbo culture played in the development of management theories. The study specifically identified some specific Igbo cultural practice and their managerial implications and aligned some Igbo cultural practices to existing modern-day leadership theories. The literature of the study looked at the Igbo race as a people, examined culture, explained some management theories, the Igbo cultural practice and leadership theories, Igbo cultural practices and their managerial implications and Igbo cultural practices and modern day leadership theories. The study used the matching methods as the research design. The idea involved was to basically find commonalities between chosen management theories and the leadership styles of the Igbo people in southeast Nigeria. Mostly secondary sources of data were deployed for this purpose. The study also employed a qualitative methodology and a narrative analysis technique. It was revealed from the findings that before the introduction of modern-day management theory, Igbo culture had been practising the relevant leadership style that was propounded by great thinkers of management such as management by objective (Izuora), Management by exception (Izundiichie), Motivation (ituni muo/ Ikwanye ugwu), Transformational leadership (Ibezimako), Contingencies Leadership (Igbo enweze) and Transactional leadership (Echichi/ochanja/imapu na iwu).
Keywords: Igbo, Culture, Southeast, Nigeria, Development and Management Theory.
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Shchepacheva, I. "The problem of identification in Ch. N. Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”." Philology and Culture, no. 2 (June 25, 2024): 248–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.26907/2782-4756-2024-76-2-248-253.
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The article deals with the novel “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006) by the African-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The writer shows different components of the identification process in the modern multicultural world. The main historical event of the novel is the Civil War of 1967-1970, which took place due to political and ethnic struggle. It was caused by numerous attempts by the southeastern provinces of Nigeria to secede and form the Republic of Biafra. The novel shows how the interethnic conflict between the Hausa and Igbo peoples, and later the war, influence not only the fate of the characters, but also the peculiarities of their identification process. This process is represented by three components: ethnic, national and gender. Kainene and Odenigbo, whose ethnicity is formed and recognized with the emergence of a new republic, feel, first, not as Nigerians, but as Igbos. Therefore, they take an active part in the Civil War. British interest in the war is shown through the characters of Susan and Richard who demonstrate typical colonial attitudes towards Africans. However, Richard’s interest in African culture contributes to the process of realizing the ethnic identity of Ugwu who chooses a member of the African community for his role model. Olanna, representing a new generation of Nigerian women, destroys the traditional forms of gender relations in Nigerian reality.
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Kakarla, Dr Ujjwala. "Psychological Realism in the Arrow of God --- Chinua Achebe." Saudi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 8, no. 09 (September 17, 2023): 284–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.36348/sjhss.2023.v08i09.006.
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Chinua Achebe’s, the third novel, Arrow of God centralizes around the struggle for power and authority between the African and Colonial traditions. Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of God Ulu is the protagonist who is in quest of wielding an absolute power throughout the novel. It is the study of psychology of power which incessantly switches directions, but can never be wholly acquired or seized. Achebe wavers between representing the good sides and bad sides of Christianity and Igbo religion reflecting his own ambivalence and split consciousness. To apply Freud’s theory to Achebe, we can say that Achebe had a wish to become English-like and to run away from everything that is native. On the other hand, a part of him rejects the white standards and clings to native ones. These two wishes overlap and integrate in his unconscious producing a creative writer whose ego-ideals are revealed in his writings wavering between the two cultures and their languages. His novel, Arrow of God criticizes and praises both his people and his colonizers simultaneously because of not being able to identify with either. Achebe’s own unconscious is reflected through the central character, Ezeulu who is also fascinated by the power of white man and his customs. The criticism of his native people never disturbed his mind. He goes against his obligations least concerning and considers his power as a device to accomplish his decisions. Towards the end of the novel, we witness him alienated both from his native culture and his white friends succumbing to tragedy. The Psychological Realism in the Arrow of God represents Freud’s three elements of personality - id, ego and superego controlling the basic needs, reality and morality. The mind is not the physical thing one can see through, but the effects of the actions of the mind on people’s lives are felt physically in the novel. Each character undergoes an unconscious thought process leading to anxiety and the eventual repression of thoughts.
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Ebere Nwazonobi, Patricia, Edwin O. Izuakor, Isaac Attah Edeh, Innocent Aliama, Loveth Ogbonne Ogudu, Beatrice Ogonna Ogbonna, and Victor Chinedu Ogbozor. "Religious and Ethical Dress Code Dynamics in Africa : Igbo Traditional Society in Focus." African Journal of Religion Philosophy and Culture 2, no. 1 (June 1, 2021): 5–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.31920/2634-7644/2020/v2n1a1.
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Dress can be a reflection of the social world order, which is bound by a tacit set of rules, customs, conventions, and rituals that guide face-to-face interaction as observed in Africa and among people of Igbo descent. Africans are known for their cultural values and norms which their dress codes are significantly recognised in line with their national identity and symbols. The method adopted in this research work is qualitative to dissect these negative attitudinal changes in dressing that have led to increase in promiscuity, less zeal in education, crime and corruption. Findings showed that ‘riot’ in dress code are a reflection of lack of family values and orientations, parental negligence and irresponsibility. From late twentieth century to this twenty first century, there is a twist in the ethics of dressing that have defiled moral values, class, status, religiosity and cultural identity. For instance, before the above mentioned period in any gathering, one can easily differentiate the married from the singles, celebrities from other members of the society, the affluence from the poor, masquerades from human beings, the prostitutes, and gigolos from the decent. Today, there is ‘riot’ in dress code that some people dress like traditional priests and lunatics in the name of fashion or ‘fashion in vogue’. Women, both married and single dress alike which makes it difficult to differentiate the married from the single; this is also applicable to men. The focus of this research work on Igbo of Southeast Nigeria is for effective investigation. Again, Igbo people are adventurers which brings the globe as a village to them be it negative or positive including dressing. People ought to adhere to religious and social differentiations in dress code which recognise regional groups, classes, occupation, majority and minority groups, educational levels, persons of different ages, men and women.
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Okoro, Justice Chukwudi, and Festus Goziem Okubor. "Abigbo’s Identity in Music Making and Repertory of Songs: The Mbaise People’s Heritage." UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities 21, no. 2 (March 30, 2021): 170–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ujah.v21i2.9.
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This paper directs attention to Abigbo, an outstanding traditional music of Mbaise people of Igbo south, east of the Niger. It gears to interrupt and challenge willful observations by western-oriented music lovers’ derogatory opinion, contrary to music in traditional setting such as ‘Abigbo’. To realize this objective and prove wrong the ill-informed critics, ‘Abigbo’s uniqueness in song rendition and peculiarity in music making is conspicuously examined here as a case study. The origin and development of Abigbo, its uses, and relationship with other aspects of Mbaise culture are discussed in this work. The musical challenges are highlighted with the dance formation, movements/steps and the ensembles costumed critically analyzed. All these are essentially adumbrated in association with music making trends in contemporary Mbaise. Equally reviewed where applicable are Abigbo’s relevance and inevitable roles in achieving the goal of societal well being. Song communication supported with body language and phonic emission via vocals are equally matters of great interest here. Methods employed in the data collection are library source of information obtained from associated printed materials documented in the library shelves. The researcher consulted relevant ones, read through them during desk work, and use their extracts as backup information to the subject of discourse which he initiated. Few of the procured print media materials are equally paraphrased as and when due. Datum is also secured through participant observation. At this juncture, the researcher’s sense of sight and aural perceptions are actively utilized along with retentive memory with the view to capturing the salient points needed for the paper. A few literature reviews that border round music making in rural culture are altogether, examined to guide and back up the thrust of this discourse. Abigbo has proved its worth beyond all reasonable doubt during its performance presentation in Mbaise social culture. The musicians’ close attention to the masses, particularly the zealous ones who are inclined to get at African tribes’ traditional music to subject them to western notation is a spring board to its fame. At this juncture, we resolve that for music making through song communication to logically reign supreme in Abigbo, its practice by interested artistes should be enhanced and encouraged even beyond the ensemble’s environmental origin. This done helps to secure indigenous interest akin to norms and values within the fabric of Mbaise society.
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Andreeva, Larisa. "Judaism in Tropical Africa: The Phenomenon of the Igbo People (Nigeria)." Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost, no. 2 (2021): 83. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s086919080014160-3.
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Peters, Prince Emma, and Omaka Kalu Ngele. "“Hoi angeloi auton” in Matthew 18:10 and the Pristine Individual “chi” of Igbo Society." Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture 53, no. 3 (August 2023): 195–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/01461079231191562.
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Individual guardian angel belief is one aspect of Second-Temple Jewish angelology that infiltrated early Christianity. In Mtt. 18:10, these angels were referred to as guards to people, especially those whom Jesus referred to as ‘the little ones.’ Jesus’ mention of this second temple angelology explains the popularity of this angelic belief within Jesus’ time. Meanwhile, in Africa-Igbo mythology there is a belief in individual destiny spirit (chi) who is also a guardian spirit. This destiny or guardian spirit is possessed individually by each Igbo person. The chi-spirit personality is seen to display certain characteristics which make it possible that the Igbo philosophy on individual chi and the individual angel of Mtt. 18:10 refer to the same spirit beings. The study aims to verify the nexus between these two spirit phenomena..
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Okpokwasili, Chinazor R., and Alvan-Ikoku O. Nwamara. "Igbo funeral songs: Exploring their major themes." Journal of the Association of Nigerian Musicologists 16, no. 1 (August 22, 2022): 171–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/janm.v16i1.13.
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Death, transition and other related terms are used by various human societies to communicate the ending of all formal functions and processes in the life of a living organism. When death occurs, it causes an emotional outburst which people express in forms of chants, recitations and dirges. In most parts of Africa, the death of an adult member of the society goes with the rendition of some songs in honour of the deceased and to contemplate on death as a natural phenomenon during the funeral. The Igbo of South Eastern Nigeria, through funeral, send off the deceased solemnly as she/he was welcomed at birth. The essence of this is captured in Igbo cosmic thought and in many funeral songs. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to identify some strands of meaning which most Igbo funeral songs convey and to also highlight their basic thematic constructs. The paper applied expository and analytical methods of research for data collection. It then observed that Igbo funeral songs have a clear identifiable purpose because in them are expressed different phases of grief and they serve valuable purposes in the various Igbo communities where they are rendered.
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Unya, Ikenna Ukpabi. "The Historical Significance and Role of the Kola Nut among the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria." Journal of Religion and Human Relations 13, no. 1 (July 22, 2021): 289–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jrhr.v13i1.13.
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There are many customs and traditions that have effectively given the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria group identity and social cohesion. And the kola nut is one of those realities. However, it is not only the Igbo that cherish and reverence the kola nut. In fact, kola nut is a highly prized fruit among the people of West Africa where its importance is seen in the social and religious customs of the people. But the Igbo lay special claim to kola nut and view it as the king of all fruits on earth because of the roles it play; hence, the kola is seen among the Igbo as a symbol of acceptance, cooperation and solidarity. Thus, the objective of this study is to examine the historical origin of the kola nut based on the Igbo ancestral myths and the symbolic interpretations of the different lobes of the Cola acuminata. The study will also investigate the significance and functions of the kola nut and how the influence of modernization is eroding its traditional values. The study is basically qualitative. It utilized existing literature on kola nut with oral sources in order to enhance our knowledge on kola nut. The study’s findings reveal that kola nut consumption and functions are part of Africa’s indigenous traditions that survived colonial intrusion, although the influence of modernization is greatly threatening the ritual functions and the traditional values. The study, thus, concludes by recommending that the Igbo should restore the significance and values of the kola nut by planting more kola nut trees in order to increase its availability and affordability as a source of hospitality and acceptance. Again, the Igbo communities and leaders should create a platform where the origin, significance and values of the kola nut must be taught and passed from generation to generation.
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Ibrahim, Fausat Motunrayo, and Ayodele S. Jegede. "“She was neither unduly fat nor lanky”: Representation of body size and beauty in the novels of Daniel O. Fágúnwà." Nigerian Journal of Sociology and Anthropology 18, no. 1 (June 1, 2020): 131–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.36108/njsa/0202/81(0190).
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The climate of thought regarding beauty characterization among Africans and other people of colour portrays the large body as beautiful. This reflects that body size and beauty is racially and culturally expressive, making it apposite to be disparate in advancing related discourses. This is particularly important because such discourses can influence Africans’ evaluation of their self-worth. The concerns generated by the global rise in obesity further create interest in these issues. African literature offers a fine and disparate platform to understand social realities. Consequently, relevant contents of the five precedent Yorùbá novels of Daniel Fágúnwà including Igbó Olódùmarè, Ìrèké Oníbùdó,Ògbójú ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlè, Ìrìnkèrindò nínú Igbó Elégbèje and Àdììtú Olódùmarè were extracted and analyzed to examine association of beauty with body sizes. Findings reflect more of bipolarity in the definition of beauty, such that the none-fat/none-thin structure is conveyed as beautiful. Concurrently, the fat and the thin is also portrayed as beautiful, making ‘body size’ definition of beauty to be elusive, and strongly suggesting neutrality to body size among the Yorùbá. This is strongly borne out of Fágúnwà’s and indeed, Yorùbá construction of beauty from a ‘character’ perspective. Character (ìwà) is staunchly expounded as constituting beauty. The beautiful body size is indeterminate in Fágúnwà’s narratives and indeed, in Yorùbá thought.
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Odubajo, Tola. "Post-transitional Justice in Nigeria and the Igbo Nationalism Question." Africa Insight 51, no. 1 (March 22, 2023): 54–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ai.v51i1.4.
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The 1990s saw the resurgence of transitional justice as a mechanism for reconciling groups and individuals in hitherto authoritarian and undemocratic states. The former military-governed states and post-conflict states in Africa adopted a truth commission approach to transitional justice and latched on to the window of opportunity that could engender new beginnings. Nigerians generally applauded the initiative of the Obasanjo civilian administration (1999-2007) of setting up a Truth Commission to investigate the human rights violations against individuals and groups between 1966 and 1999. With the aid of secondary data, this article adopts the descriptive and historical methodological approaches to interrogate the fissiparous tendencies of the Igbo ethnic nationality in Nigeria. The article employs content analysis to examine the variables that induced both the selfdetermination drive of the Igbo and the responses of the Nigerian government between 1999 and 2018. The work investigates the nexus in the activities of the two prominent separatist revival groups - the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) - and the Nigerian state, against the backdrop of the recommendations of the Truth Commission. The government’s inability to negotiate the implementation of the recommendations of the Truth Commission, and therefore redress the perceived historical injustices to the Igbo, resulted in continued exclusion, marginalisation and peripheralization of the Igbo in the Nigerian state.
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Bondarenko, D. "Global Governance and Diasporas: the Case of African Migrants in the USA." World Economy and International Relations, no. 4 (2015): 37–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.20542/0131-2227-2015-4-37-48.
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In 2013, the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences began a study of black communities in the USA. By now, the research was conducted in six states (Alabama, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania); in a number of towns as well as in the cities of Boston, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. The study shows that diasporas as network communities have already formed among recent migrants from many African countries in the U.S. These are diasporas of immigrants from individual countries, not a single “African diaspora”. On one hand, diasporas as an important phenomenon of globalization should become objects of global governance by means of regulation at the transnational level of both migration streams and foreign-born communities norms of existence. On the other hand, diasporas can be agents of social and political global governance, of essentially transnational impact on particular societies and states sending and accepting migrants, as evidenced by the African diasporas in the USA. Most American Africans believe that diasporas must and can take an active part in the home countries’ public life. However, the majority of them concentrates on targeted assistance to certain people – their loved ones back home. The forms of this assistance are diverse, but the main of them is sending remittances. At the same time, the money received from migrants by specific people makes an impact on the whole society and state. For many African states these remittances form a significant part of national income. The migrants’ remittances allow the states to lower the level of social tension. Simultaneously, they have to be especially thorough while building relationships with the migrant accepting countries and with diasporas themselves. Africans constitute an absolute minority among recent migrants in the USA. Nevertheless, directly or indirectly, they exert a certain influence on the establishment of the social life principles and state politics (home and foreign), not only of native countries but also of the accepting one, the U.S. This props up the argument that elaboration of norms and setting the rules of global governance is a business of not only political actors, but of the globalizing civil society, its institutions and organizations either. The most recent example are public debates in the American establishment, including President Obama, on the problem of immigration policy and relationships with migrant sending states, provoked by the 2014 U.S.–Africa Leaders Summit. Remarkably, the African diasporas represented by their leaders actively joined the discussion and openly declared that the state pays insufficiently little attention to the migrants’ needs and insisted on taking their position into account while planning immigration reform. However, Africans are becoming less and less “invisible” in the American society not only in connection with loud, but infrequent specific events. Many educated Africans who have managed to achieve a decent social status and financial position for themselves, have a desire not just to promote the adaptation of migrants from Africa, but to make their collective voice heard in American society and the state at the local and national levels. Their efforts take different forms, but most often they result in establishing and running of various diaspora organizations. These associations become new cells of the American civil society, and in this capacity affect the society itself and the government institutions best they can. Thus, the evidence on Africans in the USA shows that diasporas are both objects (to date, mainly potential) and real subjects of global governance. They influence public life, home and foreign policy of the migrant sending African countries and of migrant accepting United States, make a modest but undeniable contribution to the global phenomena and processes management principles and mechanisms. Acknowledgements. The research was supported by the grants of the Russian Foundation for Humanities: no. 14-01-00070 “African Americans and Recent African Migrants in the USA: Cultural Mythology and Reality of Intercommunity Relations”, no. 13-01-18036 “The Relations between African-Americans and Recent African Migrants: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Intercommunity Perception”, and by the grant of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a part of its Fundamental Research Program for 2014. The author is sincerely grateful to Veronika V. Usacheva and Alexandr E. Zhukov who participated in collecting and processing of the evidence, to Martha Aleo, Ken Baskin, Allison Blakely, Igho Natufe, Bella and Kirk Sorbo, Harold Weaver whose assistance in organization and conduction of the research was inestimable, as well as to all the informants who were so kind as to spend their time for frank communication.
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Cole, Jennifer. "Foreword: Collective Memory and the Politics of Reproduction in Africa." Africa 75, no. 1 (February 2005): 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/afr.2005.75.1.1.
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When Bamileke women in urban Cameroon give birth, older women often recall the ‘troubles’, the period between 1955 and 1974 when the UPC (Union des Populations du Cameroun) waged a battle of national independence, as a way of teaching their daughters about the hazards of reproduction and threats to Bamileke integrity as a people (Feldman-Savelsberget al.). Slightly to the north-west, in the Nigerian city of Kano, Igbo talk constantly about their memories of the Biafran war, using them to forge a sense of Igbo ethnic distinctiveness that reinforces patterns of patron-client relations critical to the maintenance of transregional connections (Smith), while further to the south many Yoruba are reassessing the meaning of the old practice of pawning children (Renne). Meanwhile in Botswana, where the AIDS epidemic exacts a high death toll, members of an Apostolic church create distinctive practices of remembering what caused a person's death. In so doing, they counter the attenuation of care and support that often occurs when people interpret death as due to illnesses transmitted through blood and improper sexual relations (Klaits). By contrast in a Samburu community in Kenya, the cultural practice ofntotoi, a complex board game, reproduces a male-dominated history of kinship, while systematically erasing a female narrative of adulterous births and forced infanticide. And among rural Beng in Côte d'Ivoire, beliefs and practices that structure infant care serve as an indirect critique of the violence of French colonialism and of its aftermath that continues to interfere in Beng lives in the form of high rates of infant mortality (Gottlieb). As these examples taken from this volume indicate, the papers gathered together in this special issue examine the complex and often contradictory ways in which the reproduction of memories shapes the social and biological reproduction of people.
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Bamigboye, Samuel Oloruntoba, Muhali Olaide Jimoh, Falilat Abeni Lawal, Zainab Temitope Osiyemi, Charles Petrus Laubscher, and Learnmore Kambizi. "Utilization of Afzelia africana Sm. ex Pers. (Magnoliopsida: Fabales: Fabaceae) in Nigeria and its implications for conservation." Journal of Threatened Taxa 16, no. 2 (February 26, 2024): 24795–803. http://dx.doi.org/10.11609/jott.8582.16.2.24795-24803.
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This study investigated the ethnobotanical uses of Afzelia africana Sm. ex Pers., a threatened tree species in Nigeria to determine the impact of uses of this species on the risk of its extinction. Ethnobotanical surveys were conducted by means of semi-structured questionnaires with the local community called Ijebu Igbo in Ogun state of Nigeria and a total of 60 respondents were interviewed from this community. Herbalists, artisans, Islamic scholars, traders, and retirees were interviewed to document their knowledge of the uses of A. africana. This study revealed that there are different uses of A. africana, among which its spiritual and medicinal uses were the most dominant. An unsustainable harvest of A. africana for these uses will aggravate the decline of its population, thereby increasing the risk of extinction. This study recommends local awareness of the indigenous people of possible ways this species can be utilized in a sustainable manner to prevent its extinction.
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Agbetuyi, Olayinka. "Authority and Moral Conflicts in the Films of Adébáyọ Fálétí: Àfọ̀njá, Gáà, Ṣawo Ṣẹ̀gbẹ̀rì and the Yorùbá Cosmopolis." Yoruba Studies Review 3, no. 2 (December 21, 2021): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.32473/ysr.v3i2.129990.
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In this piece, I examine the role of authority in Yorùbá society and how au[1]thority is subverted by moral conflicts generated in the political evolution of the Yorùbá state from city state to empire, leading to disastrous consequences in the society at large as presented in the films of Adébáyọ Fálétí, specifically in Àfọnjá (2002), Basọrun Gáà (2004) and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì̀ (2005). I argue that such pains and pangs of transformation are not unique to Yorùbá society but mirror similar political evolutions in other societies such as Rome and Greece. Such political upheavals led to the celebrated assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome and Alexander the Great of Macedonia. In particular Àfọnjá ̀ and Baṣọrun ̀ Gáà dramatize evocatively the poignancy of the attendant confrontations. In addition, I evaluate Adébáyọ Fálétí as a Nigerian and African foundational practitioner in the global field of cultural studies and his use of cultural post materialism in his work. Adébáyọ Fálétí can be regarded as the father of modern Nigerian Cultural Studies and in Africa in general in line with the way that the discipline is understood the world over standing, as it were, on the cusp of traditional Nigerian and African drama and modern drama in African mother tongues. In addition, Fálétí epitomizes what modern cultural studies world-wide represent as a cross between the traditional discipline of drama and the television 172 Olayinka Agbetuyi industries as well as filmic industries, along with advertisements, which together constitute what is today known as the culture industries. As defined in the words of Chris Barker, “Culturalism focuses on meaning production by human actors in a historical context.”1 Fálétí’s historical drama and films fall within such category. Barker added that Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of understanding meaning.”2 These are the hallmarks of the historical drama that formed the basis of two of the films by Fálétí being examined here. In addition, he stated that cultural studies deal with subjectivity and identity or how we come to be the kinds of people we are. Fálétí’s Afọnja and Gáà’s thematic preoccupation is how the Yorùbá subjectivity has been constituted over time through its political evolution. The three films also demonstrate what Stuart Hall considers to be the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to matters of power and cultural politics.3 With regards to the role of Fálétí as pioneer in the area of radio-vision cultural industries the broadcasting mogul narrated the manner in which he pioneered the phone-in radio broadcast in Nigeria on the programme “Ѐyí Àrà” at the Broadcasting Corporation of Ọyọ̀ ́ State, Ibadan (BCOS) after pioneering Yorùbá broadcasting on Africa’s first television station Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) twenty years earlier.4 Fálétí’s career spanning close to seven decades dovetails public services with private engagement with drama production. He was one of the earliest organizers of a drama performing company in 1949 to produce his own plays. His career development can be divided into three phases: the formative traditional drama performance phase, the literary drama phase which dovetails into his career as a public servant in a symbiotic relationship and his post public service movie production phase which coincided with the efflorescence of the Nollywood. The three works examined here straddle Fálétí’s second and third phases of engagement in drama production. Both Basọrun Gáà (to be hereafter referred to as Gáà) and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ were first staged in the second phase of Fálétí’s development as a theatre practitioner. In addition to being staged in the theater, Gáà and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì̀ were produced for tele[1]vision audiences as dramatic thrillers and became household favourites in the ‘70s and ‘80s at the time of his career as a radio/television broadcaster. Fálétí’s retirement from public service provided the opportunity needed to build on the experience gained in the television industry to launch a full-blown film production career for which his earlier experience seems to have been a tutelage. Àfọ̀njá (2002), Gáà (2004) and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ (2005) are part of the products of this final phase. Although Àfọ̀njá preceded the other two in movie 1 Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2012. 2 Barker. 2012, 17 3 Barker, 5. 4 Nigerianfilms.com. February 17, 2008. Accessed Aug 10 2018. Authority and Moral Conflicts in the Films of Adébáyọ Fálétí 173 production, it was the last to be written among the three and is organically a prequel which builds on the success of Gáà and extends a thematic continuum in the Fágúnwà-esque manner of the novels Ògbójú Ọde Ninu Igbó Irunmọlẹ and Igbo Olódùmarè. While Àfọ̀njá and Gáà are historical drama based on actual events in the history of the Yorùbá Empire, Ṣawo Ṣegberi is purely fictional and is based on a postcolonial Nigerian setting. The movies therefore take a reverse order to the chronology of writing and stage performance while Ṣawo Ṣẹ̀gbẹ̀rì, which was the first to be staged among the three, was not written for stage and television performance until it was script-written for film production.5 Àfọ̀njá, Gáà and Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ are each set in a cosmopolis where the Yorùbá citizens have to deal with other nationals in the context of Yorùbá mores within a broader cosmopolitan ethos. In Àfọ̀njá and Gáà that context is provided by the empire phase of Yorùbá civilization in which Yorùbá civilization was the dominant point of reference; in Ṣawo Ṣẹgbẹ ̀ rì ̀ the drama is situated in the context of postcolonial Nigerian city, in a nation that boasts large ethnic nationalities of which the Yorùbá are only one and in which Yorùbá culture is mediated by the postcolonial state with its symbol of the English language as the means of communication and its cultural spin offs. Fálétí demonstrates the mastery of dramaturgy in Àfọ̀njá and Gáà by juxtaposing the dynamics of running a state originally built on a confederation of city state structure very much like the Greek city state structure, at the latter’s comparative stage of political evolution, with a new imperial structure and the conflicts generated by the flux of the two systems; whereas in Ṣawo Ṣẹ̀gbẹ̀rì moral conflict is generated by interpersonal amatorial clashes as well as models of expertise.