On Amala, Ohu and Osu

By Biko Agozino

In answer to a question raised by colleagues on the USAfricaDialogue Series, I wrote this on December 11, 2020, but recurring questions have led me to repost it on this blog:

 Of course, no one ever said that precolonial Igboland was an Eldorado of mythical absolute equality. There has always been a hierarchy between elders and youth irrespective of gender and wealth as Oyewumi pointed out in The Invention of Women even among the monarchical Yoruba. In any system of equality, there is also respect for achievement and competition for titles... 

The difference in a republican system such as the radical democratic tradition of the Igbo is that your Ozo title does not make you king over anyone and your privileges are mainly in relation to other members of your Ozo society. Your elderly status does not mean that you run a gerontocracy either because an elder could be foolish in some matters to be corrected by a beardless youth. When a youth has learned to wash his/her hands clean, he/she can feast with the elders from the same plate. 

The Oha, or community, still gathers to discuss and vote on choices because the Oha is the Eze of the Igbo. No Igbo person lies down on the floor to greet another human being just because the other is more elderly, richer, wiser or whatever. We do not even kneel down to pray to Chukwu; rather, we sit down and have a chat with the Big God. Soyinka loves this about the Igbo and adopted it by refusing to lie on the floor to greet his elders since no one expects him to do that before God. Yoruba elders must have called him Omo Igbo or literally, bush child.

On Osu and Ohu, Rodney has convincingly argued against the mythology of Fage that slavery was universal and that Africans freely engaged in the slave trade with Europeans. To Rodney, there was no slave mode of production in Africa prior to contact with Arabs and then with Europeans. The Osu, I humbly suggest, arose from people who took refuge at shrines when kidnappers raided their community instead of joining the resistance that Ekwuoanu - Spoken Unheard - (Equiano) described. People may have shouted, Osula!, Osukwanu o, Osu, or it is happening. The people who took refuge in a shrine are untouchable in the sense that they are sacred and cannot be harmed by anyone. Even a goat dedicated to the shrine of Ani or Mother Earth, ewu Ali, is untouchable. Ewu Ali could eat your yam and you dare not strike it. Some say that the Chiefs who survived the Ogoni attack were the ones who took refuge in the shrine of the Voice and could not be touched while they rained curses on their attackers until rescued, and later gave witness against the Ogoni 9. 

There is no evidence in history of mass execution or genocide by the Igbo against the Osu or Ohu. Instead, the democratic Igbo have used modern education and trading based on competition and achievement principles, to tackle the problems of Osu and residues of Ohu that arose from the trans Atlantic holocaust that cry out for reparative justice today. In school, no one wants to know your status because what matters is your position in the class, whether you carry first or last, in examinations. Igbo no dey carry last because we are always in the business of helping our family, community, and country to rise, according to Uchendu in The Igbo of the Southeast Nigeria!

Some communities like mine do not even have anyone who is Osu or Ohu. With the migratory tendency of the Igbo, people buy and sell, seek employment, make friends, play sports, pray and worship together, and listen to music without any concerns about Osu, Ohu, and Amala statuses. Azikiwe made a law on day one as Premier of the Eastern region to abolish the Osu status. It is now revived by some mainly when someone wants to get married and the family wants to know about the family background. However, this is the practice all over the world where families seek to guarantee the happiness of their children in marriage. Osu, Ohu, Amala, or not, once you want to get married, you will find busy bodies telling your potential in-laws that you are too sexy or too ugly for their child, or too educated, not educated enough, too tall, too short, too fat or too thin, too rich or too poor, Catholic or Protestant, Christian or Muslim, Obeah or Maroon, Shooter or Informer, foreigner or native, etc. I lie? Today blood tests are compulsory to rule out sickle cell and HIV.

On Ohu, it is historically known that democratic societies like ancient Greece and modern America co-existed with the institution of slavery because democracy is rarely absolute. In the case of the Igbo, it was not chattel slavery but more like servitude from which an individual like Amanyanabo Jo Jo Ubani rose to be King Jaja of Opobo after rising to become the head of the trading House that 'enslaved' him. The content and context differed from Ohu or slavery. That social mobility is not found among the Greeks nor among the Americans. The Igbo did not have a slave mode of production and there was never genocide against any group of people based on their status as servants or Ohu, nor because they were called Osu. The Igbo have never committed genocide in their history even after they suffered genocidal attacks. Exemplary.

You are right that the Aro and the Asaba Igbo were beginning the process of state formation probably due to their proximity to more monarchical neighbors. Yet they fought the Ekumeku war against colonization for about 30 years, according to Ohadike, and the Aro resisted British attempts to penetrate the interior and take control of the lucrative palm oil trade, according to Chinweizu - The West and the Rest of Us - long after the slave trade had ended. But those who started it and ran it for 400 years used the suppression as the guise for the scramble for Africa. 

Eze Aro and Eze Nri  were chief priests or Eze Muo and not kings or monarchical Eze. Uchendu identified the monarchy as an 'intrusive trait' in Igboland, meaning that it intruded from neighbors. However,  Nzimiro documented that some Igbo are rather proud of their evolving monarchies just as others remain proud of their status as members of a 'royal' family with 'royal blood' today among the more monarchical neighbors of the Igbo. You are mistaken when you asserted that such people are not against democratic equality. They are too. 

That process of state formation was distorted by the slave raids and by colonialism which still found the Igbo resistant against the imposition of feudalism. The Igbo could have evolved a democratic state. Igbo women won the war against warrant chiefs in 1929 and the East was the only region without a House of Chiefs but only had a Legislative Assembly under the McPherson's and Richard's constitutions while the North and the West were bicameral with a House of 'Natural Rulers' each. Zik should have negotiated a second elected chamber of Women, Senators, or Councilors for the East. 

As Soyinka observed in his Nyerere Lecture, the Igbo and the Kikuyu are exceptional in their refusal to build empires by conquering their neighbors. He identified the democratic tradition of the Igbo as a good indigenous model for Africans to study and adapt because that is what post-colonial constitutions promise in principle, though neocolonialism is far from being a system of mythical perfect equality, mind you. 

Rodney also made the same point in Groundings with my Brothers when he warned that it is a mistake to study African history simply from the perspective of kings and queens because such monarchies were found mainly on the coastal fringes of the continent while the vast majority of people in the interior remained in direct democracies to some extent. He specifically identified the Igbo, though he called them Ibo, on page 55, as a good example of indigenous democracy that we should be proud of instead of always clashing and boasting over who should be crowned Calypso Monarch or Reggae King or Dancehall Queen and thing. 

Afigbo offered a similar critique of 'colonialist historiography' of the sort that tries to find evidence of Eze in every family just to prove to the colonizers that we were as advanced as they were since we also had kings and queens. Afigbo said that we should be studying the history of indigenous medicine, textiles, crafts, music, agriculture,..and indigenous democratic tendencies rather than obsess about a minority of  dying monarchical intrusions (see his papers edited by Falola).

On equality, it is obvious that all fingers are not equal, as Oliver de Coque sang. Some fingers are tall, some fingers are short. Yet, no finger ever claims to be the royal, Osu, Ohu, or Amala, finger. All the fingers combine to wash the hands clean, to form a fist when necessary, shake hands, and to wipe the bottom with the left hand or feed the mouth with the right hand. The Igbo are not all the same, some hold doctorates, some hold money, some are great musicians, farmers, traders, athletes, healers, priests, some are tall and some are short but they are all equal because nobody has more than one head. Hence we say that ishi aka ishi, a head is no bigger than a head. All heads are equal. Gbam! Ho-Ha! Period.

This is a radical philosophy that we should not try to belittle. Let us study it and find ways to overcome the contradictions invented mainly by colonialism. For instance, the claim by Simone de Beauvoir that women are always the Second Sex has been challenged by Nkiru Nzegwu, in Family Matters, to show that among the Onicha Igbo and even with the Obi of Onitsha, who is far from being a king, women had equal rights to inherit property from their husband and father until colonialism came to impose the patriarchal principle. Yet Igbo women continued to resist and in 2018 won the Supreme Court ruling that women have equal rights to inherit property. Amadiume also demonstrated that Igbo and Kikuyu women can still marry other women as female husbands or remain unmarried as male daughters even today.

The Igbo who name their daughters, Nneka or Mother is Supreme, as explained to Okonkwo by his maternal uncle, Uchendu, in Things Fall Apart, will never accept the racist-imperialist-patriarchal notion that women are always the Second Sex. That may be why the Igbo lead Nigerians in the equal education of their sons and daughters today. Equality is not sameness because it is something else that stands beside something to claim equality as Achebe put it and as I demonstrated in Black Women and the Criminal Justice System. Equality does not mean that women want to become men, that Africans want to become white, though the poor rightly want to become rich and should enjoy equal opportunities to pursue happiness.

This is from a Facebook post of mine in response to another post:

The problem in No Longer At Ease was never the problem of jargon or the simplicity of expression, Achebe excelled in the simplicity of expression and no one despised him for it. The problem was that of the miseducation of Obi Okonkwo. Here was a brilliant young man who was sponsored by artisans to go and read Law in England in order to be of better use to his community but he chose to switch to English Language without refunding the scholarship money so that another student ready to read law would be sponsored. Achebe also switched from Medicine and gave up his scholarship fund in preference for English Literature but was lucky to have his brother pay for it. In fact, Obi never contributed toro or shishi to the scholarship fund for any other student as expected nor did he use his knowledge of English language to write novels, plays or poetry to narrate the history and culture of Umuofia the way Achebe did. Instead, he got a job working for the colonizers at the scholarship commission and, after initial refusal of bribes, started extorting candidates who had to bribe him to be considered for scholarships. 

What sort of education did he receive in England to make him go and give his mother high blood pressure by telling her that the girl he fell in love with in London and wanted to marry was an Osu, prompting the mother to threaten suicide if he went ahead with it? Achebe was suggesting that as an educated man, it was nobody's business who he chose to marry. When the mother died, probably of hypertension, the efulefu refused to go home and bury her under the pretense that the money for his transportation home would be better used to pay for the funeral. Ewu. And when his girlfriend that he did not have the balls to marry told him that she was pregnant, he forced her to get an abortion but still expected her to keep in touch with him afterwards. Obi Okonkwo was an all round punk upon whom the villagers wasted their scholarship fund and who brought shame to the English university that miseducated him. That was why members of Umuofia Improvement Union were disappointed in him, not because he spoke with 'is and was' like everybody else. Nothing wrong with jargon anyway if put to proper use. Obi Okonkwo failed.