By Onwubiko Agozino
Today, January 15, I reflect on 'The World House' which MLK repeatedly said that we inherited from our ancestors. We must share with brothers and sisters in the Jim Crow South, in Vietnam, in apartheid South Africa, in Palestine and everywhere else. We must share all in a 'Beloved Community' or fight in 'chaos' and burn it down. Achebe identified the world house as Mbari, an ancient symbolic architecture still observed among the Igbo. It requires communal ritual selections of representatives to go into the forest and commune with the spirits of the ancestors for days. They return to restructure and reconstruct the miniature Mbari world (mud) house every now and then. When the foundations are shaky or the walls crumbled, a new one was collectively created to replace it. The new Mbari is repopulated as usual with images of people from all over the world, along with ancestral spirit figures, animals and plants under the same roof. This symbolizes how tolerant of differences Africans are and it demonstrates that chaos is not always a bad alternative to order or the beloved community, since they coexist; as Abdul Bangura, Horace Campbell and Ron Eglash remind us with theories of the science, arts, and cultural politics of African Fractals. Desmond Tutu called the sharing spirit, Ubuntu or a bundle of humanity (and of nature too). Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to You. Onwubiko Agozino
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2 comments:
Prof Kudos, but does this World house include the extermination of a whole race, the Red Indians in the Americas and replaced by the Europe’s white suprimacists. And the forceful imperialistic occupation of Africa by the same resources predators. Look as they put up this devilish philosophy that the “whole history of man is man’s inhumanity to man” this iron stronghold can only be broken in chaos. No amount of common sense will ever make them shift their positions .
Good question, Anonymous. Martin Luther King Jr. was saying exactly what you are saying. He condemned the injustice in American and world history and he challenged us to try and make the world better through the African philosophy of nonviolence. Achebe and Tutu made similar points about the fact that we share the world already (albeit unequally) and that no genocidal regime will ever succeed in wiping out any group. They are offering descriptions of the world as it is and not simply making prescriptions for how it ought to be. Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism largely agree that they are willing to share their land and knowledge with settlers on the basis of equality but it is the settlers who are still wishing that they could wipe them out along with their indigenous knowledge systems and exclude them from the resources in their land. Achebe shows that the world house of Mbari is not always in perfect condition due to climate change, greed, war, vandalism, and oppression. But we can democratically choose to restructure, rebuild, and continue to share the world more equitably in the interest of all.
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