For Oga BJ in Admiration

On A Soyinka Prize In ‘Illiteracy’, By Biko Agozino

by Premium Times  July 14, 2018 Reading Time: 11 mins read

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I will admit to a ‘strategic misreading’ that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial.

On July 13, 2018, the 84th birthday of Olumo Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, I honoured him by revisiting a debate that is raging on the internet over what many call my misreading of his work, especially with reference to my interpretation of his play, Death and King’s Horseman. Literary experts have been marveling about the ‘Author’s Note’ that accompanies Death and the King’s Horseman. Most playwrights leave it to the directors and producers of their play to interpret it as they wish but Soyinka was worried that most experts would misread the play. He took the unusual authoritarian step of stipulating how the play should be interpreted but the critics appear not to notice and have continued to misread the play, in my own humble opinion. Soyinka leaves clues that would guide readers to decode his original intention in writing the play but most literary critics miss the point and some accuse me of being the mis-reader.

The very first sentence in the Author’s Note may have led many critics astray by stating that the play is based on real historical “events which took place in Oyo”, which the author defines as “an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria”. This is misleading in a number of ways that literary critics should have been able to understand. To say that the events took place in 1946 would be to localise the time and space of the dramatic events, whereas in the world of theatre, events do not take place exclusively in the setting but also on every stage where the play is produced. Soyinka expected that literary theorists would understand that the playscript is not simply an archival document or ethnographic report but the work of original creation, even when based on real events. The play was not expected to be read as the verbatim report of a tragic case that took place once upon a time. This is true of all works of creative writing that are supposed to be inventive, no matter how much resemblance there may be between fiction and reality. In fact, many writers include a disclaimer that any resemblances to real events are unintentional. As a matter of fact, the same can be said about reality genres that are full of inventions too. Soyinka clearly states in the first paragraph of his Author’s Note that he made “changes” in the narrative “in matters of detail, sequence and of course characterisation.”

He also informs the illiterate critics that he deliberately set the play back a few years “while the war was still on, for minor reasons of dramaturgy.” Here, Soyinka is guiding the would-be producer away from a simplistic historical interpretation of the play as being only relevant to the case of 1946, given that dramaturgy grants artistic license that defies the laws of historical specificity. In addition, Soyinka may have misled the interpreters of the play by saying that Oyo was an “ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria.” Here he could be challenged by historians who may point out that Oyo was an ancient Yoruba Empire and not simply a city and that by 1946, it was no longer simply a Yoruba city but a multicultural one. Moreover, nothing ‘of Nigeria’ can be said to be ancient because Nigeria itself is a modernist invention by colonisers. The hint about the Nigerian setting of the play should have encouraged the critics to understand that the play is not only about a Yoruba tragedy but about a Nigerian tragedy. The reference to “while the war was still on” should have massaged the memory of the critics to remind them that the play was published only five years after a tragic genocidal war in Nigeria in which Yoruba elites played a leading aggressive role, along with other ethnic elites in Nigeria. This play, in my lay opinion, is better understood as part of the soul-searching by Soyinka after he was released from solitary confinement for opposing the genocidal war against the Igbo. Why were highly educated Yoruba leaders the ones who cheered on the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra?

Also, Soyinka indicates that those who were interested only in the factual account of the case of 1946 should go and read it in the British National Archives in Kew. He also points out that those who want to read a more exact historical reenactment of the case should consult the “fine play in Yoruba (Oba Waja) by Duro Ladipo.” In other words, Death and the King’s Horseman is not that kind of historical re-enactment nor is it the kind of ‘misbegotten’ German television film about the case. The play was a more urgent intervention while Soyinka was in exile following the end of the war and his release from solitary confinement for having the audacity to oppose tyranny. Unlike his other plays, he did not wait for the play to be produced before he published it. I believe that Soyinka was directly and indirectly challenging his fellow Nigerian intellectuals to account for their opportunism in supporting a genocidal war that took 3.1 million lives in 30 months.

I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, “Season of Anomy”, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide.

In the third paragraph of the author’s note, Soyinka declares that the “bane of themes of this genre” is that once the text appears, ‘they acquire the facile tag of “clash of cultures”’. He rejected such a label as “prejudicial” in the sense that it is prone to “frequent misapplication” and also because the label “presupposes a potential equality in every given situation between the cultures of the coloniser and the colonised ‘on the actual soil of the latter’”. Soyinka went on to award “the overseas prize in illiteracy and mental conditioning” to the writer of the blurb of the American edition of his novel, Season of Anomy, for ‘unblushingly’ stating that the novel is about the “clash between old values and new ways, between western methods and African traditions”. Soyinka explains that it is due to “this kind of perverse mentality” that he was forced to warn future producers (and critics) of the play to avoid “a sadly familiar reductionist tendency” and instead attempt to capture “the far more difficult and risky task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence.” Experts on the work of Soyinka are baffled by this injunction and wonder openly what he was banging on about? What is Soyinka trying to hide, asked Anthony Kwame Appiah? He was trying to reveal something, in my own opinion.

To repeat, I offer the original interpretation that Soyinka was referring to the genocide against the Igbo, which was the theme of the novel that he referred to, Season of Anomy, in which he recounted the eye-witness account of how fellow Nigerians hunted down tens of thousands of innocent Igbo men, women and children and massacred them in a pogrom that led to the secession of the Eastern region and the intensification of the genocide. In that novel, he mocked the archeologists for poking around in search of fossilised bones while fresh blood flowed like river Niger in the country and they did not seem to be bothered. He also challenged the sociologists who came with ‘erudite irrelevances’ about marriage and divorce but refused to join him in opposing a genocidal war. The novel depicts the Marxists who were locked up in a mental asylum as a phrase-monger who failed to recognise the revolutionary situation in the country and instead rallied in support of the genocidal military dictatorship, rather than turn the civil war into a liberation war. To suggest that the novel was about the clash of cultures was a strategy to condition the mentality of Nigerian intellectuals towards the acceptance of the propaganda that the Igbo who led the struggle for decolonisation were primitive tribalists, perhaps because they had no chiefs, while the ethnic groups that ganged up against them were more civilized because they were monarchical, according to the ideologues of colonial domination, such as the Oxford colonial anthropologist, Margery Perham, who advised the military dictators to impose chiefs on the radically democratic Igbo in order to control them better. Walter Rodney also observed that to call the genocide against the Igbo a tribal war would be to call Shell BP an African tribe (along with the Labour Party government of the UK and the Soviet Union that generously supplied the weapons of mass destruction). Ikenna Nzimiro argued that the Marxists in Biafra were engaged in class struggles while the Marxist in Nigeria were engaged in national defencism. 

The ‘threnodic essence’ of the play refers to funeral songs in Greek tragedies and I believe that Soyinka was inviting the producers of the play to imagine a national mourning for the 3.1 million killed in Biafra that the country has refused to mourn. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo had been calling for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be recognised by the Nigerian government as part of the atonement.

In the final paragraph of the Author’s Note, Soyinka observes that an alternative structuralist interpretation of the play is to see it as a cruel joke on the British colonial District Officer. He quickly dismisses such a reading as distasteful and adds that he deliberately avoided writing dialogue or scenes that would support such a misinterpretation. He dictates that “No attempt should be made in production to suggest it’. This sounds like an angry response to critics who choose to misread his works for ideological reasons while ignoring the concrete conditions that his works address. 

A prominent Marxist literary theorist that I admire, Biodun Jeyifo, who is an expert on the work of Soyinka, was invited by the BBC to write about any work of literature that he saw as being representative of global culture. He chose to write beautifully about Death and the King’s Horseman as an anti-colonial play that tries to subvert the use of the Queen’s English by creating a ‘future’ tradition of the Anglophone that is more figurative than the English language. He invoked the work of Marxist Cultural Studies by Raymond Williams (but without mentioning the more relevant anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist work by Stuart Hall) to suggest that the other Englishes around the world serve to subvert the domination of the world by standard English. 

I pointed out that Jeyifo's interpretation is too superficial for a Marxist because the ‘thredonic essence’ of the play is not to show that Africans can speak English better than the English. I suggested that a Cultural Studies reading of the play would not have focused exclusively on the beautiful writing or language of the play but would have tried to see the challenge to monarchism and oppressive traditions in the play. Jeyifo told me privately that I should go and read the play again because it is not against the monarchy or against ritual suicide but simply against the colonial domination of African cultures. Moreover, the melodrama about the coveting of the virgin bride of another man as a right in Esin Oba's rites of passage to ritual suicide appears to be the ridiculing by Soyinka of the rapaciousness of the genoicidist troops that forcibly took underage girls and the wives of other men and claimed them as 'wives', as Achebe recounted in There Was A Country, and as Boko Haram continues to do. I admitted that I could be accused of misreading the play but I called it a strategic misreading and wondered if it is possible for an expert on the work of Soyinka to misread it? Soyinka seems to think so and that is the whole point of his detailed telling off of the experts in his Author’s Note.

I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Contrary to the claim that Death and the King’s Horseman is only an anti-colonial play, Soyinka concludes his Author’s Note by stating that “The Colonial Factor is an incident, a catalytic incident merely.” To him, the central ‘confrontation’ or conflict that he tried to resolve in the play was ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it played out in the world of “the Yoruba mind – the world of the living, the dead and the unborn, and the numinous passages which links all: transition.” Soyinka was puzzling about the metaphysics of the Yoruba worldview that made it possible for the best educated characters in the play to be the ones who cheered most vociferously for Elesin to abide by the tradition that expected him to kill himself in honour of a dead king. Similarly, Soyinka was wondering why the best educated Yoruba were the cheer-leaders of the genocide against the Igbo. 

Soyinka advised producers to try and capture this tragedy by using music to represent the macabre dance to the “music from the abyss” by the intellectuals who danced while millions were being slaughtered in Biafra. In his Talakawa column, Jeyifo once wrote that while blood was flowing in Biafra, (1967-1970) he led his secret Pyrates fraternity, that Soyinka founded as a student at the University of Ibadan, in chanting, 'Give us this day, give us this day, our daily manya' (wine in Igbo). Were the elites drunk on power during the genocide? The play symbolizes this with the 'Not I bird' and the hunter who consumed many gallons of manya before trying to kill the innocent Not I bird.

I am not an expert in dramaturgy but I love the work of Soyinka. I cited his essay on Neo-Tarzanism in my criticism of the film, Black Panther, which I called an example of neo-Tarzanism. Following the serialisation of the criticism, I was invited by Assumpta Oturu to the KPFK public radio in Los Angeles to discuss the film with an Ethiopian publisher and an African American director of the Pan African Film Festival. During the discussion, the Ethiopian said that we should not condemn the presence of monarchies in Africa because there were popular emperors such as Mansa Musa and Haile Selessie who were admired by Africans and by the African diaspora. The director of the Pan African Film Festival questioned my reference to Soyinka because he saw Death and the King’s Horseman as an indication that Soyinka was a monarchist who supported even the tradition that the horseman should commit suicide to honour the dead king. 

As Killmonger asked derisively in the film, I asked, “This is your king?” Why must African brothers be expected to fight to the death to determine who should be the next king when we can just hold elections to select our leaders with term limits? I stated that Soyinka used that play and almost every play of his to undermine the institution of the monarchy and call for democracy, which he is on record as admiring in Igbo culture. He tried to spare the life of the horseman in the play and his other tragedies – Kongi’s Harvest, Madmen and Specialists, King Babu; his novels, his poetry and his memoirs all support my interpretation of his anti-monarchical orientation. Since the experts who have studied his work have focused almost exclusively on the structuralism, I propose to offer a post-structuralist or deconstruction radicalisation of his body of work to show that the tragedy of state violence, especially against the Igbo, is at the centre of the conflicts that he has been trying to resolve. Just as the genocidal war was waged without a cease fire for humanitarian interventions, the author coincidentally instructs on page 8 of Death and the King’s Horseman that ‘The play should run without an interval.’

I agree with critics who will charge that I am misreading Soyinka here. If so, I will admit to a strategic misreading that is necessitated by placing the text within the context of a recent history of trauma that the author did not simply witness as a bystander but one in which he actively tried to stop the genocide and earned himself solitary confinement without trial. Sociologists approach the work of writers by taking into consideration, the context of the private and the public lives of the authors, whereas literary theorists may concentrate exclusively on the technical, language, or structural aspects of the script as instructed by T.S. Eliot in his foundational essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. 

To reiterate, what I am offering is a sociology of literary interpretation of Soyinka and I am certain that the rebel in him may force him to disagree with my interpretation and award me a national illiteracy prize. I am not contending that all existing interpretations of Soyinka are wrong. I am only saying that there is something missing in the community of Soyinka interpretations and I contend that what is neglected by critics is not minor but a central aspect of his work – his self-sacrificial opposition to the Igbo genocide in particular as a foundational part of his oppositional aesthetics in the face of tyranny.

Biko Agozino is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences in Virginia Tech, USA.

Originally published in massliteracy.blogspot.com. Republished as a tribute on the passing of Biodun Jeyifo at the age of 80 years.

My Cousin Was Lynched as an alleged Witch

 By Biko Agozino 

 During the time of goodwill towards all, bad news came during the Christmas holidays, on January 2 2022, saying that youths who returned for the holidays from distant cities, accused one of my cousins, Agatha Mgboebuba Nwaba, of being the witch who caused misfortune in their village. She was said to be the evil one who consumed the wealth of her husband who lived in London and who was said to have complained that it was his wife who used witchcraft to stop him from visiting home so that she would not be asked to account for the remittances he had been sending home to build a nonexistent house. He was reported to have told the lynch mob that he was not concerned and that they should do what they liked with her.

It was also alleged that she used witchcraft to kill one of their sons and that the same evil powers prevented her daughter's partner from going to pay the bride price for her daughter after she had four children with the Yoruba man. The daughter allegedly claimed that she found an exercise book in the house where her mother wrote a list of all the people she had killed and the dates that they died. That may be the kind of lists that every family keeps to remind them of those who brought them gifts during ceremonies and who deserve gifts in return when they have ceremonies of their own. The young people were obviously too biased against her and the list of names confirmed the bias. 

They were said to have paraded her around town with a tire hung around her neck to shame her but she showed no shame, perhaps because she was in shock. She was said to have begged one of her cousins who tried to intervene, not to let her in-laws beat her to death but her attackers threatened to attack her cousin too if he did not shut up. They were said to have tried to shame her extended family by asking them to take her back but they allegedly said that she was no longer in the shape she was as a young woman when they came to marry her and one of her uncles feared that she was the witch that killed his wife. Another cousin who believed the allegations like most people in Awgu (a local government headquarters) reported what happened in Awgu dialect as follows:

Mgboebuba lili amosu laegbuishi ndu ibe ayi. Ive ogbulu egbu kalikwalu. Shite la eka ada e nwayi ('Chikwado' la di e) o kelu igbuko ka eshilu chofuta ive o la eme. Ndu Awgu lo daide juwe ive oji egbushi ndu eka va du ucha, ya shi lo ndu ino e ive ya legbu. Eva ndu o kalaeke igbukwe kaligbukwelu. O gbuagakwalu madu, kalegbukwe tufu adaide. Eva mpam la mmam, okeke kele la nwae nwoke, onyebuchi adae nwayi la nwae dukota la ekwukwo ndu o gbugolu egbu. Oo ndu Awgu jikolu eka kpufute la orie Awgu, megbuo akaje, kpuluihia bia la uhumbele ezi nnae lo tigbuo ye, palu ozue ga gbavuo la ejo ovia du la nduegu ululor.

"Ovokwe ndu Uka gbulu e. Oo ndu ime obodo Awgu tigbuli e, maka la oshilu va la ya la ndu otu e la egbukota ote va ha tie ye ive, va lo tizie ye nke oji nwuhu. Onwevokwe onye kpolu ndu uwe ojii."

(Translation: "Mgboebuba ate witchcraft and was killing our people. The number she killed was a lot. Through the efforts of her daughter ('Chikwado' and her husband) whom she was preparing to kill too, that was how it was discovered what she was doing. Awgu people caught her and questioned why she was killing innocent people who have clean hands, she said that her enemies  were the ones that she killed. The names of the people she was preparing to kill were numerous. She had killed too many people and was going to kill more before she was caught. My father and mother, Okeke Kele and his son, Onyebuchi, his daughter and his grandchild were among the names found in the book of the people she had killed. The people of Awgu joined hands to drag her to Orie Awgu market place, mocked her, dragged her to her father's compound in Obugo village and beat her to death, then they carried her corpse and threw it away in the evil forest at the farm settlement of her husband's village, Ululor").

"It was not church people that killed her. It was the people of the inner village of Awgu who beat her to death, because she told them that she and her group will kill all those who beat her, then they beat her so much more that she was left dead. No one called the police."

They should have taken her to hospital to make sure that she was examined by experts if she admitted these things under torture and they should have reported the case to law-enforcement officers. The person narrating this to me emphasized that she was from my extended family. After parading her around the town all day, ‘the next day she was dead’, said the narrator.  Highly educated people strongly believe in witchcraft. But the surviving son of the woman is said to be demanding for his mother to be returned, I heard. There is an urgent need to run grassroots workshops to reeducate the people or else mutual distrust and suspicion will reign.

 They may have killed the poor woman, fearing her as a witch. Lethal witch hunting happened before in the same town a few years ago when some youth returned from the cities, burnt a native priest, Nwamme, to death and destroyed his shrine on allegations that he used his claimed powers to control thunder, Amadioha, to kill someone from the village who lived in a distant city. But our people carry on under thunderstorms with the belief that lightning only kills those whose hands are unclean. The frequent occurrence of misfortunes leads to suspicions that someone is behind everything. Fanon was right that Africans fear spirits more than they fear the police and the army of colonizers, at least they can bribe the police.

I spoke with the husband, Remi Nwankwo, in London by Whatsap and he told me that he suspects his uncle as the instigator because he had been threatening his wife. According to him, the uncle recently sent him a list of dead enemies allegedly compiled by his wife but it was typewritten and so no way to prove that his wife compiled such a list. The uncle then sent another list that was handwritten but it was not in his wife's handwriting. He asked the wife to leave the family home and go and stay in a hotel for a while but she told him that no one runs away from his father's compound. The uncle then phoned and threatened to send 'ndu ogba ozi' or messengers to force her out if she did not leave. He said that someone later sent him a video of how some people broke into his house and dragged his wife out and beat her to death. 

I asked him if he has reported the matter to the police and he said that I must know how the police work in Naija. I do not know what he means by that but I know that it is believed to be an abomination for a family member to invite the police in matters that involve other family members as suspects. He said that he had been ill since he returned from a visit home last year but that he is better now and is working to save for his airfare back home to see what he can do.

 Contrary to popular beliefs, Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) advised the new Africa of his Renascent Africa to move away from belief in witchcraft and develop the scientific methodology in everything they were doing. His aunt tried to scare him as a child by alleging that the reason why he once fell into a fire and why a dog once bit him was because his grandma was a witch trying to kill him. Zik stated in his autobiography, My Odyssey, that he did not believe the allegation because he said that his grandmother was a loving and caring kind women. According to him, the epidemics that kill lots of people are not caused by witches but by often preventable diseases. If witches kill people by poisoning the air, Zik reasoned, they too would breathe the same air and die for as the Igbo say, dibia la agwo otule, o dowelu ike ye la elu (the sorcerer who is concocting diarrhea, is he keeping his own buttocks in the sky)? Two years after Azikiwe published Renascent Africa in 1937, one of his future rivals, Obafemi Awolowo (Awo) published an academic journal article in 1939 arguing that Juju is an African scientific method that could kill enemies remotely by calling their names three times at crossroads. The colonizers must have been pissing their pants if Africans had such powers.

Awo believed that juju can be used by a detainee to vanish from prison even while chained to the walls. Zik was skeptical and asked for the proof of juju to be demonstrated through the scientific methodology by asking those who claim that they could change from one animal to another or fly on a broomstick to do so under systematic observation. Zik went on to test his own social scientific method of intellectual-activism by training journalists from scratch and appointing them to run his chain of newspapers to successfully campaign for the restoration of independence. 

Although his political party, National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, allowed membership of Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association to join as a group member, the party did not use witchcraft beliefs to organize (unlike Awolowo’s Action Group that relied on the Ogboni Cult) at a time that people believed that Zik was what Phillip Emeagwali later reproduced from a newspaper report as ‘the Spirit-Man’ that supposedly made him bold enough to lead the fight against colonialism. Zik’s son, Chukwuma, said that his father had no magical powers. 

 Reports of witch hunting are on the rise across Africa at a time of social, security, economic and political crises facing Africans. If we do not end witch hunting in Africa, the disaster that faced medieval Europe may be looming in Africa. During the witch craze, Europeans murdered an estimated nine million people, mostly women, according to Stephen Pfohl. According to Mary Daly, alleged witches were killed by people who claimed to be Christians and they killed them while chanting: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son’. 

 Today, the Europeans have come out of their dark ages, thanks to millions of Africans that they kidnapped and enslaved without pay for four hundred years. Nothing to do with religion or Obeah, wrote Eric Williams in Capitalism & Slavery (just republished); despite the fact that his high school teacher, CLR James, wrote in the Black Jacobins that the enslaved used Voodoo as the medium to organize their revolution against slavery in Haiti. 

Similarly, the National Church of Nigeria and Cameroons was used by the banned Zikist Movement to support the independence struggle by making Zik and others, living saints of Africa as opposed to European Churches and their saints and the war heroes invoked ancestral spirits of Chimurenga in Zimbabwe while also chanting the Rastafarian songs of resistance. Obasanjo wanted to use juju to fight against apartheid, and the Boers must have been shaking and quaking in their boots.

Max Weber theorized that it was the Protestant Ethic of hard work that first produced the Spirit of Capitalism in England and in the US compared to China, India or Africa; supposedly proving Marx wrong that religion is the opium of the people. WEB Du Bois (the only American Sociologist that Weber invited to contribute to his academic journal)  in Black Reconstruction in America proved Marx right and Martin Luther King Jr. agreed that it was the forced labor of millions for hundreds of years that produced capitalism, not protestantism which people of African descent embrace in their millions but still remain underdeveloped.

Now Europeans celebrate Halloween Day every year by giving sweets to children who knock on their doors at night while dressed as witches. They even allow people who identify as witches to practice their own faith that they call Wicca. At the same time, Africans are killing ‘witches.’ What if a poor child tries to do Trick or Treats during Halloween in Africa?

 When lightning strikes and kills someone from the village in a distant city, it is likely because people go about openly even during a thunder storm and not because of the priest in the village who claimed that he had the power to make rain and invoke thunder and deserved to be burned alive. It is not witchcraft that causes unemployment, poverty, and other misfortunes. When one branch of the extended family is doing relatively better while others are struggling, it is not because the head of that family used juju to tie the hands of the other branches of the extended family. Those who sacrificed to provide education or business startup for their children have seen more success among those children than those who failed to educate their children or train them in a trade and it has nothing to do with witchcraft. 

 African countries are at the bottom of the league tables of the Human Development Index reports of UNDP annually because Africans are denied educational opportunities by African rulers but not because of witches and wizards. Those who believe in spiritual warfare should say prayers but desist from attacking and killing fellow human beings with the bias that they are witches. Those who kill people for money ritual should desist from that and work smarter. 

 Difficult times promote witchcraft beliefs and desperate measures in all societies, according to a controversial academic conference on witchcraft at the University of Nigeria that was opposed by Christians. What distinguished the Igbo among their neighbors in the past was that while the Ibibio, for example, believed in appeasing or eliminating the suspected witch, according to my professor, Daniel Offiong who however failed to compare them with their Igbo neighbors who did not have significant beliefs in witchcraft; nor did he compare the Ibibio with their Tiv neighbors who believed that all their chiefs were witches, according to a brief review of Offiong’s book by G. I. Jones. 

 The current state of insecurity may be contributing to the rise of witchcraft allegations among the Igbo as some news reports indicate, though many more may go unreported, as I analyzed in an article for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. Let the youth be trained in scientific methods so that they can invent new technologies to improve life in Africa without blaming misfortunes on innocent people suspected of witchcraft to be lynched by misguided youths. Educate your children or sponsor them to learn a trade. No more witch hunting. 

 Africans must show more love for fellow Africans as the Igbo symbolized with Mbari sculptures where the living and even spirits cohabitate under one roof, according to Chinua Achebe. Stop trying to demonize fellow Africans to justify attacks against them. The fact that intoxicated drivers of vehicles that are not road-worthy but manage to ply on roads that are nor vehicle-worthy and cause many fatalities is not the fault of a poor woman in the village who should not be killed by people who claim to be Christians. If you see mobs attacking anyone as an alleged witch, oppose the attack and advocate for the person being targeted. You can also report it to the organization that is trying to end such violent crimes in Africa: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW). Google it.

UPDATE:

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/ssouth-east/762404-witch-killing-group-kicks-as-court-discharges-man-charged-with-murder-of-woman.html

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

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.

Igbo Legal Advice to a European Law Firm

 By Biko Agozino 

  A Paralegal at a Solicitor Law Firm once wrote to me out of the blues seeking advice about a case that touched on Igbo belief systems. I was told that he came across my details while researching the family law proceedings that his firm was handling. They were looking for a court expert to hopefully advise about 'threats' by a "Nigerian father to place a curse on the mother of his unborn child" 

The threats were said to specifically reference a shrine that was suspected to be 'Okija Shrine in Anambra State or a shrine of similar reputation and function.' They were looking for someone with the 'requisite expertise to comment on the culture and beliefs' of the worshippers and 'the significance of the curses the father has laid on the mother through and using his child as the conduit.'

I was told that appointment as a court expert would come with 'a remuneration from the legal aid agency'. Without quoting my hourly rates for such a remuneration, I felt the need to offer immediate advice to the law firm for free. But since they did not acknowledge receipt of my instant response, I guessed that they did not agree with my comments and may have appointed someone else. They must have been overwhelmed with cases to find time to acknowledge receipt of my advice. 

I have therefore decided to blog my advice here to see if I gave them good advice or if people who worship at such shrines or other lawyers would disagree with my advice. 

My Peacemaking advice may be supported by The Book of Forgiving by Tutu and by Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community. The Pepinsky and Quinney editorial on Criminology as Peacemaking that claims to be influenced by indigenous philosophies of non-violence may also be supportive of my advice. Finally, Carol Smart has reported relevant research evidence that lawyers who seek mediation and reconciliation were said to be better lawyers by clients than lawyers who seek adversarial approaches under the Family Law Act where there is no guilty party though the ruling may be in favor of one party; and any criminal matters, like violence against women, can be tried separately in a criminal court where the defendant would be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

What do you think about my anonymized and slightly edited response below, Dear reader? Did I say something wrong?

 Dear Paralegal, 

 Tell the expectant mother that I wish her all the best with the baby. She must not allow any stress to give her the impression that the baby is a conduit for a curse. The baby is a blessing who deserves to be loved to bits. Forgive the father if he says things under stress, love him and bless him as much as you can for he is also struggling with the huge responsibility of bringing another life into the world. 

Nobody can curse a mother who is bringing another child of Chukwu into this world. Make sure that the mother (and father too) gets 8 hours sleep every night and starts each day early with a healthy breakfast. Forgive those who curse you and love your enemies as yourself because sometimes, you are your own worst enemy. Forgive yourself too and love yourself unapologetically. 

 The Igbo do not believe in curses as threats to people who are upright. The neighbors of the Igbo believe more in witchcraft but the Igbo believe in good or bad Chi or personal God; and we say that if your Chi does not agree to any temptation, you will never be tempted or you will triumph in the name of the great God, Chukwu. 

The Igbo survived a genocidal civil war in Biafra where 3.1 million were killed in 30 months and they left it all in the hands of Chukwu without seeking revenge or laying curses on their enemies. As a result, the Igbo have been immensely blessed to the envy of many of their neighbors who still threaten and kill the Igbo in large numbers, according to Amnesty International. 

 Okija is a truth shrine where people in dispute could go to swear that they are telling the truth (as people swear on scriptures in court while many lie through their teeth; whereas sworn liars are afraid of being punished by the shrine). It is not a Voodoo doll for cursing anyone. 

In other words, if due to the stress of Covid, racism or economic precarity, the expectant father is pissing his pants and wondering how the hell he is going to raise this blessing coming to a world struggling with climate warming, the mother should show understanding and forgive him, treat him with tender loving care, and transform him with kindness into the more loving person she fell in love with. 

 But if the couple are determined to split up for their own sanity or safety, they should still aim to remain friends so that they can cooperate to raise the baby who deserves to have relationships with both mom and dad even if they cannot stand each other (unless they are considering giving up for adoption, or going for reproductive healthcare in the interest of the mother's legal and medical rights to choose). 

 Here is an article by Professor Nonso Okafo of the University of Nigeria Law Faculty with 53 references to alusi 'Ogwugwu Isiula' in Okija but with no reference to a curse, in the context of indigenous non-state law in AJCJS, a peer-reviewed academic journal that I edit for the African Criminology and Justice Association: https://www.umes.edu/uploadedFiles/_WEBSITES/AJCJS/Content/6%201%202%20okafo%20proof.pdf

Thanks for asking for my penny thoughts. Best wishes to the expectant mom and dad. 

Here is my reply to a comment on a different social media platform:

I agree, mental health services may be needed by the couple. My advice may contribute to the mental healing but I do not believe that being stressed as expecting parents means that they are crazy, it is normally a stressful experience, albeit a joyful one, to most too. The mother has the right to choose what to do with her own healthcare just like every other adult. The parents are required to contribute to the upbringing of their children but where they fall short, society should be there to support them with good publicly-funded schools, healthcare, housing, and well-paying employment opportunities.

And this to another comment elsewhere:

Getting mental health services is a call for them and the national health services to make, not for this doctor who has only a Ph.D. in Law and Society. The law firm asked for my knowledge of the culture and advice on the case for the court as an expert.

And this:

We have only heard one side of the story from the mother. Who knows if the father only swore that he was telling the truth and if he was lying, Okija should punish him, just like Fela said Na Truth I want talk again o, and if he dey lie, make Ogun punish him? I was asked for a legal opinion and knowledge of the culture rather than for a recommendation of a religious ritual in far away Europe. But you are right that it can be settled out of court with love and forgiveness like I said.

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA, and the Editor in Chief, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies.

My Great-Grand Father Fought for Justice

By Biko Agozino

 

Senior colleagues in Africana Studies have been asking me to explain if it is true that Africans sold their own people during the Trans Atlantic slavery as alleged by Henry Louis Gates in his BBC series, Wonders of the African World. This renewed interest follows the historical fiction by a Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Obinne Nwaubani, who published a story in New Yorker, ‘My Great-Grandfather - the Nigerian Slave Trader’ and another on the BBC website, ‘My Nigerian Great-Grand Father Sold Slaves’. The BBC presented her as a ‘journalist’ to legitimize her invented stories but she is better known as a novelist who makes things up. I blogged a response to her New Yorker article but I was told off for going soft on her supposedly because she is a fellow Igbo. Here is my slightly tougher but hopefully shorter response to her imaginary BBC story:

 

For full disclosure, Adaobi advertised on her own website that while growing up in the 1980s, she had the strange saboteur dream of becoming a CIA or KGB agent presumably to work against the interests of Africa. She may still be looking for such jobs by writing eagerly like a character witness for European enslavers of Africans against the pending legal writ for reparative justice by people of African descent. First of all, she keeps calling her notorious great-grandfather a famous Nigerian but he pre-existed the invention of Nigeria by the British. Secondly, Africans were not slaves but kidnapped people being trafficked. She is not a historian, so I will not go hard on her.

 

Adaobi correctly translated the Igbo word, ohu, as slave but being neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist nor a historian, she did not know that the context and contents of igba ohu or slavery in ancient Africa were nothing like chattel slavery. As a matter of fact, there was no slave mode of production in Africa, said Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. That was why Amanyanabo Jo Jo Ubani, King Jaja, could rise to be King of Opobo and Joseph became Prime Minister in Kemet. They were servants or odibo and not slaves or ohu.

 

Adaobi may also be right that some cruel families like hers insisted on burying their dead patriarchs with living human beings but that was never part of Igbo culture. During the World Court case over the disputed Bakassi peninsula that was allegedly ceded to Cameroon earlier by Nigeria to blockade and starve the Igbo in Biafra, a Calabar ruler, Obong of Calabar, was a witness for Nigeria around the year 2005. He told the court that there was a similarity in the culture of the Efik of Nigeria and the Bakassi of Cameroon who were one people, in his view, because they buried their King or Obong with four human heads. Nigeria promptly lost the dispute to Cameroon who may have rebutted that such barbarity was not allowed in Cameroon. Neither is it part of the radically democratic Igbo culture where all heads are equal and the Igbo say that they know no king!

 

I responded in detail when Adaobi displayed ignorance about Igbo language and mistranslated her family name in an earlier version of her historical fiction for the New Yorker. The proverbs that she mistranslated for the BBC would say servants or odibo and not ohu, when referring to the ability of servants to learn from the instruction of sons by fathers. The Igbo may say that a man who owns no servant owns himself since inwe onwe is self-ownership or freedom. Yes, the word slave means ohu in Igbo but the Efik still call civil servants the white man's slave or ntop mbakara while the Igbo call them those who do the white man’s work or ndi olu bekee. Even when the word ohu is used to warn children about slave-traders, everybody knows that Europeans warn their children that there is a monster or bogeyman under every bed ready to devour naughty children but it is the pervert uncles, priests, and parents that the children should beware.

 

If Adaobi’s great-grand father was a slave trader, then he was obviously a lumpen scum bag who must have been shunned by the masses that resisted the kidnappers whom she said that her great-grand father hired to go and kidnap people from distant places for sale by him. That may have been why the colonizers made him their paramount chief and tax collector, a deplorable role that led Igbo women to declare war against colonialism in 1929 and force the abolition of Warrant Chiefs among the Igbo who still believe that all heads are equal and boast that the Igbo know no king.

 

Notice that Adaobi ignorantly reported that her great-grand father did not appear to have an extended family, friends, age-grade members, in-laws, or community supporters that rallied around him when his possessions, including ten wives and slaves, were seized by the colonizers who only returned them when he showed the certificate issued to him as a trader by the Royal Niger Company. He was surely a sad lonely figure in a society that valued people more than wealth and still name their children Nwakaego or Ndukaku meaning, child is greater than money or life is greater than wealth. No wonder his name was also Oriaku – a pejorative title by the Igbo for a parasitic wife who only consumes wealth, a title that Igbo women rejected in preference for Odoziaku or wealth manager.

 

In the New Yorker, Adaobi exposed her motivation for her hagiography when she wondered if Africans deserve reparations given that her great-grandfather was a highway robber and kidnapper. Fallacy of the straw man. She also claimed that her family was facing mysterious disasters attributed to the sins and abominations committed by her great-grandfather, forcing the family to contemplate changing their name, to chant psalms annually and pray for forgiveness, and to destroy some family juju pots, perhaps to attract rich wives and husbands for their beautiful children (the thinly disguised theme of her debut novel about 419 fraud, I did not Come to You by Chance).

 

I advised Adaobi in my earlier blog response to tell her wealthy family to set up scholarship funds for her cousins who descended from those that her great-grandfather oppressed instead of simply praying to be washed as white as snow for as she reported, schooling is a great leveler of social statuses – school children make friends without being constrained by ancient claims to status, wealth or caste.

 

In the BBC story, Adaobi quoted the eminent historian, Adiele Afigbo, to give credibility to her amateur psychoanalysis of her dysfunctional family by suggesting that the residues of the slave trade continued until the 1950s before the British finally ended the crimes against humanity that they themselves initiated and ran for hundreds of years without apology or reparations, charged Chinweizu in The West and the Rest of Us. Not being a historian, Adaobi failed to interpret this riddle from Afigbo who was obviously inviting scrutiny of the fact that Africans were to blame for their inability to mobilize and end the slave raids by themselves for more than 400 years. Look how long! For that, Mathew Kerekou, president of Benin Republic, rightfully took a knee at an African American church and apologized for the despicable roles that some African chiefs were forced to play in the inhumane crimes against humanity but Rodney insists in The History of the Upper Guinea Coast that Africans were mostly warriors against slavery.

 

Afigbo was reminding us that since Africans were conscripted as enslaved people to fight for the British during the European tribal wars as if they were slaves, the British cannot claim to have ended slavery. When unarmed African women demanded not to be taxed without representation in the colonial government, the British massacred dozens of them as if they were homo sacer or slaves whose lives could be taken with impunity, wrote also Afigbo in The Warrant Chiefs. And when coal miners demanded for a living wage in Enugu, the colonizers massacred dozens of them in 1949 to prove that it was never their intention to end slavery in Africa, they only wanted to transform it into colonial slave labor and Africans continued to resist, wrote Du Bois, Azikiwe and Rodney. How can the British claim that they ended slavery and barbarity in Africa when they orchestrated the genocide that took 3.1 million Igbo lives in Biafra?

 

All I know is that my great-grandfather was not a slave trader, he was a resistance warrior for justice quite unlike Thomas Jefferson who raped little African girls and then sold his own children for money. When will Adaobi write about American Founding Fathers who were perverts like her great-grandfather and who raped children and called them his ten wives like Boko Haram? 

Maybe I should write that book in answer to the bewildering question repeatedly posed by African Diaspora colleagues: were you not the ones who sold us? No.

 

HARRIET AS IGBO

By Biko Agozino

This is not a spoiler. Harriet is a film without spoilers because the audience already can tell how the movie was going to end. What I would like to comment on are the symbolic representations that the Director, Kasi Lemmons, brought into the narrative that will not make sense to viewers who are not familiar with the background Igbo world views of both Harriet Tubman and the actress who played that role, Cynthia Chinasaokwu Erivo.

Some critics reportedly protested against the casting of the award-winning ‘British’ actress and singer to play the role of the iconic African American hero but if only the protesters knew that it is a case of an Igbo woman being portrayed by another Igbo woman... Besides African Americans have played the roles of Africans in Hollywood without protests from Africans who simply admire good acting by our black brothers and sisters.

There was a carving that the father of Minty, short for Araminta, gave her when she went to tell him that she was fleeing to freedom from slavery. She kept it with her always just as Frederick Douglas kept a piece of wood that an elderly enslaved man gave him after he was beaten by an overseer. According to Douglas, no one ever beat him again in his life for he kept that piece of wood with him, just as the old man told him. The Igbo call such a piece of wood or carving, Ofo na Ogu, the symbol of innocence and blessings. The Director, Kasi Lemmons, was probably reminding us throughout the movie that Harriet Tubman held Ofo and Ogu as a blessed innocent person and that that, in addition to her strong faith in God, was part of the reasons why she was bold in fighting for freedom from slavery for all, unlike Django who only went back to unchain his boo.

Harriet repeatedly claimed that she heard the voice of God but that was attributed, even by black abolitionists, to ‘possible brain damage’ from her head injury as a child when she was found in a barn with the white boy. The Igbo will agree with her claim that she heard the voice of God because the Igbo also believe that God is present in everyone as Chi, or God, a part of the Great God or Chiukwu, also known as Chineke, God the creator. Such a God or Chi would never subscribe to the pro-slavery gospel that the black preacher was paid to preach to the congregation of the enslaved who were called upon to obey their masters and work hard for them as an honor to a white God. Harriet did not say amen to that prayer.

It is a shame that the leading actress, Cynthia Erivo, chose to go by her English first name when her Igbo name would have been more appropriate to the role. Chinasaokwu, the name that her Igbo parents gave her in England when she was born, means God answers accusations. Just as Minty dropped her slave name and chose a free name, perhaps to evade slave catchers who continued to search for runaway enslaved people especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Cynthia should be challenged by her fans to drop the slave name and adopt her Igbo name, Chinasa, as her first name in honor of Harriet if not in honor of her own family. Her real last name, Erivo, literally translates as the unfed or the starving, a strange name that echoes memories of the mass starvation of the Igbo in Biafra during which 3.1 million died. The actress owes it to herself to recover her Igbo name as her first name.

Incidentally, the name Harriet and her original slave name, Araminta, may have onomatopeic meanings in Igbo as Ha aya eti – they will never beat us and Ala mu nta - my little land, or Aninta, a common Igbo name. Hayeti is, by coincidence, similar to the name that the Haitian Igbo revolutionaries gave to their new republic – Ayeti – and that is the way they still spell it in creole today, like the way that Harriet said that people pronounced Rit, her mother's name that she took. It means in Igbo, they will never beat us. Even the name of the Director of this movie, Kasi, also transliterates in Igbo as to console, suggesting the consolation for those who have suffered great injustice without being offered reparative justice.

Moreover, the name Moses that was attributed to Harriet by almost everyone, may also have an Igbo-sounding meaning – Moshishi, or the spirit said to say. The enslavers could not believe that an African woman was capable of leading such daring raids to free the enslaved and lead them to freedom in their hundreds. They claimed that she was a white abolitionist in ‘black face’ which must have been a popular pastime of influential white men then and even now. 

The Harriet model of womanist activism can be found in Ogu Umunwanyi during which Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929, only sixteen years after Harriet passed away; the Abeokuta women’s rebellion against taxation in 1945, the Kikuyu women’s uprising against forced labor in the 1950s, the South African women’s defiance against the pass laws of apartheid in the 1950s, and the Liberian women’s praying of the devil back to hell to end the bloody civil war in the 1990s.

Unlike Western feminist activists who seek gender-separatism, the Africana womanists are exemplary in the sense that their demands always included the interests of suffering men and women in articulation or intersectionally instead of seeking divisive gender essentialism. This is part of the reasons why Professor Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi theorized that womanism was more appropriate than feminism as a description of the interests of African women within cultures that also inevitably include men as allies who can also be opponents in some ways but cannot be pigeon-holed essentially as all the enemies of ‘womandom’. The film, Harriet, showed that not even all white men were enemies during slavery given the important role played by white abolitionists, though some white women were among the worst enslavers and some black men worked for the slave catchers to earn some money.

Harriet was fond of singing the freedom song, ‘Go down Moses, go down to Egypt land and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go’, as a rallying signal for the enslaved to join the underground railroad to freedom. The biblical Moses was called an Egyptian and so, Harriet was not a black Moses – the biblical Moses was obviously not white. The fact that Harriet was suspected to be a man goes to challenge the western invention of women as gendered in submissive relations under patriarchy whereas gender is not a central feature of the conception of people in African cultures where generation, not gender, is more deferential and hegemonic, according to Oyeronke Oyemumi in The Invention of Women.

Harriet carried a gun with her for protection and used it to threaten some of her own family members who were too scared to go with her to freedom. But when she had the opportunity to shoot and kill her enslavers, she chose not to kill. This may seem strange to many fans of Hollywood who have come to expect the hero to be a blood-thirsty maniac in Tarantino movies. However, to the Igbo who suffered genocide, pogroms and mass killings in Nigeria without resorting to retaliatory killings, it is normal to leave the gravest wrongs in the hands of our Chi and instead invest our energies into rebuilding our beloved communities in accordance with the African philosophy of nonviolence that Gandhi admitted that he was taught in Africa and Martin Luther King Jr. followed to lead the Civil Rights Movement.

A puzzle that the film tried to solve was why many poor whites who did not enslave Africans continued to fight in support of what the film called the ‘lost cause’ of slavery even after the Africans had asserted their right to freedom as fellow human beings. W.E.B. Du Bois explained this with the theory of the psychological wages of whiteness. However, the film differed slightly from the conventional interpretation of this theory by explaining that, according to Du Bois, it was not just psychological wages because there were huge structural privileges to even poor whites that they would like to defend; not to mention the hefty rewards placed on the heads of ‘Moses’ and the runaway enslaved people to motivate poor whites to join the posse to try and recapture them. Also, the young white men were motivated by their lust for the bodies of young black girls who were gang raped even ‘before their first blood’ perhaps because they were brought up to think of black girls as ‘pigs to be sold or eaten’ but never to be loved by white men who fathered children that looked exactly like them and still enslaved their own flesh and blood or sold them for money.

The film represented Harriet leading a unit of African American soldiers in battle during the Civil War at the historic Combahee River point of the Black Womanist Rebellion statement. This was the only time that a woman commanded men in battle during the civil war. It came to pass in fulfillment of the vision that Harriet shared with the young white man who was trying to recapture her as his property even though she prayed for him to survive typhoid as a child. She had disarmed him and made him climb down from his white horse, knelt him down and aimed his own rifle at him, and told him to listen to the coming sounds of the civil war even before the war started. She prophesied that he was going to die with thousands of other young white men fighting for a lost cause. Then she rode off on his white horse which did not discriminate between a white male rider and a black female rider. That war soon took an estimated 750,000 lives but it could have been avoided if white people simply accepted the fact that black people were equally human and not property. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.