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.

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.

 

Otherness in African Cosmology

By Biko Agozino

African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest. The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king, Igbo ama eze. 

This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.

The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.

Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result, many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.

Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.

The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the country belongs to all who live in it.

The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu, everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is unforgivable. 

Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination. 

Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.

Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to the tolerant culture of our ancestors.

No African society banned homosexuality before the colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or Gelede masquerades, for instance. 

Today, dressing like a woman in parts of Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of children out of school and with low human development index.

Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9 million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere. In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.

In Renascent Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times. The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.

One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism. 

The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on Her Slave-Trading Grandfather

Adaobi Nwaubani narrates in the NewYorker the fact that there is hurt in every family that is self-inflicted. Having the humility to confess past wrongs and ask for forgiveness is part of the healing. Having the courage to forgive those who wronged you frees you from the resentment which Mandela called a poison that you take and hope that it kills your enemy. Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven. Africans have forgiven the unforgivable crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of colonization and 70 years of apartheid but some Africans still find it difficult to ask for forgiveness or to forgive members of their family for past wrongs. What Adaobi described is going on all the time in Igboland where the belief in witchcraft is not as pronounced as in some other cultures. Instead of hunting for witches to blame for your misfortune, the Igbo are encouraged to look inward and see if there are things that need atonement or to ask their Chi for a better deal. Adaobi's family did not kill or exile the adopted child of an enslaved ancestor but forgave him even after he was suspected of plotting to poison a leader of the family. Okonkwo was also told off by Achebe for killing Ikemefuna, a child that called him Papa, just because an oracle told him to do so. The Igbo have no history of raiding their neighbors for slavery or to execute genocide in order to colonize their land. They believe in letting the Eagle perch and letting the Kite perch. Egbe belu Ugo belu.

My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have lo...

Igbo culture, like all cultures, is not perfect. Culture is not defined as a way of life, contrary to colonial anthropology. Culture is defined by Cabral, Ngugi, Hall and James as a struggle between the forces of domination and the forces of liberation. The way poor people live under capitalism, the way women live under patriarchy, and the way that black people live under racism is not the way they chose to live as a way of life but represent the conditions that they did not choose, conditions imposed by law and tradition, under which they struggle to make history. Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery that cost an estimated 100 million lives to Africa, according to Du Bois. The Igbo, unlike their neighbors, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbors; and that was why they were the predominant group of people captured for sale from what Europeans called the slave coast, according to Douglas Chambers, Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo Africans in Virginia. Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu (outlawed by Azikiwe in the 1950s) on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors, sang Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The question that Adaobi is raising is the old one of how could Africans sell their own into slavery? This was the question that Walter Rodney tackled in his doctoral dissertation on the History of Upper Guinea Coast. He concluded that what happened during the 400 years of the African holocaust was the process of class formation and primitive accumulation. The few chiefs who sold fellow Africans did not regard the war captives as their own people because they belonged to a different class or to a different nation. It was not a trade of the sort where parents put their own children on the shelf to say that these ones are toro-toro, those ones are shishi-shishi, and those other ones are nai-nai pence. It was a long-running war of pillage and the hunting of labor in black skin that Marx condemned in Das Kapital. It is true that some African elites benefited from the enslavement of Africans just as some African elites continue to benefit from the looting of African resources today but the vast majority of the Igbo and other Africans have always been activists against oppression and the main beneficiaries were Europeans from royal families down to pirates. The fact that the wounds of slavery are slow to heal in Igboland is evidence that the Europeans still owe reparations to the survivors of the European slavery. Adaobi's family is showing the way by apologizing to those they hurt in their family and asking for forgiveness from the ancestors. When will Europeans make atonement for crimes against humanity?

Another Guyanese writer, Karen King-Aribisala, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity, posed the question in the novel: how could Africans sell their own for 400 years? In the novel, her Nigerian husband retorted by asking, how could she write a novel today about a slave rebellion and still make the enslaved lose instead of giving them victory in her fiction? She protested that it was a historical novel but her husband encouraged her to revise the history. The pain of the African Diaspora is real and sometimes I get it from students in the US or in the Caribbean, were you not those who sold us? To which I would answer that I would never have sold anyone, I would have been among the warriors and freedom fighters who did fight back with sticks and stones against guns to try and save us from being captured as Olauda Equiano narrated and as Rodney documented in historical accounts written by even some Europeans. 

Chinweizu, in The West and the Rest of Us, disputes the 419 propaganda by the British that they came to fight against slavery in Arochukwu and that that was why they burnt the Long Juju. Chinweizi said that that was not true because by that time, the slave trade that the British and other Europeans had initiated had come to an end and that the British were only after the trade in palm oil that they wanted to monopolize in order to dictate prices against the interests of the middlemen in the interior. It is true that there are always saboteurs and collaborators in any system of oppression especially one that lasted for more than 400 years but it is not smart to blame the survivors for the massive crimes against humanity committed by Europeans against Africans. Frantz Fanon said that Europe owes massive reparations to people of African descent at home and abroad. Chinweizu also agrees that reparations are due since people of African descent appear to be the only survivors of historic wrongs that have not been offered any form of reparations and not even apologies simply because of racism. 

Adaobi played into this by starting her opinion with a doubt as to whether Africans deserve reparations given that Africans, like all human beings, have also hurt one another. Africans never traveled thousands of miles to enslave others for 400 years and colonize the survivors for another 100 years and ridiculously turn round to say that Africans owe them billions, according to Ekwe-Ekwe in Africa 2001. In Specters of Marx, Derrida agreed that Africans deserve to have the unpayable international debts cancelled. It is time for Europe to start paying back the debts owed to Africa and the Caribbean countries are demanding such reparations from European enslavers. It is high time that the African states joined the demand for reparations even while recognizing that, like all human beings, we have also hurt ourselves in our struggle for survival and we should ask for forgiveness the way that Mathew Kerekou visited an African American church, knelt down and asked for forgiveness for the role of Dahomey in the capture and enslavement of fellow Africans..

The vexing question was posed repeatedly by Henry Louis Gates in his infamous documentary for the BBC, Wonders of the African World, where he asked market women in Ghana what it felt like to meet a descendant of one of those that her ancestors sold into slavery. Gates never asked a similar question to the white BBC crew or to any white person he met, how does it feel to work with the descendant of those that your ancestors enslaved? Many poor whites resent such questions and claim that they did not benefit directly from slavery even though they did benefit directly and indirectly from the national wealth created by slave labor. It was poor whites who were the crew of the slave ships, who fought the American civil war to keep slavery going, and it is poor whites who join the KKK and the police to terrorize the survivors of slavery today in defense of white privilege without knowing that they too pay the price for white supremacy since injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, according to Martin Luther King Jr. Reparations for slavery will not come out of the pockets of poor whites but would be paid as percentages of the GDP which would have gone to corporate welfare and not necessarily to the poor. Europeans and North Americans should follow the example of Adaobi's family and ask for forgiveness from Africans, they should offer reparations too.

Adaobi's family should go beyond the annual singing of Psalms for forgiveness and endow scholarships for the children of their estranged family descendants of the adopted Nwaokonkwo. Education is the key to lifting the poor from poverty. The reason why a widow died and her children died mysteriously could be due to infections in a country where the life expectancy is 50 years. Adaobi's cousin was right that this sounds like the story of the bogeyman with which naughty children are warned to eat their greens or else. Africans should invest more in research to find cures for tropical diseases instead of simply praying for forgiveness for past wrongs. Families that educate their sons and daughters to the highest levels tend to thrive better whether they are Ohu, Osu or Amaala. Education is the key to the healing of the wounds of slavery in Africa. 

With more emphasis on education for which the Igbo are the leading achievers in Nigeria, people like Adaobi will make friends with more school mates irrespective of their family backgrounds and Adaobi may learn the Igbo language enough to understand the meaning of names. Her family name, Nwaubani does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo who rose from 'slavery' to become king over the community of his master to show that it was not really slavery and whose name was actually, JoJo Ubani or someone who was wealthy in real estates: Uba is wealth and Ani is land. Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze. It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no king but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo ommunitiues in 1976 under the dictatorship of Obasanjo, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no king.

Biko Agozino

NB: The following opinion editorial in response to this blog post may interest some:

https://www.sunnewsonline.com/igbo-cosmology-the-meaning-of-ubani/

Biko