Special Broadcast on Critical Race Theory, including an interview with me by producers in Northern Michigan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1RQ_tb_hIs

Biko

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.

Review of our video in a Class

 Hey Biko,

I showed your video in my Race, Class, Gender and Sexualities class this semester. Here is what one student wrote on her final exam essay:

"The lecture that most struck me over the course of this semester was, in all honesty, the lecture given on the history of racism and intersectionality on Virginia Tech's campus. Upon entering Virginia Tech in 2017, and up until mid-October of 2021, I had never found any cause to question the written history that is so often presented as hallmarks of the University's foundation and tradition. Figures like Addison Caldwell were staples in my mind, but I had never taken pause to question the reality or historical accuracy of this type of narrative, until our lecture. Watching a video during class about the sordid history of minorities at Virginia Tech was extremely eye opening to the nature of Virginia Tech to "white-wash" history in a sense, allowing for the savory parts of history to shine through, while the unsavory bits are lost to time and historical speculation. I believe this lesson had inherent value, not only to me, but to others who I spoke to after class. Many discussed how the video and lecture had opened their eyes to a historical framework they had never considered to be possible on such a campus as Virginia Tech, but seeing it placed out in front of us, it almost seemed obvious in a way. How could we have not noticed the hidden frameworks and doctrines hidden right before our eyes? If you are to teach this class again, I would make intersectionality at Virginia Tech several lectures (or maybe its own unit), in order to ensure that the issue is being properly discussed and called attention to."

Here's another comment from another student on their final exam essay: "what I recall the most vividly was what I discovered about Virginia Tech's troubling history. Watching the video that listed the racial and gender discrimination and the slavery that was talked about being casually listed as a minor detail when it was a extreme basis of Virginia Tech's origins was rattling to say the least."

Thanks to the colleague and to the students for sharing. Readers can play the video by clicking on the hyperlinked word, video.

Biko

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.

Selfies With White Dwarfs

By Biko Agozino

This is a series of selfies that I took during the August 2017 solar eclipse in Virginia, USA. The shower of colors from cosmic rays that emerged as bubbles around my African silhouette image made me wonder where they came from and where exactly was the eclipse that I was trying to capture without daring to look the eye of the sun squarely in the face as it raced from West to what Nnamdi Azikiwe serenaded as ‘the land of the rising sun’ in the East, a poem that was later adopted as the national anthem for Biafra.

In My Odyssey, Azikiwe recounts tales of a meteor that blazed across the sky the night he was born in Zungeru near the great water and how tongues wagged about the prophesied greatness of the newborn before he went to live with his grandmother in Onitsha where he swam in the West-East flow of Orimiri and later grew up to challenge the Orientalist colonization of Africa by the West.

The images reminded me of the song by Bob Marley and The Wailers – Natural Mystic. Except in this case, being photographs, you cannot hear even if you listen carefully as Akinbode Akinbiyi advocated in The Sound of Crowded Spaces conveyed by photography. Rather, if you look carefully you will see the mystery of realism in the pictures even without hearing the sound of an eclipse, described with an app for the blind, from pictures.

As in Frantz Fanon’s haunting phrase, ‘Look, a Negro’, I did not make it up. It was not rehearsed and staged with special effects. My smart phone just captured what was not visible to my naked eyes or what you are forbidden to gaze upon, lest the awesome beauty blinds you for staring at, or evoking, what can’t be seen, a la Teju Cole who wrote about being blind-sighted by a 'blind spot' (probably because he had a strange habit of washing his eye-balls with warm chlorinated tap water).

The images also make me conscious of the indigenous knowledge system of the Dogon of Mali who are able to accurately predict the appearance of the Sirius star over cycles of sixty years for thousands of years and celebrate the reappearance. They also accurately identify the Sirius B White Dwarf that accompanies the Sirius on its visits to the earth’s astral path. Some colonial anthropologists dismissed this as a myth and said that the Dogon have no right to know such things unless some Europeans told them.

My ‘Selfies with White Dwarfs’ series of photographs of the fast-moving eclipse appears to be a reminder that certain meanings can be revealed by nature to those who are willing to look carefully and see what may be hidden from the wise and the prudent.

Some people posted on Facebook that evidence of the path of the eclipse from the north west to the south east, unlike the east-west rotation of the earth across the face of the sun daily, proves that the earth is flat and the moon landing was staged. Ha ha ha, my selfies with the eclipse were not staged, halo and all.

I have used one of these iconic photographs as the cover picture for my collection of essays published as a book: Essays on Education and Popular Culture: Massliteracy, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019. Can you tell which picture was used as the book cover?

The pictures approximate the streams of consciousness that travelled with the eclipse from West to East, unlike the eye of the sun that goes from East to West, but exactly like the course of the great river Niger from the West to the Southeast across West Africa.

The pictures were submitted for exhibition in Recontres de Bamako 2019 and this blog post alludes to the Director’s statement but the entry was not accepted for the exhibition.

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.

Appreciation for Kasala Kamara’s Tribute to African Civilization

By Biko Agozino 

I received a signed copy of A Tribute To African Civilization (Atlanta, Sene Press, 1995) from the author, Kasala Kamara, on 10/11/2006 in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago shortly after sharing a panel with him at the Center for Black Arts and Culture conference with delegates from Nigeria. He had just spoken about the energy sector and later that evening, the Honorable PM, Patrick Manning attended an evening reception where he promised to offer help in the energy sector to Nigeria. I shook hand with him later to commend him for the policy of publicly-funded university education for the citizens. 

Some of the Nigerians came with samples of their produce - roasted groundnuts in plastic bottles but with a dose of sand. One wanted to know how he could export cashew nuts to Trinidad and Tobago. Did they not hear the Prime Minister offer help with energy sector? I asked myself. I had just arrived the country a few months earlier to take up a job as a Professor of Sociology at the University of the West Indies. Brother Kasala must have been impressed with my modest contributions as a chair of the panel in which he presented; for he wrote in the autograph to me: ‘To Brother Onwubiko Agozino Positive Vibrations’ and singed. 

That was very touching for a reggae lover like me who understood what groundings with Rasta mean by positive vibration, popularized by Bob Marley and the Wailers in that iconic song. I purposively went to the Caribbean partly to reconnect with brothers and sisters whose ancestors were kidnapped from Africa for four hundred years without any expectations that we would survive and meet again, survivors of the slave raids and survivors of slavery, survivors all. And here was a brother I was meeting for the first time, and he called me, brother. 

 When I read the book, it struck me as an original contribution to knowledge in many different disciplines. Structured into five parts, the book covers in Part I, what is now a consensus among scholars in different disciplines that Africa is the genesis of civilization, science and technology. Such a thesis was argued by Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1950s with three successive Ph.D. dissertations before he was reluctantly passed in France. Like Diop, the author maintains that Black Africa built the ancient Egyptian civilization contrary to skepticism by Eurocentric authors. Kasala went beyond Diop’s theory of state building origins in Africa by delving into his own specialization in International Relations, in which he has published several other titles, to highlight the ancient African origin of diplomacy and international law. 

 Part II highlights the contributions of Africa to the development of world spirituality, morality, ethics and wisdom and how the African conception of God is related to other contributions to civilization. Part III profiles personalities like the Pharaoh, Akhenaton, and Imhotep, the first recorded multi-genius in the world who thrived in a civilization that respected the rights of women without slavery as a mode of production, without prisons, and without racism. 

What jumped out at me most, as a criminologist, is Part IV where the author offers a definition of national security based on the welfare of the people and the roles of Africans in the development of humanism, the family and the wider world. I have cited this part of the book in several of my publications because of its alignment with the decolonization paradigm that I am credited as having helped to develop in criminology following my book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation and also in my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason. 

In an editorial essay for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies which I edit for the African Criminology and Justice Association, I answered the question: ‘What is Criminology?’ And I stated that it is ‘A Control-Freak Discipline’. I was invited back to The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine to present this paper as a Keynote Address for the International Conference on Penal Abolitionism. I was told by one of the organizers that the police officers attending were eager to challenge me, and I said to them, bring it on. When one lady officer objected that the national safety officers did not like being painted as the bad guys, I responded that the same bosses that pay them also pay us scholars but the difference is that we are hired to apply our critical thinking to the order of things while they have the mandate to impose order. 

The Chief Judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice who chaired the session privately agreed with many of my recommendations. A radio DJ had made a joke earlier about my call for Reparative Justice by using it as the subject of his daily ‘Tings that make me vex’. This time, he interviewed me live on radio about my call on the Prime Minister to legalize marijuana as reported that morning in The Guardian,  and I answered those who called in to say that it was a gate-way drug by asking them to help to take it out of the gate by making it legal. 

 One of the sources that supported my critique of the obsession with controlling others by criminologists is Kasala Kamara. I cited his revelation that in ancient Egypt, it was reported to the Pharaoh that the principality of Damascus was rebelling and demanding their independence from Egypt. The advisers recommended crushing the rebellion militarily to teach a lesson to other would-be rebels but the Pharaoh invited the rebellious prince to dinner instead. 

After liming (feasting and philosophizing) with him in the royal palace, the rebel prince was asked what his people wanted. He answered that they wanted to be free to govern themselves by themselves. The Pharaoh shook his hands and told him to go and tell his people that they were now independent and free to rule themselves as they saw fit. Compare that with the constant waging of wars through invasion, enslavement, colonization, genocide, and exploitation engaged in by the imperialist West for five hundred years at a huge cost in lives to poor Europeans who were used as cannon fodder around the world and also at home where militarized policing gave rise to the BlackLivesMatter movement worldwide.  South Africa massacred poor people protesting the jailing of President Jacob Zuma for alleged 'state capture' while the proven criminals of apartheid land, gold, and diamond theft and mass murder are forgiven to walk free in a deeply corrupt South Africa.

By forgiving the rebels and granting their request for freedom, the rulers of ancient Egypt avoided putting the lives of their own soldiers at harm’s way and avoided creating enemies abroad through the mass killings of the loved ones of others. The wealth that could have been wasted in such wars were instead devoted to education, the development of canals, science, arts, architecture, medicine and philosophy in the longest lasting dynasties ever recorded in history. I was also borrowing indirectly from this book when I Directed and Produced an award-winning documentary on the banning and eventual liberation of Shouters Baptist Faith in Trinidad and Tobago. 

The documentary, ‘Shouters and the Control Freak Empire’ asked criminologists to explain what crimes the Shouters committed that made the colonial administration to proscribe them, arrest, and harass them just for praising God in their own bell-ringing ways. In accordance with the decolonization paradigm, I suggested that the Shouters were right to see themselves as people who were victimized and abused by the imperialist state for their freedom of conscience, a people who resisted non-violently by holding services secretly in the liberation struggle to regain their freedom, making them deserving of reparative justice. It premiered on Gayelle TV and later won the International Best Short Documentary Prize at the Columbia Gorge Film Festival, USA, 2011. 

 As I look back at the book and the author, I now understand better why he is named Kasala Kamara, which literally means in my Igbo language – complain (Kasala) and let it be known (Kamara), appropriate meanings for the rebellious Igbo man who led a rebellion in Guyana, and the common West African name for great teacher from whom he took his second name. However, the name could also be meaningful in other African languages. 

I came to hear from those carrying commerce that he was one of the Sixth Form student activists who supported the 1970s Black Power revolution in the country to end discrimination against people of African descent. On graduation from the St. Augustine campus of UWI in 1975, he became one of the leaders of the National Joint Action Committee and the book emerged from his 30 part radio program series that he narrated in 1988 in his capacity as Director of the Caribbean Institute of Regional Affairs and International Relations in observance of  African Liberation Day and with a commitment to the re-emergence of Africa as a leading world power. I heard that when the activists were rounded up and put on trial, a Nigerian genocidist army officer who led the genocide against the Igbo in Biafra (in which an estimated 3.1 million died in 30 months, 1967-1970) was said to have been seconded from Nigeria to be one of the military judges that tried the activists. 

I heard that he recommended the death penalty as appropriate because that was what he would do in Nigeria to coup plotters. Prime Minister Eric Williams rejected the death penalty and all but forgave the activists while implementing some of their demands to see Africans hired as bank tellers or air hostesses in Trinidad and Tobago, the only country in the world where people of African descent are officially known as Africans. 

 The forgiveness of the unforgivable is common among people of African descent who went through slavery, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, and internal colonialism without seeking revenge, only reparative justice i9n accordance with the Africana philosophy of forgiveness, compared to Abrahamic traditions that rule out the forgiveness of the unforgivable, according to Derrida. Such apparent forgiveness was not rare in the Caribbean for Fidel Castro was spared after the June 26 Movement failed to capture state power and he, in turn, forgave the captured Bay Of Pigs invaders and sent them back to the US whereas Che was executed after being wounded and taken prisoner. 

Hugo Chavez was forgiven by Venezuela, the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty, and Chavez forgave the military officers who had briefly overthrown him. Granada has also released from the death row, members of the New Jewel Movement who had been sentenced to death for the killing of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and others that prompted the US to invade the country. Mandela abolished the death penalty while the killers of Chris Hani were awaiting trial and possible sentencing to death. He launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear confessions and offer forgiveness, but no offers of reparative justice there. 

 Twenty years after the Black Power revolution in Trinidad and Tobago, the July 27, 1990 uprising by Muslimeen activists again rocked the government at the Red Building in Port of Spain. Instead of detaining the leaders without trial or assassinating them as was common practice across the world, the government went to court to try and evict the group from a piece of land that they were occupying without authorization. 

If the government leaders had read this book by Kamara, they would have allowed the Muslimeen to occupy the land and grow their own dasheen or okra and things as they wanted. The government should not be evicting citizens from land where they want to grow food while the same government spends huge resources to import foreign food that the poor people may not be able to afford, or just not wanted by people who want to grow their own. 

 This book was at the back of my mind as a journalist, Nazma Muller, interviewed me for The Express Newspaper on policy options to reduce the mass violence in the beautiful country. I told her that the people were brutalized by history and so it was not surprising that they would be violent.  I suggested that the government could help to reduce the violence by ending the death penalty which brutalizes the conscience of the people, as I argued in a paper written in the country; by ending the war on drugs which escalates violence, by legalizing sex work, abortion, and same sex marriage, the prohibition of which promotes toxic masculinity, and by offering reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans who got nothing at the end of enslavement. The corrupt, brutal, neocolonial regimes in Nigeria have been prone to be overthrown despite the use of the death penalty as a punishment for failed frequent coups. 

 I heard that some preachers preached against me at church after reading the interview but if they had read this book by Kamara, they would have agreed with at least some of my recommendations. Someone reproduced the interview as a booklet with an artist impression of my interview photograph on the cover and with the title, The Big Bad Book, with copies sent to all the banks in the country, just for so. I was informed that a credit company used the article as the cover for their annual report on bad debts. Huh? Eventually, Prime Minister Keith Rowley bowed to reason by accepting the recommendation of the Caricom Cannabis Commission to decriminalize marijuana for medical uses. I hope that the people of Trinidad and Tobago will have the courage to push for full legalization of marijuana to allow poor women and men to grow it and sell it to tourists during carnival and thereby earn legitimate wealth from which they would pay taxes, as I argued in a written submission to the commission. 

I hope that they will have the courage to abolish the death penalty as we recommended (in a joint paper with David Greenberg of New York University) published in the British Journal of Criminology. When the country of The Gambia proposed to execute 37 people at once, this paper was sent to them with the observation that it was the colonial administration that imposed the death penalty that African countries have retained long after the colonizers abolished it as barbaric in the metropole, partly because there is proof that it is not a deterrent. I hope that this was one of the reasons that made the government to suspend the mass execution. Ent (no be so)? 

 In agreement with the final Part V of the book on the present-day riches and potentials of Africa, I invited Kasala Kamara to guest teach my political sociology class for Graduate Students. The students evaluated his teaching to be of very high quality and if I had stayed longer in the country, I would have recommended that he should be hired as a permanent lecturer. Readers can support his work by asking their libraries to order copies for them if they cannot afford it. Students can also use inter-library loan to access the book and they can write to various departments on campus to raise funding to bring the author as a speaker by Zoom or in person. I recommend the book to all levels of readers. 

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