AFRICAN METAPHYSICS - Onyeji Nnaji

Contents

1) The Metaphysics of African Oral Tradition

- Universal cognate

- Restricted cognate

2) Transcendental empiricism of African myths

A) The duality myth

- Animated duality

- Cohabitation duality

B) Celestial cosmography

C) Totem

3) Mysteries of life in the Igbo cosmology

- Agwu

- Rejuvenation

- Ike-Ishi

4) Cosmic Chain

- Mind Control

5) Soul Travel

- Mutant soul

- Still bound

- Purgation

6) Incarnation

- Ogbanje: entity & Journey

- living within lives

- Reincarnation    

- Memories of the Afterlife

          - Memory by scar

          - Memory by reflex

7) Igbo Geometry and the Metaphysis of Number

The Mystery of the Number One

The Mystery of the Number Two

The Mystery of the Number Three

The Mystery of the Number Four

The Mystery of the Number Five

The Mystery of the Number Six

The Mystery of the Number Seven

The Mystery of the Number Eight  

                             CHAPTER ONE

          THE METAPHYSICS OF AFRICAN ORAL TRADITION

Oral tradition may be explained as the aspects of any people’s life that are transmitted orally from one generation to another. It is also a testimony bothering on the establishment and sustenance of a people over a long period of time. Its special characteristics are the fact that it is oral and its manner of transmission is also through oral sources. To define oral tradition is complicating; it is not easy to find a definition which covers all its aspects. A written record is an object: a manuscript, a tile, a tablet. But a verbal record can be defined in several ways, because a speaker can interrupt his testimony, correct himself, start again, and so on. This situation made Hampate Ba to say that,

When we speak of African tradition or history we mean oral tradition; and no attempt at penetrating the history and spirit of the African peoples is valid unless it relies on that heritage of knowledge of every kind patiently transmitted from mouth to ear, from master to disciple, down through the ages. This heritage is not yet lost, but lies there in the memory y of the last generation of great depositories, of whom it can be said: 'they are the living memory of Africa' (History 1: 166).

So, oral tradition is the totality of the life and history of any people. Oral tradition, to be précised, is multifaceted. It defines the potency of the existence of any people. It addresses the relevant aspect of any people such as:

            - Where the people came from.

            - Why the people came from where they had come from.

            - How the people come to their present abode.

            - How much belief they people have about nature courses and their                interrelationship with strange forces.

            - What their prejudices and superstitions are.

Oral tradition is incomplete without the inclusion of the trado-cultural activities with which the people’s society is informed. Culture itself is the embodiment of the people’s total life. With culture, alongside other factors that sustain a society, the people’s language is comprehensibly composed. Language is the most credible informer of every oral tradition. It achieves this through the people’s lore, proverbs and other communication strings within the setting of the concerned people. One incomparable relevance of tradition to any people is the call for a continual return to the source. Conveyed through oral processes, it has to be listened to, learnt by heart, inwardly digested like a poem and carefully examined to make it yield up its many different meanings. This relatively made it difficult for strangers to accurately document the history of another people. Such a historian must therefore learn to work more slowly, to reflect, to work his way into an alien system of ideas and images, since the corpus of tradition is the collective memory of a society which explains itself to itself. C. Haddok, in the preface to M.J. Leonard’s 1906 publication expressed this reasoning very eloquently.

Appreciating these facts, Major Leonard made it his business to consult at first hand the great book of nature as it is manifest in Southern Nigeria, and to see the people as they actually are, as they live, as they do, and as they think and speak. The more he looked, and the deeper he studied, the more evident it became to him that never has the European understood the Negro; and the present volume is his interpretation of Negro thought and expression. (Lower Niger; X).

The historian must learn how the oral society thinks before he can interpret its traditions. And since the interpretation he would receive would come directly from the same inheritors of the tradition, he cannot boast of having a complete interpretation. For a complete interpretation to emerge, the interpreter must have come from within the same people and has, through years of experiences, been assimilated into the philosophical streaming of the people such that he could speak vividly of his cultural instinctiveness even untutored.  All these activities cannot be known by a strange figure, just by tarrying a while with the native. You cannot transmit a tradition you are not born into or have grown through. Even when you are born into or have grown under such a tradition, there are certain intricacies abiding with the same tradition that will not be part of you provided you are not an indigenous. These aspects are concerned with the prejudices and superstitions of the people which are inborn and is only transmitted inborn. For so reasoned you can only be an interpreter, not a transmitter. As Achebe reveals about the Igbo situation thus,

Since Igbo people did not construct a rigid and closely argued system of thought to explain the universe and the place of man in it, preferring the metaphor of myth and poetry, anyone seeking an insight into their world must seek it along their own way. Some of these ways are folks-tales, proverbs, proper names, rituals and festivals ­(Creation, 135).

If there is no transmitter, there is no history, because it is no longer possible to distinguish what proceeded from what follows. An interpretation cannot serve as a more genuine/preferred means since the interpreter cannot achieve a complete accomplishment of his task without selecting the more preferred information to him, while the less preferred ones are abandoned. With this, history is tented and cannot prove completely true. Selection approach cannot be a complete process for the thorough adaptation of any people’s tradition.

As unique as oral tradition has remained, it always gives a relative transmittal dependent figures within the generations it has lasted. In general, this transmittal agent enables the whole body of traditions of the society under study to be placed in the framework of the genealogy or the list of Theo (in the form of theocrat or theosophist) or age groups which covers the broadest geographical area, but it does not enable the relative sequence of events to be linked to those outside the particular region. However, where there is a related historical contiguity (such as one historical element giving birth to others around it) such contiguity can be vividly specified as proof of relationship but may not have indebt information bothering on the continual process that had sustained the contiguous offspring’s oral tradition.  For this reason, I insist that of all the civilizations I have studied; call it Sumer, Dravidian, Egypt, Nubia, China and others, only the Igbo and Israel can truly boast of presenting a complete oral tradition and the history of ascendancy from a common progenitor. No other civilization in the entire glob has a complete and more genuine oral tradition.  An oral tradition is considered more genuine and complete when such oral tradition embodies evidences of having mothered people belonging to other tradition via traceable proof that shows them as belonging to a same source. In the same vein, that oral is considered the richest which contains the prehistory of other people connected to it with clear specifications.  
    

The reason why some important historical movements and local evolutions go unnoticed or remain doubtful is because the unit on which the transmission is calculated is geographically too restricted. The Igbo case, for instance, had been restrictive for inestimable centuries because it had rested on one family. The same way, many communities among the Igbo nation have their history, tradition and cultural transmission resting upon a family. This family, usually, is directly connected to the progenitor and through them such bloodline has been maintained time beyond memory. I can tell from the difficulties people have gone through, trying to document the history of my community, Nkalaha, until when I stepped into it in 2013. It was relatively easy for me because I have the bloodline of the inheritors; born by the Ugbor (the theosophist), and under whom I grew up. I have witnessed prayers said at different rituals and have partaken of the ritualistic involvement. I as well had taken parts in different communal festivals and traditional gatherings during which the incantation that embodies the history of the community were said for years. Those researchers aping to document our history have not had these experiences, but had depended on what they could hear at certain occasion of interviews. This made it impossible.

Family genealogy is valid only for the one family and the village or villages it lives in. But this is not true in all the cases. I have witnessed where Nnaji nwa Nnaji, the Ugbor of Nkalaha gave detailed explanations on the migration and settlement of the inhabitants of a neighbouring community. Related tradition must therefore be linked together and if possible converted into absolute transmitting agencies for it to be valid for progressive adoption. But first there is another problem to be solved, that of ensuring that the information used corresponds to a reality which has not been distorted with respect to time. It is increasingly clear that oral transmission may be subject to distortion. This only happens when it is transmitted by an agent who is not committed to the moral consciousness that rules the inheritors. His primary intention is to expunge certain aspect of the oral tradition that discriminates against him either as a stranger or a slave. All the family members among whom the duty of transmitting the tradition of any people rests on their shoulders know the danger attached to the attempt to desecrate the tradition beforehand. To avoid this impending danger, they have guarded it with all form of care. This condition makes for the tendency to regularize genealogies and succession sequences of age.

Cognates of African Oral Tradition

The closest way any people are connected to their ancestors is through the tradition through which the people grew and acquired its culture even untutored. Culture, though tied to the people’s language, cannot be absolute in the retention and sustenance of the people’s history. The reason is very simple; culture can be acquired but tradition is inherent. Tradition may be observed by a stranger, but it cannot be internalized. When it is so, it involves struggles attempting to live by the tradition which, to the stranger, is nothing other than rules. The inheritors do not see it in that light. They rather see it as their normal lifestyle and move along with it easily, because they grew up with it and it had formed a greater part of their persons.

Someone born into one tradition, culture and language can easily be influenced to take up another culture or language and display proficiency in them than his own, after he has lasted for a long time in the new culture/language domain; but he cannot change his tradition as easily as he had to language/culture. It is simple; to get acculturated into another culture is simply to get wedded into the language of that same culture. With the uses of the language of the new culture more frequent than the native language, cultural implantation becomes very easy. It is so because the language cannot stand in isolation. The, the acquisition of the language cannot hold without the assimilation of the imagies and behaviours that the language carries. Yet, such a person cannot lose the consciousness of his tradition in him. This is why Africans, despite their years of stay in the west, may view things in the western view but do not lose the consciousness of the motherland. At the Silver Jubilee of The Guardians in 2008, Achebe spoke of himself thus:

Who among us, if there were reincarnation, would like to choose Nigeria in his second coming? Of course nobody. I thought that same way in my days in exile in the United States of America. But one unfortunate thing had lingered; each time I look at myself, my skin reminds me that I came from somewhere else.

Culture is environmentally conditioned while tradition flows through blood and skin. To measure the level of the connection of any people to their tradition and culture, cognate becomes very useful as the yardstick for determining the extent of the connectivity amidst a people and their ancestors.

The term, cognate, is a psychological concept that explains connectivity depicted through characterizations, speech and other behavioural aptitude that loudly speak of oneness or brotherhood. The kinds of activities engaged in by organized groups of people may be interpreted for an elaborate explanation of cognate behaviour. An organized group shows episodes of collective behaviour which tend to be quite spontaneous, resulting from an experience shared by the members of the group, such as cognates show similar behaviour resulting from, perhaps, the family, village or community that engenders a sense of common interest and identity. The informality of group structure is the main source of the frequent unpredictability of collective behaviour.

Because cognate emphasizes groups, the study of cognate behaviour should be considered different from the study of individual behaviour, although inquiries into the motivations and attitudes of the individuals in these groupings are to be considered, especially when such behaviours are instinctive. The collective behaviour that cultural cognate informs resembles organized group behaviour in that it consists of people acting together; but the latter is more spontaneous, consequently more volatile and less predictable, while cognate informed behaviour is usually more natural, having well-established rules and traditions specifying their purposes, membership, leadership, and method of operation. Cognate generally speaks of people that share same natural identity such as bloodline and related by descent; from the same ancestral language. Cognate behaviour can be experienced through language and other behaviours that may be peculiar to a sect.

Now, metaphysics employs cognate in the analysis of oral tradition when it sets out to examine the anatomy of certain behaviours that may be universal within a people of the same tradition and culture and in another hand, to also survey the intricacies behind the situation where this knowledge is not universal among people of a same language and tradition. It also seeks to establish why certain families are vested with certain knowledge which every other family in the same society, village and community do not have.  The misconception amidst these views directly impinges the feelings that certain cognate is universal among a people while another may be restrictive among the same or different people.  

(1) Universal Cognate

 A universal cognate is explicable where a particular people belonging to a same oral tradition share certain identical behaviour. A common cognate behaviour do to every Igbo, for instance, is egalitarian lifestyle. Every Igbo has in him the vibratory instinct to survive anywhere he finds himself. This aptitude is instinctively directed by the tribal intuition to display certain characteristics of the Igbo ancestors. As Afigbo puts it in Rope of Sand,

From the very name and symbol (of the Igbo) there would appear to issue vibrations which induce in the average Igbo man the will to make efforts of the kind that can magnetize success in life’s different directions (P. 1).

The history of the origin of Igbo traditional religion must be sought within Igbo history of origin. Igbo lived a hazardous wandering life of the hunter and gatherer of wild edible plants. The tradition of Nri disclosed how the Igbo entered a settled 1ife which brought him further development of skills (P. 9).

Igbo ancestors were originally hunters and gatherers at the earlier stage. This situation afforded them the opportunity to found other places. This life is born in every Igbo untutored. At growth this lifestyle begins with the hunt for lizards. Usually he does this with his peers among whom he acquires his socialization first. The hunt for lizards exposes him to different skills like running, diving, aiming and shooting. Through this medium the instinct that stimulates the urge to hunt inside him indirectly prepares him for possible means of livelihood and survival. As maturity progresses, nature still does not cease in her attempt to extend this hunting life. Gradually it moves from lizard hunt to grasshopper, then birds and finally the major hunt of real animals. Now, the essence of these patterning of the Igbo child is to naturally create a sense of independence and survival through share struggle. Movement in the course of the hunt is not left without pedagogical relevance. This aspect of life of an Igbo child forms the greater part of the writing of authors writing from the Igbo oral tradition.

Another form of universal cognate is experienced among the Anang society. The Anang have certain aspect of their socialization anchored on the reiteration of the condition that put their ancestors away from their original home. In the beginning, the Anang and the Ibibio were brothers whose common ancestor was Ibom (according to their oral tradition which is now forgotten). The original home of the Ibibio is the present day Arochukwu, while the Anang own the present day Aba Ngwa in Abia State. The Aro were the oldest merchants who started moving to other settlements in the early days of iron production in the Nsukka area. The earliest of the Aro merchants arrived the area, they could not go back. Soon, more Aro people settled in the area. As time went by, the Aro, being skillful in the scheme of things, were assimilated into the Ibibio family. It later happened that the ominous deity of the Ibibio group of families (Ibin Ukpabi) fell to their favour, for the right to become the attendant of the deity had always been based on eldership and the tradition demanded. Being the attendant of the deity, the sovereignty of the deity was vested on him alongside the secretes hidden in the deity; for the people took the Aro as brothers. When he had grappled on the totality of the deity’s power, he used it to set way against the original inhabitants. The expulsion of the Ibibio by the Aro took place around 9,000 years B.C.

About that time, Anangs were having similar misunderstanding with their Ngwa neighbour. But the Ngwa were larger than the Anangs in their population. So, when the trouble set, the Ngwa took the Anangs unawares and pursued them out of their original home. In defence for the war that came unplanned, the Anangs lay hold on their machete and used it to hold to certain restraint and defend themselves against their more fostered assailant. The held to this defence until they were finally ejected from the area and pushed southwards. The attempt to hold to this defence, as some insisted never to run further and settled at the place they are now, are reflected in the meaning of the names given to those communities. from then on it became incorporated into the Anangs’ tradition. Ask any Anang while he bears knife as a mark of his socialization into the traditional Anang society, he would not have any answer other than the simple show of manhood attainment. In the Anang society, a mail child believed to have attained the level of initiation into this social state, what the parents do is to gate for him a new sword with its sheath. When this initiation is done the Anang child is believed to have attained certain level in their society. At this point the Anang is believed to have the capacity to defend himself against any external aggression. Without this level of socialization attained, no Anang male is allowed to talk of marriage. Therefore to prove that a person has attained this level of socialization, all the attainders bear their sword by their sides whenever the call for this prove is called. Even church people share in this aspect of socialization of the Anang society.

The concern of the metaphysics is not merely the actions which justify the set of universal cognate behaviours, instead he pays attention to the instinct in that same people belonging to a same oral tradition to exhibit this uniformed attitude even untutored. This stands to explain that the people have, through an indirect channel, establish a link with the spirit and acts that had guarded their ancestors. And this indirect channel is the people’s oral tradition. This indirect way of accessing the oral riches of the ancestral tradition is considered as an aspect of cognition engraved in the inheritors in the manner that even the inheritors can hardly give vivid explanation about. It is their cognate, even though it occurs indirectly; the more interesting part of it is that it is universal among the inheritors. There are however ways the people could possibly maintain a direct channel in accessing the act, arts, history and the efficiency of the arms of their anscestors. In this latter condition, the cognate behaviour among the people is not universal; it is rather restrictive because such channel maintained is usually concentrated on certain important figures in such a society. This type is not universal; it is rather restricted cognate.

(ii) Restricted Cognate

An aspect of a community’s oral tradition – history, tales, legend or myth – becomes restrictive when such aspect of the people tradition rests on the shoulder or head of a particular sector or persons in the community.  The people or persons concerned in this guise become the screen from where that aspect of the people’s tradition is made visual. It might be a priest or another person who serves as the eyes, gateway or carrier of the people’s tradition. He is usually besought during staking issues of traditional concern. Such people maintain a direct channel with the art of the ancestors while the rest of the community members establish indirect contact.

In every oral tradition in Africa, the priests are seen as the eyes and mouth through which the people see, keep and sustain their link with the ancestors. These priests have been considered as diviners, soothsayers and spiritualists because of their divinity. They get information/message from the ancestors and relate them to the people. They are usually round characters in the nature of their functions and roles. For as they receive from the ancestors, they also carry the people’s supplications to the ancestor who relate to the people via him. In this nature he remains as the middleman to the entire metaphysical functions of the community they exist.

In the Igbo society, for instance, the dibia and the priest serve as the instrument the ancestors use to police the inhabitants. As the custodian of culture and tradition of the people, the priests check against any tradition offender and oversee the punishment of offenders. It is also his role to make amendment where and when necessary. The confidence the rest of the society has on the priest or dibia is authenticated on the view that it is the gods themselves who checkmate them. In this light, the priest is hallowed and regarded as a supernatural being from his contemporaries.  In terms of their roles, the priest represents the people before the deity he presides over and as well represent the deity before the people among whom he ministers. The place of the priest is relatively certain, definite or precise compared to the dibia. The priest is stationary while the dibia is mobile. But among the two, the dibia appears to have greater responsibility. The priest can only speak from the endued power of the deity he presides over, but the dibia has unlimited power to fathom.  He can speak from the deities because he is a super creature. He can prescribe herbs; he soothsays, divines and tells fortunes. N every Igbo community, the dibia considered as a spiritualist. On rare cases the dibia travels to the spirit world.

The journey aspect of the dibia reveals his metaphysical essence. The dibia often times removes the dibia from the world of the living for a timely hibernation elsewhere. He may travel to the forest, for he remains the only human living who has the power to access the forest of the gods and spirits – or even in the water. Several instances abound when great dibias travelled in the water to procure solutions to the problem that besiege the community. This opportunity exposes them to the aura that allows for a communication with the ancestors. In the unseen world the dibia is fed with spiritual food that allows him to be connected more with the spirit fathers. At such point, the dibia is partly human and partly spirit.

The journey of dibias into the unseen world usually does not last for just a day. The dibia’s tour takes, minimally three days, depending on the nature of the problem for which reason he set out for the journey. Otherwise, the dibia spends four market days to complete the cycle of authority, power and personality that served as the pillar of the Igbo nation. While the dibia tarries, the people remain expectant of his return and all their minds rest on the anticipated solution, hope and tiding he brings at arrival. Through their expectation the people remain continuously connected to the dibia and the ancestors who see them via such connectivity in the world of the spirit. The role of the priest in this situation is to continually keep the people connected and linked to the spirit of the dibia through such spectrum (their minds). He does this by tarring also by the deity through whom he sees the dibia and reports to the curious population about the prevailing circumstance around the dibia, for the priest himself is a spiritualist. In all, the priest can and only could see the dibia by igniting and unifying his mind with that of the dibia. It is also via this channel that he could access the terrain of the ancestors at that moment.

A multifaceted aspect of the ancient African metaphysics via the oral tradition is seen in Nkalaha society. Although the function of the dibia and the priest as explained above is general to the Igbo nation, it is also dynamic. In the Nkalaha case, one finds it very difficult to differentiate the role of the third personality that represents the agencies of external factor from that of the dibia and the priest. The third person in these roles is in charge of the community’s trado-cultural contiguity.  He is identified as the traditional head of the Nkalaha society.  And as one of such, this person represents and maintains a direct channel between the people and the arts of their ancestors. He embodies the community’s tradition and it is through him that they are assigned definition. The community knows this entity as the Ugbor.

In Nkalaha dialect, Ugbor means “the first man”. It stands to explain the place of the first man to settle in the community; Onoja Oboni (also called Onoja Eze). The Ugbor title was believed to have been instituted by Onoja himself. As a result, the selection has ever remained with the part of the community that is descended directly from Onoja’s first son, Ofu, the very person who was the first Ugbor after his father. Initiation into Ugbor position does not require more protocol unlike the installation of a new priest or dibia. Each Ugbor, at any given generation, is naturally endued with the power to interpret the community’s tradition at any point in time. He too has unlimited access towards untying the community’s history in its oral form. The community’s history is enshrined in an incarnation which only the Ugbor is in the rightful position to do so.

An interview with elder Nnaji nwa Nnaji (1933-2014) reveals that the position of the Ugbor is not contestable for it is the ancestors themselves who encompasses their power around the person and cause him to be connected to the ancient art even in his mortal state. As the community’s Ugbor (1965-2014), Nnaji asserts that once one becomes the Ugbor and is made to stay in the same room where his predecessors lived, the initiation takes place with the passage of time, according to necessities. During this period, the ancestors replicate themselves through the immediate predecessor. This last ancestor remains the closest link between the ancestors and the new Ugbor. Through this last predecessor the new Ugbor is continually sensitized, enlightened and tutored on issues of the tradition that had kept the community through inception. Should there be any confusion anytime, all that the Ugbor is expected to do is to return to his room, meanwhile the ancestral person comes at dark to give him answers to the agitating questions in him. This condition gives room to no desecration as such is punishable with death. This also gives the inhabitants the impetus to know that the Ugbor has been assimilated into the arts of the ancestors.

The mystic involvement of the agencies involved in the assessment and interpretation of African lore can best be interpreted and understood via their interrelationship with the people’s tradition. Tradition serves as the linking force amidst the society and their ancestors who are believed to be closer to them. This is the binding force that had kept African oral tradition unadulterated till hitherto. For so reasoned, interpretation cannot give us the truest analysis of African tradition for it is spiritually sealed. My involvement in the adaptation of Nkalaha history directly prove tome that certain aspects of African oral tradition cannot be easily assessed. Nkalaha history is not told as a story, neither is it sung as a song. For the inhabitants to assess their very history, the community’s Ugbor has to be supplied a colanut with which he says prayers. The duty of the attendants (listeners) at the very time of the prayers is to pay attention since after the prayers the Ugbor will be disconnected from the ancient art momentarily. The mystery behind this is simple; the Ugbor is possessed by the ancestors at the very moment of the prayers for him to be launched into the aura that exposes him to the unknown thoughts. This is why J. Ki-Zerboin, stressing the importance of oral tradition in preserving history, asserts thus,

Oral tradition is not just a second-best source to be resorted to only when there is nothing else. It is a distinct source in itself, with a now well established methodology, and it lends the history of the African continent a marked originality (History, 11).

Any society without a credible oral tradition is as good as saying that such a society does not have history. In other words, such a people lack existence in their world of recluse; or they may have been slaves, savages or co-opted by the original inhabitants to make up their population and war force in times of inversions. Hampate Ba refers to oral tradition as “the living memory of Africa”.   

In conclusion, we can vividly assert here that oral tradition sums up the history, custom and belief system of a people; it is strengthened through epic or legendary acts. There is always a journey epic which justifies the legend. As a way of recreating the past, oral tradition via oral literature had contributed so much in enshrining a legitimacy of concreteness in the trace of different people’s origin. Its survival therefore depends richly on how eminently the history it carries is disseminated inextinguishably. In other words, one oral tradition is considered evergreen depending on the values placed on it by the inheritor of such a tradition.