Preface to the Historica Account of Igbo Origin - Onyeji Nnaji

 

PREFACE

In 2003, Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, carried out a succession of the sequence of Arkinson's earlier research on the origin of the human tongue and came to the conclusion that, "The presence of a particular language in many other languages does not mean that it was sourced from those languages; rather, it is a proof that other languages sprung from it". Dr. Arkinson's conclusion clarifies the reason for the heavy presence of Igbo language in all the languages of ancient civilizations: thus, they all sprung from Igbo. For, as there are Igbo lexicons in Hebrew, there are also the presence of Igbo in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient Dravidia, Kikuyu of Kenya, The Zulus of South Africa etc. Tracing the same language dominance, Dr. W. B. Baikie who wrote in 1854, also remarked that “all the coast dialects from Oru to Old Calabar are either directly or indirectly connected with Igbo”. He further asserted that the Igbo are “separated from the sea by petty tribes all of which trace their origin to this great race, the Igbo” (P.307). Dr P. A. Talbot and Mr. Mulhall also concluded this.

Could these evidences mean that Igbo ancestors had travelled from all these places to form the one glorious Igbo race or rather that the Igbo actually founded those areas? Dr P. A. Talbot and Mr. Mulhall produced a number of startling results which agree to this assertion. According to them, “The Igbo… manifest significant physical structural similarities with neighbouring non-Igbo peoples and indeed with other African people living far away from Nigeria. On the strength of some of the data, for instance, it was found out that the Onitsha of the Northern Igbo cluster ‘are nearly identical with the Nyanwezi (of Tanzania) and near to the Swahili’. But amazingly certain; these near and distant Igbo neighbours were direct or indirect descents of the Igbo mega race” (The highlight here is mine).

The question above is the one heavy type that historians have not been able to solve: the question of idedity and migration wave. Olaudah Equianio, trying to solve this puzzle, refers to it as an "imperfect sketch". He concludes that neither the Igbo nor the Jews originated from the other. In his autobiography, he states that,

“Such is the imperfect sketch my memory has furnished me with of the manners and customs of a people among whom I first drew my breath. And here I cannot forbear suggesting what has long struck me very forcibly, namely, the strong analogy which even by this sketch, imperfect as it is, appears to prevail in the manners and customs of my countrymen and those of the Jews, before they reached the Land of Promise, and particularly the patriarchs while they were yet in that pastoral state which is described in Genesis–an analogy, which alone would induce me to think that the one people had sprung from the other.”

Interpreting the cultural similarities of the Igbo and Israel to mean that one migrated from the other is wrong, especially when there is no clear proof of such historical claims. The presence of Igbo lexicons in Hebrew is simply a proof that they had had encounter(s) in the past. This encounter, evidently, was during the Jews' slavery in Egypt. An 1872 publication by Arthur Dyod Thompson, proves this assertion correct when it reveals that the Hebrew tongue was coined by Moses who was schooled in the Egyptian royal house. But oddly enough, when researchers get tired searching for the true Igbo origin, they flippantly embrace Genesis 46. Yet, none is prepared to reconcile the argument of Numbers 26 with the Eri theology. This book has taken care of this argument in "Story One" below.

This is the biggest challenge Igbo historians have had in their attempts to unearth the Igbo origin. The works of the earlier researchers on Igbo history made great success; but they seemed to tilt towards achieving the interest intended by the writers in one way or the other. The works of such authors as Onwuejeogwu, an anthropologist of Nri extraction; Emmanuel Ifesieh and I.C.K. Anadi, both of Oraeri decent, all made viable contributions to the topic in a way. There are others like B.I.O Odinanwa; the Enuguwu-Agidi-born S.O.N. Ọkafor; C.M. Ezekwugo, and even of recent, Ambrose Nnalue Okonkwo of Agukwu-Nri; F.C. Idigo of Aguleri; Charles Ujah of Arochkwu and Hyacinth Ugwu Ezema of Edem-Nsukka are all great works. The only issue with these works is that they are relative products of strife. And, as Dr. Nwaezeigwe concludes about them, “instead of teaming up to develop a unifying ground for the study and understanding of the Igbo past, these people engage on building false historical castles on a foundation of mythological fallacies and fables engrained in prejudices and uncanny sentiments.” Exception, nevertheless, lies with the work of Onwuejeogwu. He tries to create a stereotype Igbo civilization that shows a microcosm of Igbo lifestyle in a typified Nri monarchical tradition. 

The writers were writing with certain zest that seemed to promote the sustenance of certain hegemonic claim held by some sectors of the Igbo settlement; their works were not written to settle the problem of Igbo origin in general. Even the much renowned apocalyptic publications of Late Prof. Catherine Acholonu also tilted towards this hegemonic archetype. The only difference is just on the vastness of Acholonu's findings whose exuberance eventually robbed the works of its potency of chronological vetting. In my view, she too had written with certain measures of strife. The reason for the inconclusiveness found with these earlier writers’ works is very simple; they have not deeply sought to know where it began to rain on the Igbo race. That is where our history was buried. And because this point has not been uncovered, Igbo historians had hardly located the very point where the rainfall stopped on the Igbo race. 

From findings, it is clear that this problem is not peculiar to Igbo historians only; it is the same with the earlier generations of African historians: they wrote with certain measures of strife. Diop Cheik Anta would have succeeded in identifying the source of the ancient Egyptians in his bestseller book, African Origin of Civilization, especially when he identified that Egyptian word for water is “Miri”; but with his eyes set on the carbon rating of archaeological tools, he lost focus and veered towards sentiment. I believe, Diop would have made a much better success than the later achievement made by Emily Teeter in his book, Before the Pyramids. If anyone should approach Acholonu's collections, the evidence is obvious that she had her eyes fixed on her first publication while compiling They Lived Before Adam. She was on the verge of solving the Igbo historical inconclusiveness, but with her eyes on fossils it became difficult to reconcile historical timing with the dimensions of the same history in her possession. For Acholonu to interlace Eri's descent with the fall of Enki is a huge ambiguity. The reason is simple; these people allowed Western writers to define the African existence and history for them.

Western historians found it very difficult to give a clear definition to the Igbo race. All they did was to depend on certain cultural similitudes to paint a story for our origin. For Major Leonard to accurately write a little about the natives, A.C. Haddok remarked in the preface to The Lower Niger and her Tribes that,

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 (P. ix).

“Never had the European understood the Negro” is the best expression for the whole lots that the white men had accounted about the Igbo history. For instance, George Basden who wrote in 1912, pointed out certain constructions found in the Igbo language and what he considered as the deep religious feeling of the people and propagated the view that Igbo culture probably evolved under the impact of the Levitical Code. Impressed by what he considered the superior intelligence of the Aro Igbo and by their religious systems and rituals, he, alongside Sir Herbert Richmond, contended that the Aro carried Hamitic blood in their veins and that it was under their leadership that the “higher” aspects of Igbo culture evolved. Nobody had proven them wrong even when Aro tradition reveals that they originated from Nsukka.

Similarly, impressed by Igbo sun-worship and by the feature of dual organization in the Igbo social structure, M.D.W.  Jeffrey held to the view that the Igbo, at some stage in the past, had come under Egyptian influence. Jeffrey helplessly concluded that the carriers of this Egyptian influence probably were the “Nri of Ọka in northern Igboland”. Jeffrey could conclude wrongly this way because, about that time he was too shallow to have read books that would have taught him better. Had he read books like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Before the Pyramids, Reminiscence, Myths or Reality etc. he would have known that it was rather the Egyptians who carried the Igbo culture to Egypt. How did they do this? Read the books above and you will see that Egyptian Civilization was the product of the Nsukka civilization. Details are contained in "Story Three" of this book.

Another error is the application of the Oriental hypothesis to Igbo cultural history by colonial officials. It enforced a propagandistic side to those confusionists' claims. But the discovery made by MacGregor on Nsibidi inscription and the remark by Mungo Park proved explicitly different about the Igbo race. Park precisely noted that, seeing the direction the Niger river was going, he knew why. For he had already been informed in Scotland that the river flows towards the place of the rising sun: the place of the beginning. The groundbreaking fact remains the 1907 narration of Obalike at the court in Awka (Ọka).

Obalike had never seen the Bible nor had he attended any Whitman's church to hear about Adam, yet his story revealed the existence of a created man in the name "Adama". That is our story which our historians should have transferred to successive history generations. Instead of doing this, they preferred the suggestive approaches of the west. That is why Afigbo insisted that, "neither the Igbo, nor any other Nigerian group can be defined using only anthropometric or serological data". The oral tradition must come to play, and language is the carrier of this tradition.

The duty of this book therefore is to give reconcilable explanations, quintessentially, to those parts of our history that my predecessors, either ambiguously misrepresented or, saw no reason to give any clarifying attention to. To achieve this monumental height, the task ahead of me, according to John Dryden, is first, to "prove why that ought not to have pleased which has pleased the most learned and the most judicious...;" and then to "enter more deeply than they have done into the cause and resorts of that which" proves truer about who we are as a people and where we have migrated from. I undertook a similar task to uncover the origin of the Jukun; and the deepest of them, the origin of Ijaw nation.

The Igbo tradition speaks of different immigration waves for their ancestors. Igbo tradition is anchored on four, their markets and many other trado-cultural observances either celebrate the figure, four, or justify the purpose for the recognition of it. The Igbo venerate ancestors and beckon to them with four-lobbed colanut. This religious observance must not go without a cause; so also is the figure that assigns values to their venerations. For if the ancestors must be invoked with a four-lobbed colanut, it becomes significant that the ancestors share affinity with the figure, four, or that their association with this very figure could mean that they were four. Our findings ranging from the Igbo oral tradition down to the information derived from ancient tablets all stressed that the Igbo were originally four people. 

To digest all that is required in order to create elaborate understanding of the Igbo historical facts, this book shall exhume those areas of the Igbo history that have not been mentioned before. Here, Igbo history shall be uncovered in four blocks, examined as "story series". All the story parts uncover issues that have been hidden from the Igbo themselves. Story one discusses the four Igbo ancestors in their hierarchical order and highlights the nature of involvement the ancestors had together as a people. Story one also uncovers the first ever organised society the world ever had. Interesting enough, story one ends with the global deluge dramatized in the Bible as "Noah's flood."

Story two is another thought provoking part as it chronicles the activities that immediately succeeded the global flood and spans through the period of the civilization of the cave men. This part discusses the rise of a new era. And significant enough, it was the era when the human history became completely complicated. It was the era that defeated archeology by twisting their data. The human history became closely simpler with the events that occupied the Third Story. This is the area where the contribution of Adiele Afigbo becomes eminent. After Story Three, the book makes some shocking revelations on what the western world knew about the Igbo, which the Igbo themselves are yet to know about themselves.

This history book is going to be an eye opener to the reality of what the race marked as Igbo had been, still is, and is yet to become. And because it covers those areas that earlier historians have not known better and have not thoroughly discussed, it will provoke the zest for further writings that will help in creating better understanding of the different Igbo settlements across the Eastern horizon. One thing is exceptionally remarkable with this publication; it creates avenue for every Igbo settlement to find their links as it will be unravelling every community tree among the Igbo race. And because it wouldn't be nice to leave any stone unturned, the first part will permanently settle the Aguleri/Nri altercation which has lasted for years.