1994 AHIAJOKU LECTURE

FORWORD

In the Fourteenth Edition of the Ahiajoku Lecture Series, it is the fortunate lot of one of Africa's most celebrated writers in English, Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna, to share the fruits of his many years of academic endeavour with his kinsmen and women in this on-going process of re-discovery and re-evaluation of Igbo cultural identity.

In his characteristic excellent prose, Professor Obiechinna draws attention to the place of the story, story-telling and memory in Igbo life and culture His thesis is that story-telling occupies a prominent place in Igbo culture in that it affords people the best chances for enhancing their humanity. The cultivation of language sensitivity takes the place in the context of story-telling as a creative activity. The high point of creativity in this context is the use of language in story-telling. The need for imaginative; development through creative story-telling is, therefore, the main focus of this year's message.

This lecture also recognizes the value of memory as the key to a people's relationship with their past, their heritage and sense of identity, as people tend to remember in the present, these things which in the past had lent significance and value to their existence. A very significant aspect of this lecture is the recognition openly proclaimed for a galaxy of Igbo novelists among whom are Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Vincent Ike, Ernest Emenyonu, Flora Nwapa, Romanus Egudu, John Munonye and several others who have by their various writing sustained the story-centered consciousness of Igbo people. This magnificent gesture is a major contribution to Igbo oral historiography. I, therefore happily commend NCHETAKA: THE STORY, MEMORY and CONTINUITY OF IGBO CULTURE to all lovers of Igbo culture and Civilization, and to the general reading public.

Professor F.N.C. Osuji, B.Sc.; Ph.D
Hon. Commissioner for Information and Social Development
Imo State, Nigeria.
November, 1994.

MEMBERS OF THE 1994 AHIAJOKU LECTURE PLANNING COMMITTEE

PROFESSOR G.N. UZOIGWE - Chairman
PROFESSOR E. EMENYONU - Deputy
AMBASSADOR G.M.K. ANOKA
CHIEF (MRS.) J.N. ONUM-NWARIAKU
H.R.H., EZE E.E. NJEMANZE, OZURUIGBO V OF OWERRE
H.R.H., EZE SILVER IBENYE UGBALA, EZE UGO III OF OKPORO
H.R.H., EZE G.I. OSU, EZE OHAZURUME OF UMULOLO
DR B.U. NZERIBE
DR JASPER ONUEKWUSI
MRS JOY ONONUJU
MR E.N. NWAOHA
MR F.A.O. EKECHI
MR S.O. AGBASI
MR F.I. AGBA
MRS I.A. ERONINI
PROFESSOR S.C.O. UGBOLUE
PROFESSOR T.O. C . NDUBUIZU
MR T.C. OKERE
MR LIVY IWUNZE
MR C.A. OBIEFULE
MR C.C. CHUKWUOCHA
MR P.N. MBABUIKE
PROFESSOR G. UMEZURUIKE
MR G.I. ODUAH
MRS M. EKWE
MR DAVIS IHENTUGE
DIRECTOR-GENERAL, MINISTRY OF WORKS AND TRANSPORT
REPRESENTAIIVE OF ABIA STATE
REPRESENTATIVE OF ANAMBRA STATE
REPRESENTATIVE OF ENUGU STATE
MR G.E.S. NJOKU - Secretary

The experience of organizing this year's Ahiajoku Festival has demonstrated to me the need to restate once more the objectives and relevance of the Lecture Series. It was surprising to discover that in spite of the enormous impact the Ahiajoku idea has made on many of us in the last fourteen years, there are still many Igbo people who ask questions that make it clear that they need more information about the efficacy of Ahiajolcu. There arc also those who confuse the Ahiajoku idea with the concepts of Ozuruimo, for example.

Let me make it clear, therefore, that both Ozuruimo and Ahiajoku are concerned with Igbo Culture certainly, but they do so at different levels, While the Ozuruimi Festival provides visual displays of fantastic Igbo acrobatic ability, of rhythm am melody, of many virility, and of female gracefulness and beauty, all of which been eloquent testimony to the richness of our cultural heritage, the Ahiajoku Festival, on the other hand, emphasizes, as Innocent Nwoga once put it, Igbo "pursuits of the mind the intellect as well as painstaking enquiries, diligence and thoroughness all of which are the virtues which attend the pursuit of knowledge". Put simply, the Ahiajoku Lecture Series was concerned to be the intellectual barn from which the various Igbo Cultural Organisations (including the recently formed Oha-Na-Eze and other similar associations ought to derive their nourishment. Through the medium of the Ahiajoku Colloquium Series and that of the Ahiajoku Lecture Series itself, we make available to ourselves and to humanity at large a corpus of information in which our thoughts are professionally distilled and our contributions to global civilization succinctly articulated. The Ahiajoku idea, therefore, although primarily is for Igbo self-knowledge - as I made it clear in 1991 - has a prefabricated international audience.

It was because of these considerations that the Imo State Government in l979 defined the objectives of the Ahiajoku Festival as follows:

1. to define aspects of Igbo Culture and relate them to the main corpus of Nigerian Culture as well as to African and World Civilization;

2. to create a challenging situation for Scholars to undertake relevant research on Igbo Culture, especially the more basic and fundamental ones;

3. to relate the research findings to Igbo World view and total human development;

4. to establish a diachronic relationship in each discipline as regards Igbo human development".

The extent to which we have realised these objectives since 1979 may be a fine point. What is clear is that we still have a long way to go to make the Ahiajoku Festival formidable institutionally.

Since its inception, the Ahiajoku Festival has been organised in. an ad-hoc fashion from the Ministry of Information and Social Development in Owerri. There is no Ahiajoku Secretariat, no Office and no staff. Our vision for the future is to institutionalize Ahiajoku and make it financially independent. It is only by doing so that we can achieve its objectives. And we can only do so successfully if all Igbo people, at home and abroad, support us materially-and financially. There is, frankly, no other way. If Ndi Igbo believe in Ahiajoku and consider it relevant in helping to deal with their predicament in the modern world - and many believe that it is - the time is now to do something to demonstrate to the world that we are serious about our culture and about defining our place in the emerging global ecumenical civilization. It is unfair to expect the Imo State Government to continue to fund, out of its lean resources, what is after all, a great PAN-IGBO Festival. The fact that it was set up initially by the Imo State Government in no way detracts from its Pan-Igbo vision. On the contrary, the Imo State Government should be congratulated and applauded for its foresight. The Governments of other Igbo-speaking States, therefore, should have a responsibility to the Ahiajoku ideal. I want, then, to seize this opportunity to appeal to all of them to view seriously the objectives of Ahiajoku and to do something meaningful to support it materially and financially. It may interest us to know that Arewa House in Kaduna has, for. decades, been jointly supported by all the Northern States.

Ahiajoku Lectures are also said to be too academic and to intellectual. It has been suggested, therefore, that the tone of the Lectures should be lowered so that they would be understood and be better appreciated by the generality of our people. Well, as I said earlier, the series were intended to be intellectual but not necessarily academic. An Ahiajoku Lecture is not and has never been - a doctoral thesis replete with footnotes and all that. No, it is the product of mature Scholarship in which a distinguished Igbo Scholar makes available to Ndi Igbo and to the World at large distilled information from many years of relentless labouring in the groves of Igbo academy. An Ahiajoku Lecturer must not of necessity be a Professor; but he or she must be someone who has won distinction nationally and internationally through his or her research and publications - conceived in the widest sense - in Igbo studies. The academic procession and the wearing of academic gowns on such an occasion are therefore, in our view, appropriate and justified.

As we originally conceived it, and as we still do, the lecture may be delivered in Igbo, English or a mixture of both. We do not necessarily disagree with those who stress that since Ahiajoku is an Igbo Cultural Festival, its medium of expression ought to primarily Igbo. I must hasten to add, however, that it should not be forgotten that English has became an important aspect of Igbo Culture, just as wearing a suit, for example, is? Culture is a dynamic process; it is a historical process; it is a complex whole; but a culture also protects itself against invasion by outside influences. But he indeed, is the rub, the paradox: a culture that successfully excludes outside influence gradually and absent - mindedly, as it were, slides into primitivism. So as we go against external cultural influences, we must make room for a reasonable degree of cultural accretion. I do not wish to belabour this point. I must add, however, that if make the use of Igbo compulsory in this festival at this time, we will run into great difficulties, for at least one major reason: there is as yet no IGBO DICTIONARY. The Igbo Dictionary Project started several years ago has remained unrealized due to lack of funds. The importance of such a Dictionary cannot be over emphasized. A Dictionary is the great arbiter, the last court of appeal, the Supreme Court. If you will, in of linguistic usages and disputes. I say to you, then, support the Dictionary Project and leave the rest to us. We have the Men and Women to do the job. With the Dictionary Project accomplished, and with financial resources made available through your generate support of Ahiajoku, the past lectures will be promptly translated and published in Igbo

Oha-Na-Eze, distinguished friends from far and near, I believe that my point has been made and I must stop. According to my people of Umunoha, a dlala does not speak ho ha!.

Our distinguished Lecturer today, Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna, is from Nkpor in Anambra State. He is a Professor's Professor and a solid Igboman. I penciled him down, as it were, without his knowledge, of course, as a potential Ahiajoku Lecturer November, 1989 when both of us attended the Annual Conference of the African Studies Association of the United States of America held at the great city of Atlanta, Georgia One of the incidental highlights of the Conference was the launching of Chinua Achebe short-lived African Commentary at the famous Spellman College. After the launching, undertook a sightseeing tour of Atlanta. We had long and informal discussions about Ndi Igbo, about Nigeria and. about Africa generally. I was not even then a member of Ahiajoku Lecture Planning Committee but I was determined to bring up his name as worthy Ahiajoku Lecturer. I have no doubt that my confidence in him will be amply justified today. He will address us on "Nchetaka: The Story, Memory and Continuity of Igbo Culture".

Oha-Na-Nze, distinguished guests, my task is accomplished. I thank you enduring me. May we now relax as Professor Emest Emenyonu introduces to you our great teacher of today.

Thank you very much.

Mr Chairman, distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen. This is a unique year. The Ahiajoku Lecture this year, transposed from 1993 when it was to have been given, is inevitably unique, and the 1994 Ahiajoku Lecturer, the eminent Professor of English with taproots in Nigeria's Premier University, Ibadan University, and Britain's revered ancient citadel of learning, Cambridge University, is himself, inescapably, most remarkably unique. The uniqueness I have in mind is not the seemingly interminable abracadabra which appears to be revolving round our national political orbit, nor the pyscho-socio-economic disequilibrium which has filled every nostril in the past few months. The uniqueness I refer to is in quite ordinary and mundane terms. Since its inception in 1979, the Ahiajoku Lecture Series has witnessed, fourteen lecturers. Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna who has traveled all the way from Pennsylvania in the United States of America, to give this lecture, will by the time he returns to his base, have covered more distances than the round trips of all the other thirteen lecturers put together. This is a unique phenomenon, in a unique year, under unique circumstances.

WHO IS PROFESSOR EMMANUEL OBIECHINNA?

People who were associated with the Institute of Administration, Enugu in the sixties would remember him as the one-time purposeful and dynamic Head of the Department of English. People who were associated with the University College, Ibadan in the late fifties and early sixties would remember him as the young articulate, brilliant and intellectually resilient student who was not only on top of his class but was the Best graduating student in English in June, 1961.

The files of the University College, at the time, 1956 - 1961, would also identify him unmistakably as the young man who meritoriously studied with the then prestigious Federal Scholarship as a State Scholar. The University files would equally reveal that his distinguished undergraduate career he was from 1962 until 1966, the recipient of the Ibadan University postgraduate Scholarship which took him outside the shores of Nigeria and to the renowned prestigious and unrivallable Cambridge University in England where he obtained his Ph.D in English.

To people who were associated with the University of Nigeria, Nsukka from the war years until 1987, Prof Emmanuel Obiechinna hardly needs any introduction. He was the impregnable young lecturer of English who always held his undergraduate students spell-bound in the lecture rooms, such that every student of English never felt a sense of fulfillment until he had passed through Emmanuel Obiechinna. The aura of Emman Obiechinna went beyond the precincts of the Department of English for he, from 1974 when he was appointed to a full professorship of English, and thereafter occupied Chair, transformed that department into a Centre of Excellence for the study of English Language, Literature, Linguistics and Literary Criticism. From his years as the of the Faculty of Arts, to his years as the Dean of the Postgraduate School, Obiechinna, manifested a primary mission of strengthening, expanding and enriching intellectual environment of Nigeria's first indigenous University. >From the debris of post-war environment of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Prof. Obiechinna propelled first, the Department of English, next the Faculty of Arts, then the Postgraduate School and finally the whole University on to the international arena of enormous material a intellectual rehabilitation. Little wonder that in 1985, he was appointment the Deputy Vice- Chancellor of the University.

In September, 1987, he left Nsukka to serve the wider Nigerian University Community as Director, Nigerian Universities Commission Office, in Washington D.C. in United States. He relinquished that position in 1990 to return to full time academics, first as Visiting Professor of English and Third World Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the United States and later, the University of Pittsburgh, at Bradford Visiting Professor of Humanities.

It can be seen, therefore, that in the last three decades, Professor Emmam Obiechinna has been in the main stream of intellectual activities, nationally and internationally. In those three decades, he had been an academic innovator, a first class researcher, a pragmatic positivist, and an indefatigable teacher. There are some scholar who have the gift of the intellect but lack of the pedagogical attributes to transmit I knowledge to others. There are also intellectuals who possess adequate methodology and effective transmission without the substance to be transmitted. Prof. Emmanuel Obiechinna has both the attributes of an effective classroom teacher and the intellectual fountain in which knowledge flows

We are, therefore, looking at an individual who is an all round profession educator, a man endowed with immense learning and a deep reservoir of the traditional charisma of the born teacher.

Yet, if Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna were only what has been delineated above he would, perhaps, be known only to his relations and the circle of his former students and colleagues. But Professor Obiechinna is a universal man. He is a world renowned scholar and I can say from an incontrovertible position of authority, that Prof. Emmanuel Obiechinna, the Linguist, the Humanities scholar, the articulate Educator with imposing dignity, the accomplished Administrator with impeccable finesse, is unquestionably, the greatest literary critic alive today in Africa South of the Sahara fertile erudition has given birth to countless numbers of scholarly books, scores original articles in learned journals all over the world and, Public lectures in arenas stretching from Nigeria to Europe; North America to Asia, and Latin America to West Indies. His publications have also been seminal and epochal and they include: Culture Tradition and Society in. the West African Novel, published in 1975 and reprinted 1980, by the Cambridge University Press which has since become a major reference work for all literary scholars; Language and Theme: Essays on African Literature published in 1990 by Howard University Press in the United States; Christopher Okigbo Poet of Destiny, released by Fourth Dimension Publishers, Enugu in 1980 which today, remains one of the most sought after authoritative source-books on one of Africa's greatest poets of the Twentieth century. Prof. Obiechinna's. An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets published by Cambridge University Press, in 1973 and reprinted in 1980 by Heinemann Educational Books, London, was a pacesetter and remains the most informative documentation on the origins development of Pamphlet Literature in West Africa. Prof. Emmanuel Obiechinna removed this Literature from the Local precincts of "Otu Onitsha" and hauled it on to international arena. It has more than any other work of its type given concrete legitimacy and acceptability to this genre in African Literature.

If a topic is important in Commonwealth Literature; if a topic is crucial in African Literature it cannot be completely so until Emmanuel Obiechinna has spoken or written about it and when he does, he immediately confers respectability and authenticity to particular point of view.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, we have in our midst today one man who can give the last word on any issue bordering on African Literature Black Aesthetics. Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna, a teacher of all seasons indefatigable scholar, an articulate and imaginative critic of the first order, is also Godfather of the second generation of African Literary scholars of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna is to all who know him, all who have read him, and all who have experienced the vibrancy of his mind and intellect, indeed the teachers' Teacher; the scholars' Scholar, the professors' Professor, the critics' Critic the writers' Writer, and the authors' Author. It is impossible for me to adequately introduce Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna. It is impossible for me to describe in words the dignity of this man, his intellect and the depth of his vision as a literary scholar philosopher and a humanist. All I have tried to do is to give you a little insight into a o£ Africa's greatest literary theorists of this century, who, it is today, my singular honour and proud privilege to usher on to this podium as the distinguished 1994 Ahiajoku Lecturer, to address you on NCHETAKA: THE STORY, MEMORY, AND CONTINUITY OF IGBO CULTURE.

Ladies and Gentlemen here is Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna!

ONYE ISI OBODO
NDI ISI ALA
OHA N'EZE
EKELE M UNU

In the early 1970's when Michael Echeruo and I co-edited a book of essays devoted to Igbo life and culture, I had cause to comment as follows in my "Introduction" reviewing the state of Igbo studies:

"The most important single justification for devoting an entire issue of the Conch to Igbo life and culture, have up till now, been inadequately exposed. Very little precise knowledge about the Igbo exists and a good deal of this little is shrouded in the mist of half-truths, misrepresentations, myths, and plain misinformation." (Igbo Traditional Life, Culture, and Literature, 1-5).

The inauguration of the Ahiajoku Lecture series in 1979, together with accompanying colloquia was a wise and far-sighted decision by the Government of Imo State to create a much-needed forum for Igbo scholars to, among other things, "define aspects of Igbo culture and relate them to the main corpus of Nigerian cultures as well as to African and World civilization", and to relate the research findings to Igbo worldview and total human development. " For the past fourteen years, those noble goals have been assiduously pursued and the result should give the sponsoring government great satisfaction and justifiable pride. The intellectual harvest from the enterprise been abundant. Different scholars, bringing with them the insights of their various disciplines and training, have shed light on various aspects of Igbo life and culture touching specifically upon the psycho- social analysis of the Igbo personality, perceiving the Igbo and their neighbours from the historical perspective, documenting and detailing their encounter with their environment and the strategies developed by them for survival over the millennia through agriculture and the domestication of crops and animals; evolution of political culture and social organizations that guaranteed stable relationships between the individual and the community and between the individuals among themselves. The Igbo world view has been extensively explored and the Igbo visions of progress and achievement analyze. So have participation in education, ethnomedicine and the scientific process. More importantly, every aspect of this intellectual self- analysis and self-recovery has been traced along a temporal trajectory that links Igbo past to the present and anticipates the future, revealing a people with a historical, racial, and cultural memory and a well- developed sense of their identity.

I regard it as a real privilege to be invited to make my contribution to this or ping process of rediscovery. and re-evaluation of the cultural self of our people. And for my purpose, I intend to look closely at the place of the story and storytelling in Igbo life and culture; for, I consider- storytelling as one of the most vital, enriching and life sustaining activities of our people. It is an activity which is as old as Igbo people's firm settlement upon this part of the earth, spanning a period which Afigbo and the historian and archaeologists reckon must be between five and six thousand years (Afigbo, 1981 4).

Anthropologists inform us that in addition to being a fashioner of tools (homo ludens), the human being is a storytelling animal (homo narrans), but we also know that some cultures are more thoroughly permeated by storytelling than others and that some cultures are more devoted to tool-making than to storytelling. The Igbo culture has been fortunate to strike a balance between them; while recognizing the necessity of technological development which I have metonymically called tool- fashioning, the culture also recognizes- the need for imaginative development through creative storytelling. It is about this second part of Igbo cultural life that I intend to speak; for whether in the past or present of Igbo life, storytelling holds a prominent place among the people and affords them the best chances for defining and enhancing their humanity.

The story has many uses in Igbo life and culture. First and foremost, it fosters the continuity of the cultural heritage through what the generally designated akuko-ala (stories about the earth) which encompass what in Western categories are called myths and legends. In addition to akuko-ala applying to the stories that explain the mysteries of life and death, of the visible and invisible world, of gods, spirits and ancestors, of the origins of things, their relationships and underlying unities, it describes the genesis of human institutions, underwrites essential beliefs and philosophical ideas and validates social codes and approved modes of action. Akuko-ala-ala tells of the human community in its confrontation with its environment and its adventures of the human neighbours, highlighting all the time the qualities of courage, endurance, heroic self-sacrifice and exceptional moral excellence of those whose actions gave shape and solidity to the community. Akuko-ala- goes beyond tales of exemplary courage meant to inspire people in the present through an appeal to hero-worship; it, more significantly, erects communal icons which are the permanent benchmarks in the collective imagination of the community. It is the existence of those godlike ancestral heroes which gave credence to the received code of social conduct with its myriad injunctions and prohibitions known as omena-ala (what is done in the land or in the earth - law of customary conduct). The ancestral tradition is underwritten by stories which have great force of-ancestral authority behind them. For example, here is the story that underlines the power which the Eze Nri (Nri King) exercised over a large area of Igboland for several centuries:

"Eri, the first Nri King, found himself standing on an anthill in the morass of the world surrounded by water near the Anambra River. He complained of his plight to the, to great god Chuwkwu, who sent him a blacksmith who blew on fire with his bellows, made the ground dry, and became the ancestor of Awka Smiths.
Eri's son later became hungry, for the Igbo people he had come to live among were not farmers but simply wandered in the bush. Great god ordered him to kill ad decapitate his senior son and daughter, and after scarring their foreheads with mark of ritual purification (ichi), to bury their heads as if planting a garden. Nri did this and out of the son's head grew yam, and out of daughter's, cocoyam." (Cole and Aniakor, 15, quoting from Henderson and Jeffries).

This myth of origin and creation explains significant phenomena in the Igbo culture in those vast areas where the Nri King exercised hegemony and even beyond (Onwuejeogwu, 1981). We are told that since these sacrificed children were the first to bear the marks of ritual purification. Nri had the right to confer future such emblems and since he was the first to develop earth rituals, his people got the right to spiritually cleanse every community of sins committed against the earth (Henderson, S9 60).

This myth consolidates realities which have already been entrenched in culture and history, giving them imaginative anchorage, shaping them for easy assimilation by the memory and transmission from generation to generation.

The first important point is the nature of the Nri kingship itself. The first king ,Eri is in contact with Chukwu, the great, ultimate deity and creator of all things that exist. Eri is therefore a privileged monarch with this illustrious charter of contact with the divine - his own person is rendered sacred by this special relationship; he does not need mediators because he talks directly to Chukwu. His successors in the nature of inherited virtues, are imbued with the sacred essence; every Nri King exudes spiritual charisma by the fact of his ancestry. The centrality of Nri influence in sponsoring and sustaining peace and harmony in Igboland is very well documented by Onwujeogwu in his important work on the Nri, An Igbo Civilization: Nri Kingdom and Hegemony (1981).

The ultimate rationale for rulership is the preservation of peace and harmony among people

Secondly, the introduction of the smith whose technology dries the swampland and reclaims the earth for human habitation and utilization sets a stamp of validation for metal working, which is a metonym for all technology and craftsmanship. Igbo culture embraces technology as a functional necessity. That the smith who reclaims the earth is the ancestor of Awka Smiths puts the stamp of authority on the fact from antiquity, the most distinguished Igbo metal workers have been the Awka Smiths. The myth explains why the Awka Smiths and the Nri ritual priests were among the most widely travelled people in Igboland and tended to interact closely wherever they went.

Thirdly, the myth explains the origin and sacred nature of the yam crop and cocoyam which are staple diets of Igbo people. Yam is regarded as man's crop and cocoyam as a woman's. According to Okigbo, the yam crop known to botanists as Discorea Cayenensis was domesticated in Igboland around 3,000 - 2,000 B.C. (Ahiajoku Lecture: "Plants and Food in Igbo Culture", 13-14), which makes yam cultivation a very old human activity in Igboland. Ahiajoku or the festival associated with the yam harvest is one of the commonly shared phenomena of Igbo culture which is underlined by this foundation myth. It is by this association a very ancient communal ritual.

Fourthly, the fact that Eze Nri's son and daughter are sacrificed to ensure the emergence of yam (and cocoyam) as agricultural crops links agricultural activity to the religious ritual of sacrifice. The myth introduces and validates sacrifice as the core of Igbo religion, as Francis Cardinal Arinze has shown in his seminal work on Igbo religion (Sacrifice in Igbo Religion).

Fifthly, the significance of scarification as well as scarification as the meal enhancing the status and intrinsic quality of the children sacrificed, creates a precedent for all specially marked people who bear responsibility for the welfare of the people myth defines the minimal 'expectation to which persons vested with public office are held: they should wear those scars or ichi on their faces which would always remind them that they are something of sacrificial victims - dedicated to service just as the mythic children were sacrificed for the benefit of humanity.

Carving the face as a sign of personal distinction within the Nri sphere is very old indeed; for, we find the persons represented in the ninth century Igbo-Ukwu bronzes with which Nri civilization is associated all bear face scarification. They include the Igbo-Ukwu pendant head showing full face scarification, Igbo-Ukwu pot stand with male and female figure separately by open-work panels of Snakes with frogs in their mouths and male figure's face fully marked with ichi and the fly wisk handle showing horsemen with facial scarification. The practice is therefore more than a thousand years old.

In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Eqiuano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) which is the first work in writing produced by an Igbo, as far as I can tell, the significance of face scarification as an index of public distinction is again emphasized. Describing the status of his father in his complex mode of establishing identity, Equiano writes as follows:

"My father was one of those elders or chiefs I have spoken of, and was styled Embrenche (Mgburichi); a term, as I remember, importing the highest distinction, and signifying in our language a mark of grandeur. The mark is conferred on the person entitled to it... most of the judges and senators were thus conferred; my father had long born it: I had seen it conferred on one of my brothers, and I was also destined to receive it by my parents. The Embrenche, or chief men decided disputes and punished crimes; for which purpose they always assembled together..." (Narrative, 2).

Two hundred years after this was written, Dr. Catherine Acholonu, in the attempt trace the Igbo homeland of Equiano, found that three members of his family in Iseke still bear the lchi mark on their faces (The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano, 25). The accuracy of Equiano's remarks concerning the ichi marks is supported by the British captain John Adams who says that the Igbo word for a gentleman is Breeche (Sketch token during ten voyage to Africa, 1822, 41-2) and James Africanus Beale Horton, son of Igbo parents in Sierra Leone, who described the face scarifications by Isuama Igbo; Itshi and the people bearing the marks as Mbritshi (West African Countries and People 1868, 178).

I have dwelt on this phenomenon of the markings on the face which appears in the Umunri myth of origin to show that Akuko-Ala provides the thread of memory, also the thread of evidence-which links the past to the present and helps to define the relative significance of things. In this matter of facial markings, it is one of the realities linking the Nri kingship to the Igbo-Ukwu bronzes made famous by Thurstan Shaw work (Igbo-Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria). Some scholars deep-sunk in the hamitic theory and ever anxious to attribute African achievement to some light- skinned people to the north, cannot on this occasion dismiss the strong ocular evidence provided by the ichi marks. In regard to Equiano and the Narrative, to which I will return later, attempts have been made to locate his home we of the River Niger or to deny his story authenticity. If he has not described the ichi marks on the face of his father and the judges of his Iseke childhood we would have seen him banished to that limbo of cultural and ethnic anonymity invented by some scholars.

As a further comment, one wishes the modern rulers of Nigeria would undergo the Nri ordeal and have their faces carved to make them aware of the great burden the carry and the responsibility they bear for the welfare of the people. They should always have a code of taboos established to discipline their actions as the Nri wisely did in regard to their Eze and titled rulers (Onwueieogwu. 1981. 52-53).

Next to Akuko ala, we have Akuko ifo made up mainly of tales about human beings, personified animals and animated trees, nature and spirits. These constitute the largest corpus of Igbo oral, stories and are important for their use in educating the Igbo child into the culture of its people, into the ethical principles and moral values of Igbo society, and into the structures of feeling of the group, in addition to providing recreation and entertainment. It did not matter whether we subsequently went to Western-type school, our first real education and socialization process began around mothers' cooking fires or after our evening meals, when we assembled to listen to and participate in folktale sessions. Our mothers presided over these sessions, helped by our elder sisters and other female members of the family, an aunt here, a grandmother there and even some neighbours, but always it was our cultural mothers who saw to it that we absorbed the correct communal values that prepared us to participate with social intelligence and positive psychological attitudes in the life of our communities.

We learned about Mbekwwu-nwa-Aninga, Tortoise the Igbo trickster hero and not-so-bright wife, Anum. We were fascinated by his bold cunning, but we learned to imitate him, because in his eagerness to trick other people he constantly over himself and got hoisted in his own petard (Basden 1921:280). We learned about Lamb the Prudent (Nwaebuluako) who out-manoeuvered much more powerful opponents Tiger the Tyrant (Agu di Ire<). We learned about Chicken the Egoist (Okuko Akpakwuru) and how when the humans requested animals to surrender one of their kind for sacrifice had decided to recommend Chicken because Chicken was always absent from meetings looking for food. The folktales taught us that it is evil to mistreat Orphan (Nwaenwenna-Nwaenwenne), to be envious or to covet our neighbour's good We knew from the tales that the proud and haughty of spirit were soon brought low, unchecked passion would blight everything and that murder would not be successfully hidden.

I have described our induction into the folktale world in the past tense because the art of telling folktales around mother's cooking fire or in mother's little house and supper seems to have passed into history, since the 1950's, 60's, and 70's when the great avalanche of social changes swept much of rural Igbo lifestyle away in its torrent. A certain cultural hiatus exists between us and our children. Their tradition of oral storytelling under which the older generation was reared is now broken. There is no room in the modern kitchen with its electrical or gas stoves, its low wall of multiple layered drawers and businesslike deployment of space, for anyone other than the culinary operatress. The average sitting room in the modern house is not laid out with informality of storytelling sessions in mind. If a household is lucky to have a room spared for the family's cultural interactions, it would more likely than not be designated ulo-tv(tv-room).

But the parents are not reading their children right. If they could spare some time to monitor what their children's favourite tv-programmes are, they would be surprised to discover that they include Igbo plays and tv storytelling sessions, especially song-tales. like those by Igbo minstrels like Seven-Seven, Morocco, the renowned Obiligbo and such redoubtable ballad and tale-singers as Mike Ejeagha. Not only are the adults unaware of the thirst in the souls of-the culturally deprived children, but they also insensitively cast a damper over the ;children's interest by making disparaging remarks against oral stories and storytellers. It is not infrequently that one hears such remarks as: Dianyi Imzinalu m akuko Mike Ejeagha-afu (I have no time to listen to your puerile tales). Such attitudes are dissuasive and have the effect of portraying traditional storytelling a something sub-rational, if not outright irrational. The idea that one can learn wisdom obtain moral insights and-enjoy wholesome entertainment from well performed story sessions is being thrown away in favour of a false and pernicious new sense of civilized or educated or rational entertainment.

The anonymous author of the essay on "The History of Western literature in the New Encyclopedia Britannica asserts that "the stack fact about ancient Western literature is that the greater part of it has perished. Some of it has been forgotten before it was possible to commit it to writing; fire, war, and the ravages of time have robbed posterity of most of the rest; and the restitutions that archaeologists and paleographers achieve from time to time are small" (1990, Vol. 23, 224).

Commonsense dictates that we in Africa should learn a few lessons from the European experience. What Europe has saved from the wreck of its cultural past it now treasures with great tenacity of purpose. For the Greeks, the lliad and the Odyssey are great national monuments, for the British, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf is a national treasure.

Since the nineteenth century the collection and collation of folktales and fairytales and ballads have gone on with fierce enthusiasm; Fables of Aesop, La Fontaines's Fables, the German tales of the Brothers Grimm, all are owed to dedicated collectors of surviving oral texts. In Africa and in Igboland particularly, we are luckier because the oral traditions are still alive. Recent researchers, like Chukwuma Azuonye on Kaalu Igirigi and the Ohafia and Abam singers of tales, and with Obiora Udechukwu among the Anambra basin folk epic narrations, Isidore Okpewho on Simayi the bard of Ubulu- Uno in Aniocha, have shown that oral storytelling on a semi-professional level is still a living enterprise. But they also prove the precariousness of the situation. Some of the singers have since died and if they were not already recorded, would have gone with all those songs and tales with them. The Malian philosopher- historian Mpate Ba is right when he said that in Africa the death of an oral artist or a sage amounts to the burning down of a substantial library.

There is need in Igboland to restore interest in oral storytelling in the home, in the communities at the schools, especially in the primary and secondary schools, during the formative period of the lives of our children, to shape their values, condition their moral responsibilities, and help them to govern their emotions and appetite, as well as stimulating imaginative creativity among them. More importantly, our various governments, at all levels should get involved in a national effort to record and archive all existing Igbo oral stories, with the facilities of electronic and print media. Europe learned too late a lesson we do not need at all if we are wise.

Memory is the key To a people's relationship to their past, their heritage and sense of identity. They remember in the present those things which in the past significance and continuing value to their existence, singly and collectively. For, as Aristotle reasons it, "All memory ... implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is that whereby they remember" ("On Memory and Reminiscence", 690), the critical issue is not that one might forget;in the short run what realities gave one a full sense of one's relevance, but how to make the memory endure in the long run, how to make it stand up to the storms and strains of life and experience over the millenium. From every indication, this would depend on how strong are the matrices within which the experience is embedded and made to retain its consistency, strength and stability.

The answer will be found in language as the medium through which continuity is preserved in the memory. As long as a human community preserves its language also preserves those built-in habits within the language which ensure for the group not only its habits of communicating reality but also its modes of interpreting and responding to experience. That is why loss of a language or its considerable emasculation radically and detrimentally affects the autonomy and existence of that human community. Dr. Johnson, the British eighteenth century lexicographer is right when he says: "I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations" (Tour to the Hebrides", Boswell's Life of Johnson, Vol. 5, 310).

The Igbo of today are Linked to the Igbo of by gone ages through the thread of language; they are who they are through the oneness of their language in all its varieties of dialects, not only at the surface level of everyday communications, but at the deeper symbolical level of myths, tales, and fables, of values and patterns of meaning signification. The structure of language and meaning is stamped indelibly in the memory of the members of the language community and continues to function as a ready-to-hand mode of interpreting verbal messages and responding to life.

For my purpose I am concerned with the use of language in storytelling. It is in my opinion the high point of the language's creativity and dynamism. The cultivation of language sensitivity in Igbo culture takes place in the context of storytelling. Not only is a working vocabulary quickly built up by young participants at story sessions, but the widest varieties and textures of words are acquired. I have in mind words which rely on sound for the effectiveness of their meaning: ideophonic and onomatopoeic words alliterations, puns etc. Because Igbo storytelling, as with storytelling in most cultures is a cross between narration and performance, the linguistic repertoire is made to enhance dramatic action freely expressive contexts, inclining the individual towards oratory, histrionics and generally extroverted temperament. That probably explains the Igbo tendency towards expansiveness and self dramatization.

The distinction is sometimes made between cultures which are word centered (logocentric) and those which are story centered (narratophiliac), between those that are built on abstract-logic and those which recognize the primacy of experience. One set of cultures will appreciate a passage that opens with "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", while the other set would prefer a passage that begins with "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers, who both stripped him and inflicted blows, and went off, leaving him half dead ...". One is logocentric, the other narratological. I believe that we belong to the narratological group of cultures, the story- centered ones.

The Igbo have sayings which underwrite the primacy of the story: akuko di n'umi okwu (the story is in the pith or marrow of the word); akuko ka e ji a muta okwu (the story is the medium through which we understand the word); akuko n'egosi amamife (the story reveals wisdom); akuko bu ndu (story is life). We are talking of deep areas of human perception, cognition, and moral discrimination and judgment. The contrast between word-centeredness and story-centeredness is the difference between intellectual cleverness and true wisdom, The story is a mode of cognition which interconnects and integrates the moral consciousness. The story-centered consciousness tends to be highly moralistic, while the word centered consciousness preserves a high degree of skepticism.

Naked single words or isolated sentences have limited value in helping the mind to build stable, memorable images and are, therefore, not very useful as an aid to memory. But when they are used, like so many bricks at a building site, to construct recognizable whose structures in the form of stories, they occupy grooves within the affective soul to become essential features in the landscape of the memory. Stories endure where unlinked words and sentences dissolve. Stories stimulate the affective domain and elicit definite emotlve responses, whether of pleasure, sadness, pity, horror or revulsion. It is through such responses that the people experience a commonly shared sense of morality, of beauty, and of social propriety.

The story makes us think, feel, perceive, and therefore, empathize, it enables us to integrate our consciousness, educate our minds, purity our souls, and refine our sensibilities. It is the key to a humane and humanized existence. The story speaks directly to the human heart and soul and mind and engages our sympathy in a manner that straightforward ideas and logical argumentations do not. Max Luthi is right when he describes the strong hold which the fairytale has on young and old, especially before the widespread diffusion of the printing press. According to him, "When something has the ability both to attract and repel one so forcefully, one assumes that it deals with fundamentals. One is challenged to take sides, explicitly and implicitly. The role firytales play in the lives of adults. prior to the coming of the printing word, strengthens us in the belief that we are dealing with a peculiar form of literature, one which concerns man directly" (Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairytales, 6, 20).

The peculiar relationship between the story and memory which we have spoken about explains some essential features of Igbo responses to reality. The affective of the story ensures strong emotional attachments to an idea which has already entrenched in a story. For example, every community or aggregation of social groups such as an Igbo clan has a foundation myth which unites the group and helps mobilize its emotive energy for the defence of the group when its interests are threatened. The absence of a pan- Igbo ancestral myth is more than compensated by the strength of local loyalties underwritten by myths, legends and locally defined and fables. And yet the sense of the openness of the world is an essential quality of Igbo psyche, the intrinsic and the extrinsic nature of the Igbo outlook. The concept of the world even while affirming the familiarity of the known is always forcefully drawn to contemplate the world out there, the world of the unknown. The Igbo psyche closed to experience outside the immediate environment. Igbo narratives contain a large segment of action built upon foreign travel and encounters with agents other than local, be they human beings, humanized animals, spirits, or personalized nature.

The journey motif is well developed in Igbo narrative, whether in traditional narrative texts or in texts,. written and oral, that refer to more recent experience Characters are engaged constantly in journeys of one kind or another, real and imagined terrestrial and cosmic, physical and metaphysical, literal and symbolical, historical mythical, external and internalized. Journeying to them is a mode for working out individual destinies, controlling realities and clearing up contradictions and ambiguities that beset life from birth to death. The popularity of this mode arises from widespread conception of life itself as a journey. The Igbo say: Onye nje nje kariri onye isi- awo (a young person who has travelled is better informed than the old person who is home-bound).

From hoary antiquity some Igbo elements, like the Nri priests, Awka smiths, Aro traders, as well as some professional groups, such as diviners and medicinemen, carvers and artists, travelling minstrels and dance- troupe instructors, were known to traverse the length and breadth of Igboland and were cultural crossers and link-men through whom ideas and beliefs, attitudes and values were diffused throughout Igbo communities. What the Igbo storyteller does in the use of the journey motif is to appropriate for use an and concept which is deep-lodged in the Igbo psyche, an- idea and concept which already a commonplace of Igbo life and culture.

Use of the journey as a creative metaphor within the narrative mode has distinct advantages. First, it is pragmatically linked to physical distance and space and thus spans the realms of history and geography, environment and society. In as far as journey exposes individuals to fresh experiences transpiring over space and time, it correspondingly expands the boundaries of their knowledge and broadens their cognitive potentiality, enhances mental, psychological and imaginative growth and stitches experiences to those already available. It is, therefore, a dynamic mode which aptly situations of expanding consciousness. Within evolving historical and socio-cultural situations, the journey dispels epistemological insularity and naivete.

Igbo storytellers use the journey to explore the mystic consciousness, especially through quests in which characters go in search of recognizable social; moral, or ethical ideals with which to enhance their human dignity and valorize their communities. Such quests take the protagonists through vast terrains and topographies, over rivers, deserts and wildernesses, anthropomorphized jungles peopled with monsters and animated nature very often formularized as seven seas, seven farmlands and seven wildernesses (mmiri asaa, agu asaa, ozara asaa). The cosmology takes in the earth (ala mmadu), the sky (igwe), and the spirit world (ala mmoo).

The multifarious nature of the journey metaphor is shown by the fact that it does not depend on physical action; there is the journey within the mind which is just as if one has been "on the road." As with the other aspects of this trope, the impulse towards a review of history, culture, and society in order to distill valuable insights interpretative meanings from them by narrators, writers intent on restoring coherence dignity to life and culture. For example, in Achebe's Arrow of God, the Chief Priest Ezeulu makes a mythopoeic journey through the memory of all previous Chief Priest to the original founder, re-enacting the mythic vision which inaugurated his priesthood:

At that time, when lizards were still in ones and twos, the people assembled and chose me to carry their new deity.

I said to them:

"'Who am I to carry this fire on my bare head? A man who knows that his anus is small does not swallow an udala seed."

They said to me:

"'Fear not. The man who sends a child to catch a shrew will also give him water to wash his hand?"

I said, "So be it." And we set to work. That day was Eke: We worded into Oye and then into Afo. as day broke on Nkwo and the sun carried its sacrifice I carried my Alusi and, with all the people behind me, set out on that journey.

This mythopoeic journey is full of hazards, but the priest navigates it successfully, because he has the people behind him. In this quest, the four days of the week put obstacles in his way and it is only by overcoming them that he becomes worthy of high responsibility as Chief Priest. This mythic journey provides the essential ideological scaffolding to the exploration of the dangerous period of imperialist invasion of Africa. The Chief Priest is the natural leader of the resistance to imperialism in his community and that original journey of his ancestors becomes his main source of energy. Unfortunately, the Chief Priest's failure to actualize the mythic idealism of the success quest in his handling of the new forces leads to his defeat and the loss of community's vital interests.

Critics of Arrow of God tend to forget or ignore this seminal influence in the conception of this novel, for if they took it into account, their interpretive conclusion would be different from those which one often finds. For example, Ezeulu's journey of the soul is successful only with the strength of the people. The immunity which the elders offer him if he ate the extra yam and which he shrugs away is real enough because the spirit of his priesthood is entrenched in the communal mystique. He has no independent inspiration of his own, no personal source of power but the community and its vital security. His state of mind which has swayed from a popularly entrenched custodian a would-be autocrat is the real problem. His abstract speculation on what he regards "the immensity of his power" defines the critical moment of his fall.

The journey is used by Igbo writers as a mode for character exploration or for the testing out of moral positions, as in the Igbo language classic Omenuko (1935) by Pita Nwana and in Belgam's lje Odumudo Jere. In the former, the theme of exile and return is given great emphasis:

N'akuko obodo any n'ime Africa, okwu di kwa iwu a nyere enye; a nasi ma o burur na onye o bula agaa n'obodo ozo biri n'ebe ahu dika obia ma o di mma, ma o bu onye ebere, ma o bu onye amara, ma ob bu onye na-ekpe ikpe n'uzo ziri ezi, mgbe dum ihe ufodu ga na-echetara ya na ya onwe ya bu obia, n'ala ahu, o ga na-ejikere onwe ya na o ghaghi ila obodo ebe a muru ha. Mgbe o bula a turu ya n'ily, ma a gwara ya agwawa n o bu obia, o ghaghi ila (The Narrative of the Life of Omeunuko - Prologue)

("In our own part of Africa, it is almost a law that a man does not forsake his fatherland. A man can live in a foreign land but no matter how successful he becomes there whether in business or social relationships, and no matter how much the people among whom he lives hold him in high regard, there are bound to be things which will remind him once in a while that he is after all a stranger .. and he becomes more determined to return to his native land: (Emenyonyu, 49).

In this epigraph the primacy of memory is again stressed; the exile must return. Omenuko's journey and return are physical, as well as undertaken on the plane of memory. The irresistible urge to return to the native land is the pressure which the mind exerts over the body, especially on the intricate nervous structure of responses. When he commits--the serious crime of selling his apprentices, including his blood relative he leaves himself no other option than to go into exile, very much like Okonkwo Unoka after shedding the blood of a kinsman. Exile offers the hero an opportunity to begin the healing process and ultimately to redeem those sold and to conciliate "human beings and the gods" against whom he has sinned. The journey is a chance to expiate guilt and to restore harmony to a shattered moral life.

Two Igbo sons separated by two hundred years, Olaudah Equiano, also called Gustavus Vassa in slavery (1745-1797) and Chinua Achebe (1930) have done more than anyone else to bring Igbo life and culture to the attention of the world. Equiano was born, by his own account, "in a charming fruitful vale, named Essaka (Modern Iseke)" (Narrative, 2) situated between Ihiala in Anambra State of Nigeria and Orlu in Imo State, while Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi in the ldemili Local Government Area of Anambra State. The distance between the birthplaces of the two men would be less than twenty miles as the crow flies. Both men are a product of Igbo oral storytelling to which each pays tribute as a major impulse, in autobiographical comments and by his intimacy with Igbo life, beliefs, customs, and values.

In his autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1787), Equiano write as follows:

"I hope the reader will not think I have trespassed on his patience in introducing myself to him with some account of the manners and customs of my country. They have been implanted in me with great care, and made an impression on my mind, which time could not erase, and which all the adversity served only to rivet and record... I still look back with pleasure on the first scenes of my life, though that pleasure has been for the most part mingled with sorrow." (15).

Knowledge of life in Igboland, we observe, has been "implanted" with great care and been so deeply etched in memory that in his mid-forties, Equiano could still recall it great intensity. My suggestion is that this process of "implanting" knowledge primarily achieved through the oral storytelling tradition within which the Igbo child absorbed cultural education and the moral- ethical ideas of society. By his account Equiano was kidnapped with his younger sister and sold into slavery at the age of eleven years. He subsequently bought his freedom, extensively sailed over the then known world and spent his final years fighting for the abolition of the slave trade. His Narrative is part of his contribution to the campaign against slavery. Why he chose the story for is interesting. He could have written an essay against slavery as did his friend the Ghanaian Ottobah Cugoano who wrote Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, (London, 1787)..

In the first two of the twelve chapters of the book, he introduces his eighteenth century readers to life in Igboland, before telling the rest of his personal story. Reading that account of Igboland, it is interesting to observe how little Igboland has changed in two hundred years, from Equiano's time to the end of the second World War when most radical changes altered the broad landscape of Igbo world. The Narrative could therefore be read with advantage side by side with Chinua Achebc's Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (l964) which deal with Igboland in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Chinua Achebe, for his part, acknowledges the impact of oral storytelling on his imaginative development in his autobiographical essay, "Named for Victoria, Queen of England:".

"I did not know I was going to be a writer because I did not really know of the existence of such creatures until fairly late. The folk- stores my mother and older sister told me had the immemorial quality of the sky and the forests and the rivers." (Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays, 69- 70).

Even though they were formed by oral storytelling, both men have made their contributions in written stories, Equiano in the story o£ his personal life and Achebe in fiction. Both men also-use their narratives not only to explore personal and fictive experiences but also to recreate their societies and cultures with care and integrity and indirectly, to help rehabilitate the image and the Black World under attack by anti-Black; writers and philosophers. Not surprisingly, that contribution has been globally acknowledged in their most representative works, Equiano's Narrative and Achebe's Things Fall Apart, each of which has become a classic of its time and kind. Each went through several editions and reprints and was translated into different languages. Within the year of its appearance, Equiano's Narrative underwent three reprints, eight British editions in the author's lifetime and six more editions in 22 years after the author's death, and was translated into Dutch (1790), German (1792), and Russian (1794), in addition to being published separately in the United States (1791) and Ireland (1792). Things Fall Apart has sold more than five million copies in English language alone and been translated into 46 languages of the world, including all the major international languages To underscore the significance of the contribution which these exceptionally talented sons of Igboland made to African and world literature, it is necessary to discuss their epoch-making narratives The interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Things Fall Apart, in some detail beginning with the earlier work.

Equiano's Narrative has the distinction of simultaneously belonging to Anglo-African, African- American and African literary corpora. Its place in the British literature of the abolitionist, movement and in the African-American literature of the genre commonly referred to as the slave's narrative has long been established, to the extent that it has been called "the most important single literary contribution to the campaign for abolition" and "the most famous and influential black autobiography of its time" Staying Power, 107. To understand the pre-eminent place occupied by Equiano's Narrative in abolitionist literature, one could profitably refer to Paul Edward's notes in his introduction to his editions of the Narrative, to Peter Fryer's Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) and to Wylie Sypher's Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery, Literature of the XVIIIth Century (1942). The Narrative did much to silence the racist, pro-slavery pamphleteers generally referred to as the "Oran Otang philosophers" who perversely championed slavery on the basis that Africans were no better than Oran Otangs and so deserved to be enslaved and civilized for their own benefit. Equiano's description of life in Igboland refuted the thesis of an irrational subhuman existence in Africa. Equiano was described by Andrews as "the prophet, if not the father, of Afro-American Autobiography" (60). Major studies on the Narrative are by Afro-American scholars like William L. Andrews in To Tell a Free Story: the First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 176~1865; Henry Louis Gates in Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988) and Robert B. Stepto in From Behind the Veil: A Story of Afro-American Narrative (1979).

Interest in Equiano's Narrative awakened slowly in Africa. Here I must pay tribute to Paul Edwards of the University of Edinburgh who first drew the attention of African readers to the work by introducing an edition of it, Equiano's travels (1964-1969) into the popular Heinemann African Writers Series edited by Chinua Achebe Edwards has written very copiously on Equiano and the Black eighteenth century writers in Britain like Ottobah Cugoano and Ignatius Sancho. His last and very felicitous edition of Equiano's story titled The Life of Olaudah Equiano was issued by Longman in its African Classics series in 1988, while the most complete edition was (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself 2 Vols, published by Dawsons of London in 1969.

Even though it was published two hundred years ago and before the works of well known African writers became household words, Equiano's Narrative prefigured many of the themes of these later works and anticipated many of their techniques and formal qualities, and even their worldview. The relationship is so strong in fundamental ways that the narrative seems to bridge the gulf of time and consciousness and to be in easy alignment with the sense, purpose and general development of modern African writing. It has earned the privilege to be considered the beginning of modern African literature. Chinua Achebe is right to refer to the scope of modern (written) African literature as literature from Equiano to Ekwensi" (Hopes and impediments, 93-94).

Modern African literature has grown in the shadow of Europe and emerged as a reaction to the slave trade, European colonialism and racism. These forces have placed Africans and the African continent under immense pressure from the early sixteenth century to the mid- twentieth century and have had the effect of undermining the cultural confidence, creativity and self-confidence of Africans. African writers have, in response, therefore, used their works to combat the long, baleful shadow of Europe, to dissipate it and thus to restore to their people their sense of identity, their feeling of human equality and worth and their creative potentiality. Equiano leads the line in this task of the restoration of African identity through his Narrative. He put his creativity, storytelling aptitude, at the service of all African peoples by single-mindedly devoting his narrative to the liberation of Africans and abolition of the slave trade, in much the same way that later-day African; writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Augustino Neto have used their works to foster African liberation from ravages of colonialism. Indeed, it is on record that Equiano's Narrative was widely subscribed to by members of the British aristocracy and the British parliament and that it sharpened the conscience of his readers and paved the way for the abolition of slave trade. His story has the effect of reaching the hearts of those whom simple logic would not have persuaded. His frankness and candour and the meticulous manner in which he described life in his lost homeland earned him many supporters and sympathetic readers. Magazine reviewers were positive and gave all the airing they could to his cause.

Equiano's perception of himself in his creative role is of a piece with African writer's view of their own place and self-definition; it is explicit in the title of narrative. He is not simply "an African" author and narrator, as his contemporaries had also written or narrated their life stories, such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Venture Smith had been or sought to be identified, but he was "the African," the representative and definitive figure with a soulful conception of himself as a special spokesman of his people and an articulator of their deepest aspirations. As Fryer informs us, "Equiano had won widespread recognition as principal spokesman of Britain's black community" Staying Power, 107-108.

In his dedicatory letter at the beginning of the first volume of the two-volume narrative addressed to the members of the British Parliament, Equiano states his intention in the Narrative explicitly:

"Permit me, with the greatest deference and respect, to lay at your feet the following genuine Narrative; the chief design of which is to excite in your August assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen... May the God of heaven inspire your hearts with peculiar benevolence on that important day when the question of abolition is to be discussed...Narrative,."

The Narrative is thus in intention an extended appeal directed at the conscience of those in whose power it was to put an end to a great evil. Equiano was thus drawing upon the affective possibilities of the story to resolve an issue of moral, economic social, cultural and psychological crisis in his day, to remake the world by helping to right a terrible wrong. By doing so, he appropriated for himself a role which is both public and historical. In seeking to influence the abolition of the slave trade, he became a voice of moral authority and a spokesman for the durable values of civilization, including the values of compassion, humanity, justice, and freedom. He assumed a role which modern African writers have since taken up and made their own in our time, the role of defenders of the people and the people's hallowed interests.

Even though the overt purpose of Equiano's Narrative is the abolition of slavery and the liberation of its African victims, yet, in the depth and complexity of its inner structures, it evolves elaborate strategia whose designs go far beyond the declared surface intention and accommodate such themes as the restoration of the human integrity of the African, restoration of the image of the African environment as a human habitation and of African culture as a human system worthy of respect. In the narrative, a central character stands out in clear relief against a background of clearly drawn environment and society.

The culture is described with enthusiasm and in as great a detail as necessary to give the reader a coherent view of a way of life that is self-sustaining, dignified, and full of vitality. The governmental and judicial institutions are structured around the nze-na ozo, or titled elders, wit their face scarifications we saw earlier, who dispense justice and see to the stability of the communal world. Several institutions are described including the marriage institution in which the part played by the contracting families is emphasized, as well as the sharing of gifts, the dances and celebrations that act as a matrix binding the parties closely. The creative arts of music, dance, and song are also celebrated as Equiano informs the reader:

"We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets. Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, or other cause of public rejoicing is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion." Narrative, 4.

The dance formations are described in a mode that could still be recognized in great communal dances that researchers into communal and festival dramas have identified, as for instance in the Aro Ikeji Festival comprehensively described by Dr. Okafor "Inscrutable Wonder, 83-87). The manners of dress, eating and drinking habits, architectural designs and disposal of space, economic and commercial activities, all these are elaborately aired with an insider's certitude. On architecture, for instance, there are substantial resemblances between the houses in Iseke of the 18th century and those in Achebe's Umuofia of the late l9th century. The remark that in Iseke "every man is a sufficient architect for the purpose" and that "the whole neighbourhood afford unanimous assistance in building them (houses) and in return receive, and expect no recompense than a feast" is a fact which held good till the l950's and even 60's the usual thatch and mud- brick houses gave way to mortar and iron roof buildings present day. Agriculture is strongly stressed as the mainstay of the Igbo economy:

"Agriculture is our chief employment; and everyone contributes something to the common stock; and as we are unacquainted with idleness, we have no beggars." Narrative, 7.

Health and beauty, ecological dispositions, modes of warfare, religion and ritual purifications and ablutions. offerings and sacrifices, mortuary rites, specialized such as those of priests and physicians or medicine men, moral sanctions, taboo and totemism, all these are described with the surefootedness of a man traversing a well-known territory kept alive in the mind almost by instinct.

Equiano's image of Igboland in the eighteenth century is drawn with great honesty. Independent sources confirm the details of his portrayals. Moreover, anyone growing up in an Igbo village as late as the 1940's would have recognized the justness of his depiction of life and culture. A few points of controversy have been raised about some of Equiano's details, of course. For example, his view that "...even our women are warriors, and march boldly out to fight along with the men" has been questioned by commentators, including Dr. Afigbo who would make a distinction between the "war of clubs" (ogwu okpii) and the "war of guns and matchets" (ogwu egbe na mma) which necessarily excluded women. Other commentators have views which agree with Equiano's, including G.I. Jones and, more recently, Azuonye, who comes to his position through heroic legends which he has researched in Ohafia and Abam communities (Granqvist and Inyama, 12-13).

Beyond the portrayal of his land of birth and his revisiting what Senghor "the kingdom of childhood," Equiano developed a unique strategy for dealing with the world of the white people, a world he saw both exoculturally and endoculturally. He had lived within from the age of twelve until his death at the age of fifty-two, but he preserved his double identity - his privilege as an African and, therefore, a man with outsider's perspective on white life and able to criticize it and another perspective a honorary member of the British society, in which position he married a British girl tried to integrate himself into his adopted home.

Equiano's major strategy in the Narrative is to present an image of Africa on terms in which it could be contrasted with Europe. He takes full advantage of being at home in both worlds to compare and contrast, with logical consistency, the strength and weaknesses of the two ways of life. He presents the first extended critique of Europe by an African and also defines a method of doing so which is to be used to great effect African writers of later times. This is the use of a naive perspective or a childlike viewpoint to criticize the conditions of life of Europeans in their contact with Africans. The writer is looking at a lifestyle which is flawed and which is readily disparaged. The. approach is of the nature of a dialectic or the answering of an argument with a counter-argument, in the nature of a refutation.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of European philosophers chiefly Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, and Rene' Descartes had expounded theories of civilization and progress which were predicated on the primacy of reason over feeling and emotion with the implication that those whose world outlook were determined by reason and rational approaches to action had a legitimacy in promoting progress and an universal civilization to control and dominate those whose world outlook and methods of action were controlled primarily by feelings, passions, and raw sensations. Such theories of progress and civilization naturally accepted those socio-cultural and technological indices of Western civilization as the hallmarks and achievement of a universal civilization. The theories legitimized the domination of Africans who were placed low on the rationalist ladder by the Europeans who placed themselves on the top. Nor did the comparison end on the level of intellectual socio-cultural and moral achievements of Europeans and Africans but the contrast was extended to morality. Europeans were implicitly and explicitly regarded as morally superior to Africans, their moral elegance sharply contrasting with the moral degeneracy of Africans. These rationalistic and racist theories were used to legitimize the enslavement of Africans in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European colonization of Africa.

African writers from Equiano to the present have used their works to refute these theories and their overlay of racism by removing the matter from the plane of abstract speculation to the realm of experience, of true men and women and children whose lives are analyzed and assessed on standards of conventional humanity and even by standards of reasonableness deducible from the European philosophers. When Europeans are in the works by African writers judged on the claims made for them by their philosophers, that they espouse reason and abjure passion, the reverse is often found to be the case.

The documented evidence of brutalities and rampant violence in his Narrative is used by Equiano, as a naive narrator, to refute the claims of superiority by the Europeans over Africans. In Equiano's Narrative the contrast is often explicit and amply illustrated by the gentle treatment of domestic slaves in Africa and the severity with which they were treated in the West Indies and in the Americans. He writes:

"I must acknowledge, in honour of those sable destroyers of human rights, that I never met with any ill- treatment, or saw any offered to their slaves, except tying them, when necessary, to keep them from running away" Narrative, 37.

Equiano does not justify slavery whether by Africans or by Europeans even though before he became a victim himself, he had not seen slavery as a moral evil, but he is drawing- a real distinction between the relative humanity of his people, "those sable destroyers of human rights" and the Europeans whose superior technology made them even more efficient and oppressive than Africans. Notice, for example, the barbaric treatment of the black woman in a Virginian plantation reported upon in the Narrative:

"The poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak; and could not eat nor drink..(The) contrivance was called the iron muzzle" Narrative, 51.

Equiano could not dispute, the superior technology of the Europeans, but the question he raised and which other African writers after him have been raising, over and over is: What use is technology if instead of its being utilized to increase human happiness, it is negatively used to cause pain and destroy human security?.

The importance of the Narrative lies partially in its positive affirmation of Africa and its civilization built on communal harmony, on the integration of individual and communal aspirations its being rooted in the soil, in the peasantry and their autochthonous virtues - compassion and fellowship, a deep commitment to the life of the spirit, respect for all life and the belief in vital forces which are enlarged or diminished in so far as the individual is in harmony or conflict with nature, the environment and cosmos. All this is perceived through the story which appeals to the intelligence, goodness, and emotional response of the reader. Next to the image of Africa is the image of the narrator whose life under trying circumstances is full of challenges. The character survives through doggedness and resolve and application of intelligence and pragmatic commonsense which is altogether admirable. His struggles are heroic and worthy of respect.

Equiano's place in African literature is guaranteed by his use of his marvelous talent as a storyteller to create the first authentic image of an African personality and of an African society in the eighteenth century. He boldly and unequivocally identified with an environment and a way of life from which he was forcibly removed forty years earlier. Other narrators in similar circumstances have not maintained as positive a view as Equiano. In fact Andrews raises the question of Equiano's intellectual independence when he writes:

"The causes of Equiano;s intellectual independence are much less easy to trace, however, than their effects; this man was able to create a personal independent of both extremes of his contemporaries' images of the Westernized African. He was not the innocent African as sacrificial lamb (Gronniosaw), now was he the outraged African as shown and dishonoured lion (Smith). He was both - and he was neither" (To Tell a Free Story, 60).

One can reasonably attempt to resolve Andrew's dilemma by saying that Equiano himself has to large extent supplied the answer to the question why he remained confident and positive and resilient in spite of all the negative, niggling influences of slavery. The secret is his thorough cultural early education, in pre- slavery time of his life, which "implanted" the knowledge of the manners and customs of his land, the kind of enculturation which children received from storytelling sessions and stayed with them for the rest of their lives. The agricultural imagery is apt here. Knowledge received from these sessions is not immediately obvious; it is like a seed planted in the human memory: it germinates there with time and it grows and grows.

It is my view that Equiano's independence - his capacity to surmount the disaster of enslavement, to live down the trauma and the brutalities of that infamous system, and to be able to tell his own story, to maintain an optimistic perspective on life, to continue to cherish freedom in spite of the man-made constraints and fetters of slavery - arose from the confidence, the groundedness in a culture, in a moral view of life, in a distinct identity that is firmly stamped in memory, from which springs the best and most consistent of all his aspirations. Next only to cultural confidence is the belief in individual's capacity to make choices and make things happen because one is already convinced that one is already well favoured, that one's chi is good. Equiano is unshakable in his belief that according to his name, he is a particular favourite of fortune. He tells us in the Narrative concerning his name: "I was named Olaudah, which in our language signifies vicissitude or fortune also; one favoured, and having that "when a man says 'yes', his chi also says 'yes'. He is, like Okonkwo Unoka, a great achiever, but he has the enculturation and humanization which Okonkwo lacks. In many instances when he is in difficulty in the narrative, he evolves a strategy for extricating himself, a bold, unexpected action as when he brandishes a brand and threatens to blow up a ship stocked with kegs of gunpowder and by doing so throwing off a menacing bully or when he resorts to cunning, like a trickster, to pacify a disorderly and menacing group Mosquito Indians. And thirdly, the nature of Equiano's society may also have something to do with it. A mobile, achievement-oriented society which emphasizes individual initiative may be the foundation a person needs to survive in a society such as the one Equiano found himself inhabiting in the West Indies, America, and Great Britain.

In my tribute to Chinua Achebe at the international symposium celebrating his sixtieth birthday, I made the following comment upon his unique contribution to the novel of Africa:

"Taking the two novels he has set in the past, Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1963), I would attribute his success first and foremost to his thorough grasp of the dynamics of culture and society, his detailed understanding of history ant the interplay of its forces and his appreciation of the large movements of ideas and events which alter for good or ill the destinies of peoples and societies. Within this huge superstructure; he has been able also by use of finely tuned techniques of selection and organization to probe in depth and particularly the lives and predicaments of his characters. The unique combination of an intellectual grasp of history, sociology and culture and complex structural and narrative techniques give Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God their enormous appeal and power ("In Praise of the Teacher" A Tribute to Chinua Achebe").

My concern here is to take one major aspect of Achebe's contribution to the poetics of African novel and to relate it to the tradition of Igbo oral storytelling; for, the great genius of the man and his creative predecessor, Olaudah Equiano, has arisen from the capacity to translate an Igbo indigenous capability into the context of modern written narrative and, thus, giving global significance to what would otherwise have been mere local aptitudes. I will concentrate on the intrusion of Igbo folklore into Things Fall Apart in the technique of narrative embedding which I regard as Achebe's great gift to the African novel, his enrichment of its poetics. Just as Olaudah Equiano revolutionized, black autobiography in the eighteenth century by extensively building up the social context of his early life in Igboland, so Achebe has radically transformed the African novel by impregnating it with vital elements from Igbo oral storytelling.

I have chosen to call the embedded narratives "narrative proverbs." Every reader of Things Fall Apart knows that the Igbo characters that people that novel use proverb extensively. The author has himself told us that "Among the Ibo (Igbo) the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten" Things Fall Apart, 5. The place of proverbs proper in shaping the rhetorical resonance of the novel is, therefore, very well established and acknowledged by a Achebe critics, local and foreign, Igbo and non-Igbo, indigenous and expatriate. Most readers of Things Fall Apart, however, often do not know what to make of those oral Igbo stories, myths, folktales, animal tales and anecdotes, which proliferate in the novel. They either dismiss them as part of the local colour or, worse still, as unrelated distracting stories that the author perversely put in the way of a quick completion of the reading.

I call them narrative proverbs, because even though they are autonomous stories they are structurally part of the novel and perform the roles of proverbs by functioning as images, metaphors and symbols and advance the meaning of the novel in which they appear. They derive from the Igbo practice of introducing a short story during; conversation to illustrate a point triggered off by memory. Like, the use of proverb proper, narrative proverbs' embedding derives from two principles of communication in the African oral tradition - authority and association - by which an idea is given validity by being placed side by side with another idea that bears the stamp of communal approval and by its being linked to the storehouse of collective wisdom. Similarly, a story is made to supply illustrative, authoritative support to an idea, a point of view, a perception, or perspective in conversation or oral discourse and is thus vested with much greater significance than is the case in a non-traditional context.

In Things Fall Apart there are no less than nine embedded narratives, of which seven are folktales and mythic stories, one a pseudo-history and one an anecdote. They supply a substratum of meaning and interpretation which critics who ignore the embedded subtexts are bound to lose. In fact, these embedded stories are so much a part of Igbo oral tradition that one is tempted to suggest that the Igbo reader of Things Fall Apart who is knowledgeable of Igbo myths and folktales would be expected to distill greater meaning from the novel than the person ignorant of that tradition. The novel should speak more intimately to the Igbo reader or the African reader steeped in the African oral tradition than to uninitiated readers.

Let me illustrate the points I am making here with a few examples. The subject matter of Things Fall Apart is the encounter of European and African worlds at the beginning of British colonization of Igboland in the southeastern part of what is today known as Nigeria. The action could be located in the 1880s. The hero of the novel is Okonkwo Unoka, a powerful wrestler and warrior of the Umuofia clan, who leads resistance against British imperialism and Christian missionary incursion into his society. He is a rash, impetuous man in addition to being a strong man. In the end, his character weaknesses and the overwhelming force of the enemy combine to defeat him and cause for which he struggled.

Okonkwo's world is entirely traditional, subsisting within an oral culture with ultimate face-to- face social configurations and a worldview and value system that have been handed down from great antiquity. The use of narrative proverbs in the structuring of the action of the novel is a major constructional strategy in the expression of the a traditional impulse in the lives of the characters and in defining their vernacular sensibility. Orality is in the novel, therefore, more than an intrusion of an exterior style; it is a means of achieving the poetics of verisimilitude and a life-like portrayal of the experience.

The first embedded narrative is the cosmic myth of the quarrel between Earth and Sky. It is embedded in the context of the crisis of confidence between Okonkwo and his son Nwoye, a sensitive teenager who is afraid of his father. His father wants to bring him up in the warrior tradition by telling him "masculine stories of violence and bloodshed," while Nwoye prefers "the stories that his mother used to tell, " which include the cosmic myth of the primeval quarrel of Earth and Sky:

"He remembered the story she often told of the quarrel between Earth and Sky long ago, and how Sky withheld rain for seven years, until crops withered and the dead could not be buried because -the hoes broke on the stony Earth. At last Vulture was sent to plead with Sky, and to soften his heart with a song of the suffering of the sons of men. Whenever Nwoye's mother sang this song he felt carried away to the distant scene in the Sky where Vulture, Earth's emissary, sang for mercy. At last Sky was moved to pity, and he gave to Vulture rain wrapped in leaves of cocoyam. But as he flew home his long talon pierced the leaves and the rain fell as it had never fallen before. And so heavily did it rain on Vulture that he did not return to deliver his message but flew to a distant land, from where he had espied a fire. And when he got there he found it was a man making a sacrifice. He warmed himself in the fire and ate the entail (38)

The myth is narrated - not performed, as would be the case in a true oral context within which it would be performed as well as narrated. The paralinguistic features are absent though by way of enhancing our response to the story, the narrator informs us whenever Nwoye's mother sang the song with which Vulture softened the heart of Sky, Nwoye felt carried away to the distant scene in the Sky." The song text itself is not included, nor is the singing of the song. The narrative sequences are complete except for the etiological tail which is missing. Conventionally, the myth should end with explanation that it shows why whenever sacrifices are being offered vultures are often seen hovering in the sky and often descend to eat the substance of the sacrifice. As the Igbo say: A chuba aja a hughi udele, a mara na njiji jiri n'ala mmoo (when you offer a sacrifice and no vultures are seen, you know there has been a disaster in spiritland). The absence of etiology is understandable; it is not structurally relevant to the theme Things Fall Apart.

As a metaphor, the; myth serves a number of structural, thematic and ideological purposes in the novel. First, it brings into sharp focus the unequal relationship between Okonkwo and Nwoye. Okonkwo is pictured as an archetypal masculine figure who rules his household with a heavy hand and keeps his wives and children down and in mortal terror of him. Nwoye is crushed by his father's violence. On the microcosmic level of action, the myth throws light on the internal situation of Okonkwo's life and his immediate concerns, revealing the alienating relationship which exists between him and his oldest son and which builds up systematically until total rupture, when son abandons father and the traditional world to join the Christians and the new force of triumphant imperialism. The conflict between father and son, analogous to the quarrel between Sky and Earth, is build on their being so different in character, Okonkwo condemns stories and storytelling (unless they are heroic), which he regards as a symptom of effeminacy and degeneracy, while Nwoye relishes stories other than those of war and bloodshed. Paradoxically, the myth endorses the triumph of imagination over power in that the cosmic quarrel is resolved not through overt demonstration of masculinity and power but through conciliation and affectivity and the agency of song. By extension, therefore, the myth underwrites the feminine principle and Okonkwo's dedication to the masculine creates an unbridgeable impasse that ends in total alienation. The story thus sharpens the focus on characterization.

This myth also functions as a macrocosmic paradigm in that it broadly represents the historical confrontation of Europe and Africa, the main stem of nineteenth-century imperialism with its totalizing cultural, political, ideological, ethnico-philosophical, institutional oppositions and as an analogy to the conflicts. It foreshadows the triumph of imperialism and the defeat of poetically evoked in the title of the novel. Imperialism is symbolized by Sky and the Umuofia clan by Earth. In their conflict, imperialism, like Sky, wins predictably.

In the same Chapter Seven of the novel in which the myth of the cosmic quarrel appears, we have two embedded pieces, the Locust Myth and Ikemefuna's Song. In the third year of Ikemefuna's arrival into Okonkwo's household and on the eve of his tragic death, a locust swarm descends on Umuofia. The event triggers the telling of the Locust Myth:

"The elders said locusts came once in a generation, reappeared every year for seven years and then disappeared for another lifetime. They went back to their caves in a distant land, where they were guarded by a race of stunted men. And then after another lifetime these men opened the caves again and the locusts came to Umuofia" (38).

This myth should be linked to the pseudo-history in Chapter Fifteen in which the story of the destruction of Abame is performed. Even though locusts are eaten with gusto in Umuofia, their coming spells a great ecological disaster, but the incident helps to bridge the epistemological gulf in Things Fall Apart. The people of Umuofia know about the coming of locusts and what it means but they do not know about nineteenth-century imperialism. When a lone white man appears in Abame, the people send to the oracle who informs them that he is a harbinger and that many more like him are under way and would destroy their clan. The oracle tells them that the white men are locusts. That settles it. They kill the man and tie his iron-horse upon their sacred cotton tree, lest it runs away to call the dead man's friends. What is under way is imperialist invasion. Within the traditional mindset and imagination, the mythic scaffolding and the concrete image takes shape and build a perception of a mighty threat. In the process, myth transforms to metaphor and metaphor transforms reality, vesting it with clarity. Myth, metaphor, history and reality interfuse in a mode that operates largely through association. On the microcosmic level of experience, we have a particularized event of the murder of a solitary white man riding an iron horse and the terrible reprisals against a doomed clan. On the macrocosmic plane, however, we have the parabolic extension of the event that encompasses the global scope of imperialism, with the locust invasion symbolizing imperialist invasion with its attendant devastations and destructions.

Ikemefuna's Song is not a full folktale text but a song extrapolated from a folktale. The full tale is the story of a perverse, headstrong king who breaks a taboo by cading roast yam offered in sacrifice to the gods. The song is an attempt by the people to dissuade the. king from an action that would compromise both himself and his high office:

Eze elina, elina!		King, do not eat (it), do not eat

     Sala			Sala

Eze ilikwa ya			King, if you eat it

Ikwaba akwa oligholi		You will weep for the abomination

Ebe Danda nechi eze		Where Danda (White Ant) is installed king

Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu		Where Uzuzu (Dust) dances to the drums

     Sala			Sala

The song is based on the oral practice of call and response. In the novel, the body of the narrative is omitted and the song has been telescoped. There are only two responses to five calls, two "Sala" to five lines of verse, whereas in the oral traditional text, there is a "Sala" - response after each line of call. There is no immediate pressure to reproduce the full tale or the full song--text here. The condensing of the oral component within the written form is a reordering of the experience in a compromise strategy that judiciously determines how much of the oral material is admissible to secure a balance between the oral and written impulses. The singer of this ditty is Ikemefuna, the child hostage ostensibly on his way back to his original home but who in reality is on his way to being sacrificed by the Umuofia people for the murder of their kinswoman by Ikemefuna's people.

The embedded song brings complex ironic twists into the narrative at this stage. Ikemefuna is singing the song in his mind and walking to its rhythm to divine whether his mother whom he last saw three years before is still alive. The first irony is that it is he Ikemefuna who is at risk and not his mother. Then the full import of both the tale and the song apply more appropriately to Okonkwo Unoka who had been his guardian at Umuofia and whom the old man had warned not to take a hand in Ikemefuna's murder. Okonkwo does not heed the advice and it is actually his hand that cuts Ikemefuna down in the fatal bush. The reversal in Okonkwo's fortunes seems to begin with this brutal assault on the traditional moral order.

The web of irony becomes even more tangled when it is remembered that Okonkwo's descent into the abyss of defeat begins with the unintentional murder of Ezeudu's son, which necessitates his mandatory exile for seven years and which, in turn, leads to the loss of his place in the clan, an event which hurts him psychologically. It is as if the gods have decided to use the old man's son to punish the errant hero. Ikemefuna's song is a means of trying up a strong emotional nexus from the different stands of ironies and ironic intersections in the narrative. The "king" has been warned, and since he has heedlessly broken taboo, the song foreshadows his fall down the tragic precipice. His death is predicted in the song by the lines "Where Danda (White Ant) is installed king" and "Where Uzuzu (Dust) dances to the drums." The hero's suicide ensures his final annihilation in the situation in which only white ants and the dust will claim him; he is not permitted the comfort of a reunion with his ancestors and his clan.

Igbo storytellers have always used their tales to give meaning to the totality of the world as they perceive it. In their perception of this world, they have not regarded themselves as an island. Through the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial time dimensions of Nigeria, Igbo storytellers have defined their relevant functional space and human commitments, including an awareness of their human interactions with other than themselves, contiguous peoples, such as the Efik-lbibio, the Ijo, the Edo, the Igala and others with whom they had held economic, commercial, diplomatic, and sometimes, ritual-religious and cultural relations from deep antiquity. Narrative gives expression to realities the people know; myths and tales underwrite strong ties which have sustained neighbours in pacts of mutuality and primary interdependency.

The situation is a matter of the interpenetrability of myths and tales between the Igbo and their neighbours. Contact with the old Benin empire gives us the folktales we call the Iduu, featuring the oba and a rebellious general; on both sides of the Nsukka border looms the legend of Onoja, and, as mentioned earlier, contact with the Efik-Ibibio yields many heroic tales for Ohafia-Abam singers of tales. Conversely, the Ijo seven-day performance epic, The Ozidi Saga, narrated by Okabou Ojobolo and recorded Clark-Bekederemo, illustrates the presence of Igbo characters, even though they are shown in rather mixed lights. Odogu, the ugly and his witch-mother Agonodi are among the anti-heroes with whom Ozidi has to contend. It should also be stated that the sword with which Ozidi won all his victories was forged for him by an Awka ironsmith.

Igbo storytellers have featured prominently in the narratives relating to colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Professor Emenyonu's excellent study, "The Rise of the Igbo Novel," traces this important contribution of Igbo storytellers in the modern to the flourishing of Nigerian and African Literature.

This contribution deserves to be highlighted. These modern storytellers or novelists have, through their narratives, given meaning and reality to Nigerian national life. For, as Homi K. Bhabha rightly observes, "To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the conceptual object itself .. its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life." The nabon finds existence not only in its history (deconstructed as its 'high' story) but also in every imaginative reconstruction of the life of its people, be they aristocrats or commoners, town-dwellers or villagers, men, women or children. Narrative gives concreteness to their lives, to their e~cistence.

The volume of contribution by Igbo storytellers to this process of the forging the soul of the Nigerian nation is simply massive, beginning with the urban Nigerian Fiction by Cyprian Ekwensi who I personally regard as the dean of Nigerian writers. His "People of the City" published in 1954 gave imaginative presence to the millions ordinary men and women who were to become the vanguard of the new national Nigerian culture and life. We must remember Flora Nwapa who courageously and single-handedly penetrated the field of literary creativity hitherto occupied by men exclusively. The appearance of her two novels, Efuru (1966) and 1du (1969) not only put the concerns women first and foremost in African narrative, but made her the first woman novelist in Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Nor shall we forget Elechi Amadi whose novels have permanently established the Ikwerre-Etche-Port Harcourt region of south eastern Nigerian on the creative landscape of Nigeria. We remember John Munonye in whose numerous novels our world, our culture and our perception of our human condition are immeasurably enhanced, and Chukwuemeka Ike whose eagle eyes ferret out the foible and absurdities and moral insensitivities of our times, and Onuora Nzekwu whose novels celebrate our traditions, and Nkem Nwankwo who created the inimitable Danda, a I.N.C. Aniebo author of the important testimony "The Anonymity of Sacrifice," and Obi Egbuna who explores our local life and the world out there, Obinakaram Echewa who brings the gift of philosophy to the service of fiction, Buchi Emecheta who puts the woman's critical search-light on our world, old and new.

The roll call of honour is long: Anezi Okoro whose stories have delighted generations of children, Ifeoma Okoye, Clement Agunwa, E.C.C. Uzodinma, Eddie Iroh Kalu Uka, Okechukwu Mezu, Adaora Ulasi, Rosina Umelo, Kalu Okpi, Phanuel Egejuru, Chudi Uwazurike, Tony Ubesie the giant of oral Igbo storytelling in the book. The list is not complete; it cannot be. Every year new novelists join the ranks and veteran novelists produce new works. Nigeria is blessed in its storytellers of the modern era. They have brought great vitality to our world and greatly invigorated our national life. But have our people read the narratives of these precious storytellers? Not to have read them can be likened to blinding oneself in one eye, so that one cannot see the world comprehensively. Many important truths lie hidden from those who refuse to read the works of our novelists. Nor would they share in a wholesome, liberating national expenence.

This, therefore is the burden of my lecture. The story is at the heart of the understanding of the Igbo culture and the Igbo mind. It has been a mighty force for the conditioning of the personality and defining of a vision of life. In the past, the lgbo mother had been the custodian of the humanizing process that enabled the Igbo child to absorb the values that prepared it for participation in adult complexities. Now, we run the risk of losing this important formative influence. And I fear, this loss will lead to loss of cultural memory and to an abandonment to a life of rootlessness.

There are those who refuse to believe in the ancestry of ideas, who beLieve you could graft yourself at any time and at any stage upon the tree of universal civilization and who think that by such grafting, they would become part of the organic growth that tree of universal civilization. Such people in my opinion are mistaken. There is no tree of universal civilization. What there is a universal garden where every people bring their own seed to plant and tend. The soil is indifferent. Every seed planted there will germinate and grow. How it fares will depend on how much skill, industry and conscious labour the group bring with them to tend and husband their tree. Some people will forget altogether that they have a tree of their own and will labour assiduously and sleepless tending other people's trees. There is a character in American folklore called Rip Van Winkle who forgot he had a farm and spent his life working on other people's farms while his own was overridden with weeds. Among the Igbo Rip Van Winkle would be called an akalogholi.

The Igbo have always remembered that they have a tree and their storytellers have always reminded them of the need to tend it. For them, stories are important because they are anchored in memory. For them, the story is eternal, it belongs in time but it has a timeless quality, its power to instruct, to remind, to renew, and to direct is not circumscribed by time. So that in their travels and through all the vicissitudes of flux and change, they carry with them a memory instructed by their stories. There is a character in Chinua Achebe's latest novel who talks about the significance of the story to the Igbo mind:

"It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters... The story is our escort: without it we are blind."
--Anthills of the Savannah, 124.

ONYE ISI OBODO
NDI ISI ALA
OHA N'EZE

I thank you for listening to me.

• Acholonu, Catherine O. The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano. Owerri, Nigeria: Afa Publications, 1989.

• Achara, D.N. Ala Bingo. London: Longman, 1933.

• Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958.
  --. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann, 1964.
  ---. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. London: Heinemann, 1975.
  ---. Anthills of the Savannoh. London: Heinemann, 1987.
  ---. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

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