Loose Lips Sink Ships
M. O. ENE
Friday, February 20, 2009
I am not into Abia State partisan politics. Whoever the governor is, and s/he will do well to bring back sanitation sanity to Aba in particular, so be it. As English poet Alexander Pope stated, “For forms of government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.”
However, I am
gladdened by the verdict of February 11, 2009 as reportedly read by
Justice Saka Ibiyeye. I am happy
not because the court did not find allegations of electoral malpractices
credible; it is not because he ruled that Governor T. A. Orji won the highest
vote; it is not because he ruled that Orji did not
have to resign a political appointment to contest an election; and it is
not because he ruled that the Governor is not a member of a secret cult…. What
is a “secret cult” in Nigeria anyway?
So why am I happy? I am happy that someone has finally given the long-suffering adherents of African traditional religions a voice from the bench; in this case, the devotees Igbo religious creed: Odinani. For many moons, paranoid pastors and their “prayer warriors” have descended on religious relics of Ndiigbo and stolen ancestral treasures for overseas markets, all in the name of sanctifying communities. The authorities have looked the other way, just so they won’t be accused by their high and mighty pastors of defending practicing “pagans.”
I have argued severally in Odinani Forum, a yahoogroups forum for Igbo traditional religion, that one way to stop crude Charismatic Catholicism or petty Pentecostal Protestantism is to take these religious extremists to court and claim record damages. It is incomprehensible insanity that some shady characters in white robes blame ancestral shrines for socioeconomic regression. If churches cannot turn our society around in over a century, maybe, just maybe, it is about time we tried the old-time religion.
Sometimes I pray that the religious fanatics and lunatics, pathetic pastors and praying parrots, find it in their souls soon to stop the desecration of shrines for their thieving collaborators, as Nkem Owoh (Osuofia) portrayed in the Nollywood Igbo film “Captain.” I pray because some day, after desecrating an ancestral shrine, some locals may decide to desecrate more modern, concrete shrines—the cathedrals. Just imagine what would happen if they desecrate a mosque as they do to Igbo shrines. The erstwhile rising rate of shrine slaughter has abated. Or maybe the ill-advised iconoclasts have no more shrines to desecrate. Yet, the world economy is still regressing, and Christianized Igboland is not fairing any better; on the contrary, armed bandits continue to butcher innocent citizens and kidnappers prowl the land snatching victims and raking in ransoms.
Don't get me wrong, some of our inherited ways of life need changes; no culture is static. Eurocentric Christianity made many changes along the ways and needs more. We cannot change our ancestral ways for the better by denigrating those we don’t understand fully yet, just because a foreign faith frowns at them. This is sheer insanity and intolerable ignorance. Those who condemn aspects of traditional practices are right but, before we hurl more self-righteous stones, we must stop and revisit the history of revealed religions in the Middle East and Europe. The rituals have not always been so radiant; and they are still undergoing core and cosmetic changes.
I don’t see why our ancestral creed cannot be allowed to undergo its own minor or mega metamorphoses. If the sacraments of a particular shrine are hijacked by a crew of charlatans, as is normal in many mushroom churches big and small, that too can be addressed by the prevailing laws of the land—just as is done in other lands where the law is no respecter of persons. Progress in any community is a collective effort; it cannot be blamed on a shrine, a deity, or a person. The wickedness of humans and the greed in communities have done more harm than remnants of our ancestral way of reverence to, and negotiations with, the formidable forces of nature.
In his reaction to the Appeal Court verdict, defeated PDP gubernatorial candidate, Chief Onyema Ugochukwu, declared:
We are further
surprised that the Ibiyeye panel in its disreputable use of language has
elevated the Okija Shrine "a popular Igbo Shrine for customary arbitration" to
an Igbo Basilica. What a tragedy for Ndi Igbo. What impudence.
It is not a tragedy for Ndiigbo; on the contrary, the learned judge has the courage to state what many supposedly complete-denture persons have failed to say: Okija is an Igbo basilica. I hope the chief knows the meaning of the Latin lexical item for public building, which Christianized Rome adopted to mean a large place for religious rituals; in other words, a large shrine—as is Ogwugwu Shrine at Okija.
Ugochukwu wanted to be what the Igbo call “o ji onu egbu oji”; he wanted to fell an iroko with words of mouth. In letting loose his lips, he has unwittingly lifted Igbo religious legacy and set it squarely on the path to reclaim its rightful ramifications as a recognized religion of a race, a religion that foreign faiths failed to erase.
Matters of the spirit are not about shapes and sizes; they are about values attached. It reminds me of one of the several, sometimes slightly apocryphal, stories about Okwuluoha Agbaja, Eze Onyeama n’Eke, the father of Nigeria’s first justice to the World Court, the man who mainly made Coal City (Enugu) happen and railway to Port Harcourt possible, gave Ndiigbo the first Western-trained medico, the first imam, the first student at Eton, etc.
Legend has it that an Irish priest (probably later Bishop Shanahan of Nsukka) told Onyeama one evening in his palace that he wanted to build a church—which translated then into Igbo as “God’s house.” The charismatic and powerful King Onyeama found it funny that the man in white robe should make such an apparently fantastic request. Of course, Onyeama could make and unmake things throughout that part of Igboland I call “Waawalandia”—from Awka through Enugu to Abakaliki and beyond. His influence extended up to communities in today’s Benue State and down into communities south of his Agbaja Kingdom. For a man who facilitated land rights for colonial Britannia to mine coal in Enugu and provided the energy that powered Nigeria for many years, giving a piece of land to the church was a piece of pie.
Onyeama caught himself. History has it that he loved the Catholic Church, though he never converted to Christianity. He just loved their Latin and their more agreeable and respectful Irish priests, not the more abrasive and contentious Anglican priests of mostly riverine extractions. The king coughed calmly to clear his throat gratuitously and asked the cleric pointedly: “Do you have an idea how big Chiukwu is? Do you know that Chineke is the Creator, the Supreme Spirit, the Formidable Force, and the Proper Proprietor of the entire universe, a universe so big the eyes of mere mortals can never behold its beginning nor its end? And you want to build this same God a house here on earth… in this world?”
Legends apart, the size and shape of a shrine, any shrine, does not signify its soul of spirituality. Shrines, including churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, are built more for the comfort of human being and proper positioning of ritual artifacts, not for the comfort of deities and saints or prophets. So, sincerely and spiritually speaking, Ogwugwu Shrine at Okija is at par with any basilica on earth. Justice Ibiyeye has stated the obvious, the whole truth: "Okija shrine has not been described as unlawful.” He even went further to discredit “the purported Secretary of Okija Shrine,” probably paid to sensationalize the superfluous: that the Governor is a member of a secret society. Since when did “membership” of a shrine become formalized in any Igbo community?
Justice Ibiyeye could be faulted on other aspects of the case, but his pronouncement on the famous shrine at Okija is a landmark ruling. Whoever wants to steal Ibiyeye’s bicycle for saying the truth should go ahead and make his day; the thunder of his pronouncement has left Nkpoko Halt, that last minor stop after Aba, before the north-bound train starts striking and stopping only at major stations on the way to Enugu and ending in Kaura Namoda, on the fringes of Sahara span.
The fact that some suspected locals allegedly misappropriated, misapplied, and mismanaged the significance and symbolism of a shrine should not detract from its parity with any religion’s shrine the world over—including the ones to which Nigerians pay pilgrimage and come back with petty prefixes and silly suffixes to their rented names. No religion has divine immunity against fraudsters; none should claim to harbor all the saints and assign all things evil to the others.
The Igbo say that if you do not lick your lips at this time of the year, the Harmattan will lick it. The deities of Igboland have been watching as pathetic pastors desecrate and denigrate them. Igbo ancestral saints, Ndiichie, are demoted and denounced while supposed saints of strange societies are hoisted on banners and proclaimed as lords of the land. Yet, in keeping with the core principle of Odinani (egbe bere, ugo bere), no one has retaliated in kind.
Truth is naked, and time is the eternal enemy of lies. On August 8, 1985, Pope John Paul II took part in African traditional Sacred Grove (shrine) rites while visiting Togo and offered mea culpa for a century of disrespect for African faith. Throughout his papacy, he reached out to all religions and denominations, including Judaism, Voodoo, Islam, Protestantism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Yet, in our own small corner of the planet, some Ndiigbo continue to denigrate Odinani. The fact that Igbo traditional religion is not organized, centralized, and labeled, say, “Anism,” should not remove from its ranking among world religions. There were perfectly good reasons why our democratic-republican ancestors localized religious practices.
For years, we have turned our back to the persecution of adherents of African traditional religion, even when both Christians and Muslims partake in traditional ceremonies as it suits them and as long as their lords spiritual in Europe do not object. With loose lips, Ugochukwu has just sunk the ship of continued, callous hypocrisy. No longer will anyone be expected to offer any excuses for going to a shrine in broad daylight or at night; no longer will professing religion on rooftops with loudspeakers be a passport to public offices. Most importantly, no longer will any paranoid pastor descend on a community and cart away its priceless ancestral relics in the name of sanctifying the community.
Kudos to Saka Ibiyeye!
Everything else is everything.