'No victor no vanquished' is a polite way for the genocidist army to say la luta continua. It is the triumphalist Igbophobes who are continuing to wage the genocidal war against Igbo survival with things like Python Dance I and II, quit notices, deportation, and threats of mass drowning of the Igbo in the lagoon.
No Igbo group or individual is waging war against the haters orm against other innocent Nigerians in retaliation. No one among the Igbo is seeking to build and explode Ogbunigwe or to fight with small arms to kill fellow Nigerians and steal their land or to destroy their places of worship. Not I bird, said Soyinka in Death and the King's Horseman - a puzzle that literary theorists are yet to unravel as an allusion to the violence against the Igbo.
Some Igbo are asking for a referendum on the reconstruction of Nigeria and the call for restructuration is heard all over the country, not only in the South East. Even if there is a referendum today, you may be surprised to find more Igbo voting to continue with the one Nigeria of Azikiwe due to their heavy investments in other parts of the country and their love of travel. Even if Nigeria is divided today as an Arewa group recently called for, I will not be surprised if the Igbo call for us to go beyond division and try multiplication of cultural diversity through migration and settlement, subtraction of hatred, discrimination, and phobia, and addition of tolerance, atonement, and reparations.
The Igbo example to the world is that even in the face of phobic hatred, a people can thrive if they invest their energies in education of their young rather than invest in weapons of mass destruction. Countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China that have avoided war in the past 50 years have taught the world that education is better than invasion and forceful occupation.
In other words, if the Fulani cattle herders and the Boko Haram terrorists are willing to learn from the open secret of Igbo survival and success, for example, let them build modern schools to educate all their boys and girls to the highest level of their abilities. The brilliance of the few who are given access to education in the North shows what Africa is missing by neglecting the education of our youth while arming them with foreign weapons to make Africa ungovernable. Education, education, education is the key to success, according to CLR James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution.
There will always be discrimination and heartbreaks in the choice of spouses. All over the world, families are choosy when it comes to the marriage of their children but education ensures that some stones that some builders refused may become the head corner stones. The Osu caste system is a contradiction in the democratic Igbo tradition but the Igbo have dealt with the problem democratically without resorting to genocide, incarceration, expulsion, drowning, or the seizure of properties. To the Igbo, it is less important to know whether you are Osu or Diala today, what counts is your morality, your skills as a medical doctor, teacher, musician, footballer or lawyer, your faith as Cathlic, Protestant Muslim, or Odinani, your education as in formal or Imu Ahia apprenticeship, your support for the community, and your wisdom.
To a great extent, the Igbo are proof that when you have contradictions in a democracy, the solution is not less democracy but more democracy. Yes, the Igbo learn a lot from their neighbors, but I hope that they will learn more democratic lessons than undemocratic feudalist ones, more scientific lessons than money medicine superstition, more humility than ethnic supremacy. The neighbors of the Igbo are free to learn also from the tail of the kite how
to fashion the ogene metal gong if they want. Who is sick and beautiful, asked Oriental Brothers?
Biko
On Tuesday, 14 July 2020, 09:23:16 GMT-4, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Biko.
I slways stand back when most of your arguments revolve around Igbo exceptionalism. Thank God you have not yet resorted to sneers and veiled insults at interlicutors in this particular thread as may be unbecoming of a professor on the eve of his sixtieth birthday.
I dont know how anyone can be speaking of 'village republics' as synonyms for village democracy. The Igbo may indeed have practiced village democracies as many African communities ( and the Greek city states did) but that did not translate into republics with their unique political traits.
A republic will pledge the various democracies to a central authority through representation which the Igbo village democracies did not. To this extent most of the Greek city states and Yoruba city states were not republics even though they tended in evolution in that direction. That is why the Yoruba city states remained at best constitutional monarchies ( they only sent military contingents in time of war as Greece did in the Delian League.)
Full republicanism started with Rome with three centralised assemblies to which member communities sent representatives.
To refer to emergence of chiefs in Igboland as intrusive traits is to suggest that the Igbo unlike other communities were incapable of political evolution, incapable from learning from others but were created perfect at the beginning of time.
.Nothing could be further from the truth.
And why do you always undercut all reasonable arguments with people hating all Igbo and still threatening genocide against them? Come on, you can do better than that. You are no longer in your 20s and 30s.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 14/07/2020 02:50 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ode to Soyinka at 86
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com) Add cleanup rule | More info Democracy is not a phase in the evolution of republics, democracy predated republics or nation states. Democracy is a system of government of the people by the people and for the people. It is ahistorical to say that there were no Igbo before 1500 based on what you know today as identity. There was no entry for identity in the Encyclopedia of Social Science until the 1960s, what they had was an entry for identification, according to Stuart Hall.
The Igbo language was always there from the beginning of human evolution of languages in Africa. The name Ndi Igbo literally means Early People. Ancient or modern, they have exemplary contributions to democratic forms of governmentality, said Soyinka. You are welcome to dismiss it as village republics but they were wider than the villages, they saw democracy or self-ownership as spreading throughout the world of the Igbo or Uwa Ndi Igbo, not just the village or hamlet.
Biko
On Monday, 13 July 2020, 21:07:31 GMT-4, Ibrahim Abdullah <ibdullah@gmail.com> wrote:
There was no Igbo as we know it today in 1500; what Afigbo called "village republics" pre-dated Igbo identity in the same way kingship authority and monarchical institutions pre-dated Yoruba identity. At issue here is communalism---as a universal phase through which human society pass through. Communalism as a pre-capitalist socio-economic formation sans class would read like "democracy"---Afigbo's "village republic" but they're not. Comrade Ikenna's conclusions on this subject refers.
Sent from my iPhone
On 14 Jul 2020, at 12:27 AM, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Sista Glo,
On the Igbo not being perfect, no one ever said that they are perfect for they name their children, Uwaezuoke, the world is never enough. Yet, with all their very human imperfections, the Igbo do not deserve the hatred that the rest of Nigerians reserve for them. That is what Soyinka keeps reminding us, we have things to learn from the Igbo just as we have things to learn from other cultures. Threatening the Igbo with genocide is a form of phobia that is unjustifiable given their actual and potential contributions to the reconstruction of democratic praxis in Africa. Democracy itself is not perfect, it is the worst system of government, except for all the other alternatives, said Churchill. He would know because he preferred to impose colonial dictatorship in line with the philosophy of Plato - The Philosopher King - and Aristotle - the Aristocracy - as better models compared to democracy or what they called mob rule.
Eze Nri was not a king but a chief priest whose authority never extended beyond the hamlets of Nri. It is true that chiefs were emerging in some parts of Igboland as documented by Nzimiro but Uchendu identified them as 'intrusive traits' from our monarchical neighbors. Rather than scoff at the deeply democratic traditions in places like Igboland, Rodney invited us to study them and celebrate them as much as we celebrate the empires of Western Sudan. The fascination with the Igbo by Rodney is all over HEUA where he praised them for building their own schools when the colonizers pretended that there was not enough money for schools; he celebrated their resistance to the double squeeze of underpaying the peasants for their harvests and hiking up the prices of manufactures, leading to the Women's War of 1929; and he dismissed claims that the genocide against Biafra was as a result of tribal war since the nations of Nigeria are too big to be called tribes, and there was never a record of genocide by Nigerian nations against their neighbors before colonization, while there are no African tribes called the Labour Party government of Britain nor Shell BP that orchestrated the genocide with Soviet Union help.
The Osu and Ohu institutions, in my humble opinion, were impositions resulting from the slave raids and they are not present in every Igbo community. The Ohu system of slavery came about as a result of the slave raids to capture people for sale but the Igbo resisted such raids as much as they could. The British claimed that they burnt down the Long Juju of Arochukwu in order to end the slave trade that they themselves imposed and ran for 4 hundreds years. Chinweizu dismissed such a claim as false because the British had long ended their slave trade by the time they organized the punitive expedition to Arochukwu over the struggle to dominate the lucrative trade in palm oil.
Osu came about, in my own opinion, as a sacred order for people who ran into the shrines to dedicate themselves rather than join in the resistance against the slave raiders. The Igbo would say, O sukwa, or it is happening; and those who fled into the refuge of the shrines were feared for having made contact with supernatural forces and became ndi Osu. A goat that is dedicated to the shrines is never beaten and it can come into your house and eat your dinner without fear. The Osu were untouchable because no one could beat them or kill them.
Azikiwe made it his priority to abolish the Osu system once he became Premiere of the Eastern Region in 1952. The problem remained a burden to the Igbo because anyone who married an Osu was regarded as an Osu too. Parents would still make enquiries to make sure that their children will be happy in their marriage rather than face discrimination. Other nations in Nigeria also discriminate in the choice of spouses for their children.
The Osu system has already been dissolved by the Igbo who are dynamic and cosmopolitan more than any other nation in Nigeria. For instance, no parents would withdraw their child from school if the teacher was known to be Osu, no one would refuse to go to church if the priest is an Osu, and no one would refuse COVID-19 relief if the governor or senator sharing it is an Osu. With the Igbo excellence in modern education, their success in trading and widespread enthusiasm for travel to other lands, the distinction between Osu and Amala is almost completely erased as people make friends in school or at work or on the sports field or in a musical band without bothering to find out if there is still a caste system. It may still be a problem in local politics but it is fast dying out.
The residues of Ohu and Osu among the Igbo could be additional points to make in a legal writ or negotiations for reparations for the slow healing wounds of slave raids and post-colonial genocide for which the Igbo suffered more than most. The Diaspora demand for reparative justice should be extended to Africa too.
Baba Sho cannot be imagined to be a scholar-activist who never paid homage to the Civil Rights Movement. That is exactly the theme of his play, Bachae, a homage to the civil rights movement in the US. Much more than almost any other African writer, Soyinka has been fascinated by the survival of African cultures of struggles for freedom in the Diaspora. His joke about the tiger and the tigritude should be understood as a critique of Senghore who preached Negritude but relished being an evolved Frenchman, though Senghore understood the joke and retorted that Soyinka does not speak tigrese or he would know what the tiger professes. See a commentary on Soyinka and the Civil Rights Movement in the US: Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka
Biko
--On Monday, 13 July 2020, 17:27:27 GMT-4, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--From ten years ago, this Oriki still dey fresh:
Ode to Soyinka @ 76
Ode to Soyinka @ 76
ODE TO BABA SHO AT 76 By Biko Agozino 'Unlike societies right next to the Igbo for instance – more famously the...
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