BEYOND MERRY-MAKING: Customs of Indigenous Peoples and the Normative Functions of Ceremonies in Pre-Colonial Igbo Societies (Part 8)

Where do we go from here? Taa bu gbooo!!

Conclusion

By Prof. Ikechi Mgbeoji

Igbos are of an ancient pedigree and root in West Africa. Linguistically and anthropologically, Igbos have been around in these parts for several thousand years. Consider thes: In some languages of the same Kwa family, for example Yoruba, Igbo means bush or forest. In fact, Yoruba mythology posits that Oduduwa, the father of the Yorubas encountered the dwellers on the forests called Igbo when he and his followers settled at Ile-Ife.

From the foregoing renditions, the traditional jurisprudence of Ndigbo was a complex and sophisticated web of norms, practices and prescriptions for social ordering and preparation for the afterlife (Obi, 1963) often iterated in ceremonies. The ceremonies ranged from the simple to the complex.

An example of a simple ceremony is the tying or knotting of a tender palm frond on a disputed property. This is known as itu omu and is a direct function of the Igbo belief that oath taking is a sacred and serious business. Tender palm fronds indicate danger in Igbo land. Fruit bearing trees may be dedicated to the gods with palm fronds and only the owner can access the tree. This simple ceremony speaks volumes about the unshakeable belief by the person in question that the property in dispute belongs to him/her and that judgment thereon has been submitted to the gods. Complex ceremonies on the other hand could take years to complete.

Igbo ecological and traditional knowledge practices were often enmeshed in a jurisprudence that asserted the multiple linkage of mankind in a complex chain and linkage of other parts, and that changes in this delicate web of relations would disturb the intangible and tangible forces that unite society.

These beliefs were narrated and validated in Igbo law and life through ceremonies and religious observations. Those ceremonies also afforded an avenue for modifying the worldview and dramatizing the peoples’ beliefs and value systems. Virtually all members of the society participated in these ceremonies in varied ways.

Igbo society was participatory. In the words of Professor Anene: “You can’t know the inside facts about Mmanwu (masquerade) unless you are admitted to Mmanwu and participate in operating Mmanwu. You cannot say much about the various Ozo titled societies unless you are admitted to them and participate in their rituals and activities. You can’t know the implications of various socialization rites, ceremonies, including rites of passage unless you participate in them.” (see Umeh, 1999, p. ii)

Since the age of colonialism, however, Igbo cultural practices have been subjected to Eurocentric sanitization and cleansing processes designed to remake native law in the image of English common law.

In the colonial encounter, Eurocentric norms assumed the role of gatekeeper and bouncer. What the Western worldview could not understand, it banished as diabolic, uncivilized, and sub-human.

Regrettably, the colonial attitude to indigenous normative prescriptions ignored the commendable attributes of local norms such as certainty, legal reasonableness, immemorial origin and continuity.

The ceremonies constituted a normative chart of how members of society lived together in their social and environmental space. The larger significance of ceremonies is that they embedded, transmitted, and modified normative prescriptions.

Those ceremonies were not ritualistic and pointless drama. Rather, they constituted invaluable methods of communicating and transferring signals of meaning, knowledge and information among the citizens inter se and in their relationships with the larger universe (Odi, 1996).

Consequently, a study of such ceremonies is useful and can no longer be relegated to the background or dismissed as a subject of arid scholarly debate or anthropological curiosity (Fuller, 1975). The time is ripe for a critical re-engagement with what made the Igbo tick for thousands of years.

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