Condolences To God
By Chris Aniedobe
It is a sad day in hell when many an Igbo out of ethnic pride blurs the lines between compassion and strength. "Our enemies must never know we stink," my people cried. "We must be made to appear strong and in control," many argued. I can appreciate that mentality given the harsh political realities of Nigeria. What I denounce as dastardly, however, is the mentality that "others stink as well." There is absolutely no redemptive quality to that statement. It stinks just as the subject matter which it seeks to justify.
Last week, desperate to dispel the vaunting against the Igbos which must surely come following the exposition of the Okija Shrine incident, Colonel Achuzia told the world that the Igbos stink when he proclaimed in essence, "Others stink too." In the process, he diminished both himself and the Igbo man. He came across as a political desperado who would say anything to make the Igbos look good. Outsiders stricken dumbfounded by the gory details of Okija shrine, wondered if compassion was a virtue they could associate with the average Igbo man. If Okija shrine stripped the modern day Igbo man of a human face, Achuzia completed the picture by adorning our heads with horns in solidarity with the devil that we all served.
Some argued that at the level of contradiction which he operated, that it was his official responsibility to make sure that the Igbos do not fart in public. Trouble is, by the time Achuzia got to the opening of the Igbos' anus, our flatulence had already exploded into an earth-desecrating release of sulphide, blood and tears. The cat was out of the bag already. The world saw it. It was not necessary for Achuzia to accent that horrific sight with a lame declaration. Only compassion would have counted. All over Nigeria, the line between evil and religion gets blurrier by the minute but a desperate man who has one foot in the slimy road and another in the thorny bush knows to seek salvation with his hands, for here is evil that will nauseate the devil himself. It was no traditional religion.
The traditional religion of our forefathers was as benign as it was compassionate as it was moral. Justice was swift, but it was always measured and compassionate, even if interlaced with abject stupidity. Among us the Igbos, we ask a medicine man who says that a head is needed for sacrifice to first consider his own head.
We ask a man who has an irresistible craving for human flesh to first consider taking a bite out of his own tongue. There is a difference between requesting for the heart of an ant and requesting for the heart of a man. And death, if the spirits so decreed, was as loathed as it was profoundly regretted. There was no dance of the macabre, no tribute to evil, just a loathing that human nature can be so degenerate. Achuzia mocked many in a desperate bid to shield the Igbos from the mockery which we invited unto ourselves, and in the process exhibited a mind utterly callused to every impulse of compassion. That is not the Igbo way.
Every single skull out there, every decaying corpse, every single sorrowful sigh, every single cry of an Igbo widow let out in utter anguish, every single cry of an Igbo child whose parent died in the hands of those murderers, every single old Igbo woman who cried to the heavens when faced with the inexplicable death of their child, every single hope that was so callously extinguished at the Okija shrine, diminishes every single one of us. This was no religion. It was plain and manifest evil, carried out in a manner that will shame even the devil. Anyone who excuses, in anyway, the moral abandonment, the malignant religiosity, the sheer earth desecrating evil of Okija shrine, is a present danger himself to any aspiration of civilised living.
I know traditional religion and we know evil when we see one. It stirs the dark recesses of our human spirit and evokes a universal feeling of horror, of hate. It is as vicious as it is gruesome. Okija shrine epitomised evil and those who equate it to traditional religion mock our collective humanity. We respect the corpses of the dead, and the corpses of the evil man we send far away from our community to the evil forest so that evil may consort with evil. We do not sleep with corpses. Even when the gods of traditional religion decree the death of wrongdoer, it was a matter of immense gravity. But compassion and human dignity were never far away. The head of the man whom the gods decree his death was not cut off to further mock the dead man.
We do not adorn our shrines with bleached human skull. The priestly racket at Okija shrine was based on an ambience that provoked extreme fear. Some priest gorged out those eyes, pulled out those tongues, scraped those human scalps, washed out those human brains, in order to preserve that trophy to evil. What would the gods do with the genitals of a dead man whose death they decreed We do not preserve their bodies so that the lives we claim to have been extinguished by evil in midstream; so that their frozen laughter; so that their hopes which died suddenly; mock our every move. In a desperate bid to justify Okija, Achuzia made us seem like a tribe who came from an evil stock.
By whose justice system anyway did all these people deserve to die By the justice system of a priestly class anchored on Igbo's traditional notion of morality And by what due process notions By the standard of fairness in which enrichment of the priests was the ultimate justifier Are we so possessed of our ethnic pride that we cannot separate a priestly racket from the good names of our forefathers Is Okija shrine not enough ridicule that we should try to ridicule our ancestors too Okija shrine diminished us and all of humanity, and so it should. And every Igbo man owes a condolence to God.
And Achuzia, he should seriously consider if he has what it takes to lead the Igbos. It is the height of hypocrisy to be more worried about others finding out that the Igbos stink than the fact that the Igbos stink. We have so far in recent memories bequeathed to the world the likes of Eddie Nagwu who reportedly macerated live children to make medicine for Abacha. And then there is the infamous story of Otokoto and body parts, not to mention the Bakassi boys and their gruesome acts of extreme justice. And yet I can say in all confidence, this is not us. We loathe the wanton disregard for the sanctity of human life, which these incidents portrayed.
We are not as desperate to be perceived as strong as we are eager to nurture that chord of compassion that ties us to the brotherhood of humanity. The Igbo man's strength is his compassion and the seed of compassion which our forefathers planted in us stands today like a plant in drought. In the days of our fathers, kindness was it of which status was made. And our cultural values were anchored in fundamentally sound morality. Achuzia has lost sense of what made the Igbos great. He owes condolences to God.
Aniedobe lives in Washington DC, United States
