By
Obododimma Oha
As a researcher with a keen interest in cultures that are fast going extinct and a great enthusiast of my indigenous Igbo culture, I am shocked to realise that cultural materials I look for in my research or send my students to collect and analyse in oral literature or folklore programme, are simply not there in the cultural milieu, not even in the memory of present-day Ndiigbo. I could as well have sent them to construct and analyse fictions. You know what happens when people imagine things. They could spice the experience here and there, after all, we enjoy it more when there is a lot of fabrication! The folktales are now fabrications and in the place of their performances, we have Nollywood films or Hollywood films. Chiwetalu this. Ezemmuo that. Mama G those. Aki and Pawpaw these. And gradually we lose the skills of the cultural telling of the folktale. Black Panther learning to pounce! Season of mimesis and reinvention of self.
Is it the proverbs? Who remembers to cite them? They are a text of your pastness, the fact that you belong to years ago. Why not cite Obama and Trump or the referee of FIFA? Why cite the dog and say, according to the dog, those it requested to buy mat for it in the market should bring back the money because it is used to squatting? Who told you that a dog could talk? At least, not in your world, unless you are into the strangest science fiction in our time!
Worse still, when you expect listeners to exhibit their reception or processing skills by knowing your meaning and intention, citing your ancient culture again as saying that if you throw a proverb at someone like a petrol bomb and the person demands an interpretation, the dowry paid on the head of his or her mother was a colossal waste. Imagine that! Does it not raise an objectionable gender oworosu? And who says that your ancient culture is still the norm in our modern discourse, after all your education and programming in the ways of the West? Don’t be stupidly anachronistic!
I think that you should be interested in the different realities that these proverbs enact, the emergent discursive changes, and realise that you should not be looking for the living among the dead. Same for your folktales and all that.
Just listen to this mocking voice and feel how I feel over endangered Igbo cultural materials and oral literature or other related studies that feed on them. The new Christian fanaticism in Igboland and some other parts of Africa is, of course, a major source of threat. While other cultures are getting energised, building museums for cultural materials and declaring even their sacred forests important cultural sites that can become money spinners through well managed tourism, your soldiers of Heaven are busy demolishing ancient sites and shrines, declaring them evil. They are told by their pastors that the problems in their businesses and employment are from those cultural materials and sites. If they destroy the sites, their businesses would suddenly bloom! They would experience “breakthroughs” even if they spend hours in church and few minutes at work. God will do it, God the patron of laziness; God who punishes those who work hard and gives them the keys of Heaven, but sends those who work hard to Hell! You see your life, your miserable life in 21st-century Africa characterised by fundamentalist religiosity?
I am reluctant now in oral literature of folklore to send my students out for fieldwork, to collect and analyse what is no longer there, to look for the living among the dead. Rather, I am changing direction in oral literature studies. Now, I am interested in making my students understand that there is a new oral literature out there: this new oral literature is hybrid and holds an ongoing conversation with other cultural practices, even with the facilities of the new media. It is an evolving oral literature in which the tortoise drives a jeep or flies a private jet over bad roads and could sit in the National Assembly. Even the State House. If there is anything Tortoise the trickster should be able to do, a trickster that grows, it is that if it could marry a beautiful maiden with only a grain of corn, it should be able to get into the State House, to rule a nation of 200 or so mumus! A trickster must grow, must be made to appropriate modernity and changing times.
Rejoice, students of new culture in Africa. No more being made to cross the timeline, to return to the past, to look for the living among the dead. Unless you are looking for fossils. Unless that. But you may not even find the fossils. Rather, look for what is looking for you at the moment in time and how it is doing it. That is all that matters.
Obododimma Oha
As a researcher with a keen interest in cultures that are fast going extinct and a great enthusiast of my indigenous Igbo culture, I am shocked to realise that cultural materials I look for in my research or send my students to collect and analyse in oral literature or folklore programme, are simply not there in the cultural milieu, not even in the memory of present-day Ndiigbo. I could as well have sent them to construct and analyse fictions. You know what happens when people imagine things. They could spice the experience here and there, after all, we enjoy it more when there is a lot of fabrication! The folktales are now fabrications and in the place of their performances, we have Nollywood films or Hollywood films. Chiwetalu this. Ezemmuo that. Mama G those. Aki and Pawpaw these. And gradually we lose the skills of the cultural telling of the folktale. Black Panther learning to pounce! Season of mimesis and reinvention of self.
Is it the proverbs? Who remembers to cite them? They are a text of your pastness, the fact that you belong to years ago. Why not cite Obama and Trump or the referee of FIFA? Why cite the dog and say, according to the dog, those it requested to buy mat for it in the market should bring back the money because it is used to squatting? Who told you that a dog could talk? At least, not in your world, unless you are into the strangest science fiction in our time!
Worse still, when you expect listeners to exhibit their reception or processing skills by knowing your meaning and intention, citing your ancient culture again as saying that if you throw a proverb at someone like a petrol bomb and the person demands an interpretation, the dowry paid on the head of his or her mother was a colossal waste. Imagine that! Does it not raise an objectionable gender oworosu? And who says that your ancient culture is still the norm in our modern discourse, after all your education and programming in the ways of the West? Don’t be stupidly anachronistic!
I think that you should be interested in the different realities that these proverbs enact, the emergent discursive changes, and realise that you should not be looking for the living among the dead. Same for your folktales and all that.
Just listen to this mocking voice and feel how I feel over endangered Igbo cultural materials and oral literature or other related studies that feed on them. The new Christian fanaticism in Igboland and some other parts of Africa is, of course, a major source of threat. While other cultures are getting energised, building museums for cultural materials and declaring even their sacred forests important cultural sites that can become money spinners through well managed tourism, your soldiers of Heaven are busy demolishing ancient sites and shrines, declaring them evil. They are told by their pastors that the problems in their businesses and employment are from those cultural materials and sites. If they destroy the sites, their businesses would suddenly bloom! They would experience “breakthroughs” even if they spend hours in church and few minutes at work. God will do it, God the patron of laziness; God who punishes those who work hard and gives them the keys of Heaven, but sends those who work hard to Hell! You see your life, your miserable life in 21st-century Africa characterised by fundamentalist religiosity?
I am reluctant now in oral literature of folklore to send my students out for fieldwork, to collect and analyse what is no longer there, to look for the living among the dead. Rather, I am changing direction in oral literature studies. Now, I am interested in making my students understand that there is a new oral literature out there: this new oral literature is hybrid and holds an ongoing conversation with other cultural practices, even with the facilities of the new media. It is an evolving oral literature in which the tortoise drives a jeep or flies a private jet over bad roads and could sit in the National Assembly. Even the State House. If there is anything Tortoise the trickster should be able to do, a trickster that grows, it is that if it could marry a beautiful maiden with only a grain of corn, it should be able to get into the State House, to rule a nation of 200 or so mumus! A trickster must grow, must be made to appropriate modernity and changing times.
Rejoice, students of new culture in Africa. No more being made to cross the timeline, to return to the past, to look for the living among the dead. Unless you are looking for fossils. Unless that. But you may not even find the fossils. Rather, look for what is looking for you at the moment in time and how it is doing it. That is all that matters.
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