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jmoigbokwe@3web.net Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

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NIGERIA'S POLYGAMOUS FAITH

olygamous faith! This was one of the Ikemba's random themes in his 1989 book, "Because I am Involved". In a largely glowing tribute to General Olusegun Obasanjo later repudiated in 2003, Ojukwu had expressed shock at the counsel of Obasanjo that juju be employed in seeking an end to Apartheid. We would come back to this later.

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Let us first talk Anambra State. This battered State is in the news again. It is in the news for a prostitution and a perversion that is as old as its civilization. It is in the news for the breach to the sanctum sanctorum of a shrine of evil sorcery and witchcraft. It is in the news for being home to the Ogwugwu Shrine and its crafty High Priests of murder and mayhem. Oh yes, Anambra State is in the news for having a slate of public functionaries sold and beholden to a deity nurtured and sustained by a culture that still struggles to keep pace with its times.

But wait! Anambra State is in the news for much more than these. It is in the news as a point of light on the big retrogression that is Nigeria's polygamy of faith. It is in the news shining its little light to a nation's need for a revamping of its soul. It is in the news calling out for justice for the many victims of ritual kidnapping and murder across the country. It is in the news telling Nigeria and the whole world that deprivation and autochthonous beliefs continue to conspire and waste innocent lives. And yes, Anambra State is in the news warning the country and the world that we, to our peril, worship God by daylight and burn our candles to the Devil by nightfall. It is in the news sounding the alarm that whoever dines with the devil pays with his life! And make no mistake about it, the spilled blood of the innocent is in the news calling for retribution and demanding serious, honest-to-goodness retreat from our corruption of belief.

I write from a heart heavy with grief and sadness! I write in deep sorrow from what has come of the once promising beacon to Black Destiny. Ponder Nigeria for a second! Ponder her a second longer! Do you not see that in a lot of areas where the rest of the world is moving forward, Nigeria is headed in the opposite direction? Does it not sadden you, or boggle your mind as it does mine, that in a country with perhaps the highest per capita people of faith of any other country in the world, faith thrives alongside faithlessness, love alongside hate, light alongside darkness and community alongside selfism? Does it not bother you to see how the family has depreciated steadily over the years? Does the cache of headless corpses at the Ogwugwu Shrine not testify to the unfaithfulness of our faith? Does the future not look bleaker than brighter to realize the educated elite of the country are the chief patrons of these wooded palaces of the occult and the heathen? The sordid discoveries in Okija are, but a microcosm of the moral ills eating the flesh of Nigeria. Ogwugwu-like shrines abound in all the four corners of Nigeria, in many more forms, all testifying to our polygamous faith.

Consider the issue of secular and sacred slaves. What we in Igbo language call "oru" and "osu", secular and sacred slaves are supposed to be less than human, unequal to other citizens by the sheer accident of pedigree. They do not normally inter-marry with the rest of the population. On account of their allegedly impure heritage, the "osu" particularly have been historically used for evil hatchet jobs, of the sort uncovered in Okija. Amidst our loud cries of marginalization, we find right in our various villages and towns, citizens regarded as unworthy of social consort and thus inadmissible into our presumed nobility of citizenship. This is servitude to two gods. We seek for ourselves the dignity that we have denied others. When we create divisions in our humanity, those denied of social acceptability commit licentious atrocities with an abandon that only equals their sense of unjust ostracism. The once social tragedy of osu and oru has today become economic. In our ranks, we find many economic osu and oru. They lack the money, the prestige and the respect that make a citizen count in his community. And so they fall for any faith that promises a lift out of the depths. Today, a veritable army of economic osu and oru exist cannibalizing and sacrificing their kind at the altar of false pecuniary respectability.

We also see this polygamy in our medical health practices. What to medical science is stasis dermatitis, for instance, is "enyi ule" to the Igbo. The same condition carries different other names in all the 250-plus languages of Nigeria. Stasis dermatitis, a common inflammatory skin disease that occurs on the lower extremities in patients with chronic venous insufficiency, typically affects middle-aged and elderly patients. It rarely occurs before the fifth decade of life, except in patients with acquired venous insufficiency due to surgery, trauma, or thrombosis. According to a study by the team of Dr. Scott L Flugman, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a slight female preponderance has been reported in stasis dermatitis. This is said to be most likely due to the fact that pregnancy results in significant stress on the lower-extremity venous system. In the face of overwhelming medical evidence, our people still widely believe in fallacious "enyi ule". They believe a thin line of white chalk across a village street is nothing but a trap of death set for them by both real and imagined enemies. The idiocy of his myopia then drives him, at the first instance of itchy skin, to run to the unschooled herbalist or native doctor for a cure. The sore skin, exposed to unsanitary treatment worsens from infection and soon faith in "enyi ule" proves true in death. This is bondage! It is vicious bondage! It is this polygamy's vicious hold on the psyche of the people that needs to be broken, not the white line in the sand.

Growing up in Nnewi, I saw as an observant witness, the power and the danger inherent in the ignorant faith in a shaky and an unstable god. A man had accused another of utilizing voodoo in an attempt to kill him. The case had been brought to the "Obi" or the Palace. The Chief had summoned the Clan and made this case one for the Clan to decide. The Clan then resorted to the traditional ritual of raising a team (Ikwa Ukpa Chukwu) to a Shrine in Arochukwu, somewhere in Imo State. The mission was to obtain the inviolate truth from this god that supposedly could supernaturally divine everything. This Arochukwu deity also told no lies. He had supernatural keys to the most hidden truths in any case brought before it. The Team traveled and returned from Arochukwu. But uncontested truth did not return with it. And neither did peace. Instead of truth and peace, the visit brought back more trouble that sundered a once united Clan. Things fell apart after that misadventure! That ill-informed visit to the Arochukwu Shrine not only deepened the mystery it had set out to solve. It also completely shattered the regally proud centre of a princely Clan.

Research has since taught me that the Arochukwu deity, much like the Ogwugwu in Okija is an elaborate bogeyman set up and shrouded in myth to feed and fatten off the fat of a culture glutting in superstitious beliefs. The Ogwugwu "killed" the dead, the absurdity goes. How then do you account for the much-alive Governor Ngige and the other elected officials who worshipped the Shrine and took the same Ogwugwu oath? Simple deduction shows they refused to return to the shrine to drink from the poisoned chalice of the high priests. It's greedy man who kills not earthen pieces of clay and carved wood. If this were not so, how is it the unfortunate victim, convicted and "killed" by these lifeless deities always had to surrender all his earthly goods to the high priests? How is it the goods of the victim are not destroyed in keeping with the claimed altruism of the gods? How is it that one party to any problem "resolved" by these gods inevitably ended up dead? And how is it there is never a middle ground, where say, the "guilty" was allowed to make amends or issue restitution? For that matter, why the use of deadly, poisonous concoction to ensure the fool proof murder of the gullible? The "guilty" must die for the Savage Keepers of the Shrines had businesses to grow and families to enrich!

Nigeria's debasement of belief is mainstream. It permeates all social strata and all aspects of life. From the wettest tip in the Rivers to the driest top in Sokoto, we worship paradoxes. We worship paradoxes that not only confound, but also conscript. Before Col Achuzia, Obasanjo was the first prominent Nigerian citizen to publicly endorse the use of juju in the settlement of scores. He advocated it for South Africa, shocking the Ikemba as well as many well-meaning citizens. When he counselled the use of voodoo to resolve the Apartheid problem, he served notice that he was a believer in its efficacy at resolving social problems. His advocacy also prejudged the militant struggle for freedom a failure. But Obasanjo forgot that if voodoo held any lasting efficacy, colonialism would not have succeeded in raping and plundering our continent. If voodoo were efficient, powerful entrenched local slave owners would not have been forcibly pacified, imprisoned and compelled to free their slaves. The initial successes of religion in our parts have given way to a wholesale return to primitive bestiality. And this bestiality assumes a degree of fissionability when respectable personages of the country advocate adherence to it.

Following the Obasanjo example, we now hear Col Achuzia calling patent human sacrifice tradition. He says it is tradition, because of its historical antiquity. Achuzia's definition is scary. If the Okija atrocity is tradition, would it be acceptable tradition to Achuzia to have a relative of his buried alive with the traditional ruler of his town? Would it be tradition to have his leprous relative dumped for dead in the lonely forest of his village? Would he still call it tradition to have his twin grand children gored and thrown to the wooded gods of his town? The point here is that tradition is not just a way of life. Tradition is not static. It evolves. It matches with time. Tradition should not just preserve itself. It should preserve life. You do not secure tradition by wasting life. It is not tradition to throw away twins. We confirmed this truth when we stopped the practice. It is not tradition to dump lepers in forbidden bushes. We too confirmed this truth when we started to provide cure for leprosy. And certainly, it is not tradition to offer human sacrifice to strange gods. The last is the one practice that has endured. It does no good to Igbo culture or the Igbo Nation to hear the chief scribe of a major Igbo organization justifying the ritual sacrifice of human blood. Achuzia's defence of the Ogwugwu Shrine besmirches the entire Igbo nation. The Ohaneze Ndigbo should publicly retract the unfortunate comments of Achuzia or risk the eternal opprobrium of the Igbo Nation.

Nigeria's culture of polygamous beliefs is about the most basic and destructive of her problems. It is polygamy of everything to believe in the expediencies of the moment. Polygamy of faith is relativism at its worst! Point to any local or national malaise, and you would find this distortion of faith at its core. From the smallest local councillor to the biggest President of the country, this idolatry is devouring Nigeria's core. We preach monogamy, but practice polygamy. Polyandry is not far behind as our womenfolk keep and mate other men in common law matrimony. We subdue our moral qualms with rationalisations: if you do not take it, somebody else will. And so we dig ourselves deeper into abysmal holes of moral depravity from which emergence often came too late, when it did

Your faith has made you well, the Bible tells us. Your faith has made you well because you placed it in the right God. Your faith has made you well because you placed it in the right medicine. Your faith has made you well because you placed in the right doctor. And yes, your faith makes you well because it is not polygamous. Your faith makes you well because you have not believed in competing fallacies. Our people have to return to the foundation of our salvation. We have to touch and renew the basis of our faith - the faith which has helped us spare the twins who grew to become successful surgeons; the faith which helped us free the slaves into dignified citizenship, the faith which cleared once forbidden wildernesses and turned them into churches. Oh yes, that old faith which once shone its piercing light forcing the darkness to run for cover.

We raised this monster choking our life. We raised his temple of evil. We also can tear the walls down. Yes, we can still tear down the walls, for thank goodness, this monster is not yet our Frankenstein. Okija is telling us this is not yet our Frankenstein! Let Okija, therefore, be the autocatalysis to sustained indignation to other sanctuaries of murder across the country.

And so I call on all Nigerians of good faith to join ranks and man the ramparts for this new struggle - the struggle to save the soul of Nigeria. Every good soldier of faith is welcome in the Lord's Cavalry. Let us stay the course until this fight begun in the devil's house in Okija ends in victory in the House of the Lord all across the land.

We begin this war by first weaning ourselves from our polygamy of faith!