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ABSTRACT
Death among the Igbo is not the end of existence but is seen as an access road to the otherworld. Hence it is seen as the spin-off of the send-forth of the dead to the next phase of existence more commonly known as ancestry. This send-forth, defined in the framework of funeral encodes a chain of creative and spontaneous acts and actions which tend to democratise the pain of death and the burden of attendant funeral in line with the principles of Igbo thanatology. Furthermore, if art can be spontaneous, then some of the activities that characterise the funeral arena can be seen as creative actions arising from the agency of death. But even at that, they are not a frivolous affair devoted to mere jolitty and fanfare. Rather, Igbo funerals help to demonstrate the interface of this life and the next through culturally coded actions and performances that approximate some of the essences of art in their outlook and content. This paper examines the processes of dying and death and the politics of after-death in Igbo land with the attendant renegotiation of reality as well as the evolution of funeral in Igbo land in the mill of postcoloniality.
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Notes
1. Conversation with Frank Onwumelu, retired civil servant, Enugu, Nigeria on 21 June 2016. The account, according to him, was given by one of his older female relatives from his town, Oghe in Enugu State of Nigeria.
2. For discussion on Igbo names and philosophy of naming, see Basden (Citation1966, p. 60); see also Okafor et al. (Citation2008).
3. In Achebe (Citation2002), the one-handed masquerade addresses Ezeudu’s corpse thus: ‘Ezeudu … If you had been poor in your last life I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked you to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before. If your death was the death of nature, go in peace. But if a man caused it, do not allow him a moment’s rest’ (p. 116). This is a vivid demonstration of the link between this life, the otherworld, and the world to come, as well as the concepts of life after death and reincarnation.
4. The irony of this is that most religions preach life after death, yet adherents still fear death even as it remains the gateway to immortality.
5. In Nigeria, including Igbo land, it is not uncommon to find corpses of criminals or robbery or accident victims left to rot in the street to the horror of the people. Perhaps it is a micro example of what it would look like if corpses in general were left to rot without burial.
6. This is based mainly on oral reports by survivors of the war. Some Biafran captives were buried alive by their Nigerian captors. Inside the secessionist Biafra, life burial was used as capital punishment for ‘saboteurs’, not officially, but often by soldiers and fighters when they took the laws into their hands.
7. Generally speaking, actions and activities which rely on the centralising norms and myths of society can be said to be religious. The very apt description of religion offered by Grainger (Citation1998) clarifies this position: ‘Anthropologists have accepted the idea, first put forward by Hegel and developed by Marx, that societies reinforce their own sense of corporate identity by a process of self-authentication, almost of self-congratulation, whereby ideas and feelings originally produced by the social organism are fed back into the structure in the form of moral and religious sanctions in order to fortify it against disruptive tendencies … Originally created by society, they begin to influence the society that created them. To the religious consciousness which tends always to think of truth in terms of personal relation … these values become a pantheon of divine personalities, a single divine personality who is able to take account of all of them at once. In this way, it is claimed, society makes use of religious ideas as a means of structuring itself for survival’ (pp.22–23).
8. Memorialisation is a by-product of colonisation in Igbo land. Second burial is not common among the Igbo, but practised in some parts of Yoruba in the west of Nigeria. In some parts of Africa, second burial is also common. Among the Imerina, famadihama is celebrated after the funeral. See Bloch (Citation1971, pp. 138–139) for the difference between funeral and famadihama. As he explains, ‘There are two kinds of funerary rites de passage in Imerina. The funeral, which occurs very soon after death, and the ceremony called famadihama, which occurs at least two years afterwards. The funeral is the concern of the society in which the man lives, the famadihama is the concern of the dispersed family … The funeral is a less important ceremony than the famadihama, but it has several rituals in common with it.’
9. Usually the ram is placed in the middle of the funeral arena. Dancers take turns in taunting the ram, even raising it up and throwing it on the ground. Some brave ones would lift the ram up by holding it on its ears between their teeth. All the while, the ram does not bleat or escape. If it does, it means the deceased committed some abominable act during his/her lifetime which must be atoned for before the funeral can be concluded.
10. Christianity in Nigeria tends to see customary practices through jaundiced eyes. This has led to conflicts between tradition and Christianity in parts of Eastern Nigeria. See Ottenberg (Citation2012, pp. 65–80) and Ezeh (Citation2012, pp. 81–94).
11. The umuada in Igbo society are women from a compound or village married to other compounds, families or villages. They usually keep close contact with their families and villages and can still influence opinion back home. At funerals and other ceremonies, they are a formidable force in the negotiation of culture.
12. Aso ebi (literally, cloth[e] of the relatives), as its name implies, should be worn by relatives of the dead or the bereaved at funerals; it could be worn by relatives of wedding couples also. But generally people can also decide to make and wear aso ebi in solidarity to their friends at sundry occasions. It is an instrument of ranking and power in the burial arena and other events where it is used.
13. The graveyard is a piece of environmental art capable of eliciting various forms of reactions and emotions from people. It parodies the city. It is a minimised city peopled with diminutive pieces of architecture. Modern cemeteries in Igbo land may not be as rich or complex, yet they are monuments to the dead and death and repositories of the objects of funerary arts. In that sense, and as transcendental architecture, they mediate between loss and hope, and between this world and the otherworld.
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Chukwuezugo Krydz Ikwuemesi
C. Krydz Ikwuemesi (b. 1967) is an artist of superlative merit. A painter, art critic, ethno-aesthetician and a prolific writer, he is founder and International Secretary of the Pan-African Circle of Artists and Emeritus President of the Art Republic. He is Associate Professor of Fine Art, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He was a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan in 2008 and was a Japan Foundation Fellow in Hokkaido in 2009; he is a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Program and a Senior Fellow of IFRA (French Institute for Research in Africa). He is the editor of The Art Republik, Letter from Afrika, and The Artfield (Journal of Art and Visual Culture published by the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, UNN), and currently the Coordinator Death Studies Association of Nigeria.