Igbo Village Affairs

Chiefly with Reference to the Village of Umbueke Agbaja (1947)

Margaret M. Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136249983
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1964. With an updated preface from 1963, to include the census of 1953-54 and Eastern Nigerian law update, this is an account of the people of Igbo with material collected over two periods of field work between 1934 and 1937 in South Eastern Nigeria.

PART I

Village Organisation

Chapter I. INTRODUCTION

THE first part of this book is an attempt to discover some of the means by which an Ibo village achieves the practical ends of government. The question has both a scientific and a practical side. The social anthropologist has the problem of discovering how, with so little, apparently, in the way of authority or of familiar forms, public business gets done. And in the search a number of interesting social devices appear. The Government official has to ask himself how indigenous institutions can not only be found and defined but also adapted to the task of indirect rule.

There are estimated¹ to be nearly four million Ibo or, more correctly, Ibo-speaking people in South Eastern Nigeria. Mainly on the left bank of the Niger, they reach from the Delta, into which some of them have filtered, up through the flat belt of tropical forest and into the rolling, orchard bush country that lies north of it. Their most immediately striking characteristic is what has aptly been called their social fragmentation.² This great people is broken up into hundreds of small, more or less independent, social units, the largest being, in many cases, what we may call the village-group. This is a collection of villages bound together by certain ties, but each one, at any rate in the district with which we are concerned, largely managing its own affairs.

When the British Government originally took over the administration of the country, indirect rule through indigenous institutions, which was possible with the great Mohammedam Emirates of the northern provinces, seemed impracticable among a people with so little central organisation as the Ibo. When, however, in later years it was decided to introduce indirect rule into the southern provinces it became necessary to find out the nature of Ibo institutions. They had been cut across by the system of Native Courts on an arbitrary geographical basis, staffed by Warrant Chiefs, who were individuals chosen by the British with no particular reference to their position in native society. The difficult job of laying bare Ibo institutions was not, therefore, made easier by this introduction, nor by the unpopularity of the old system. But it was made far harder by the Aba riots of 1929-30 in which feeling against taxation and against the Warrant Chiefs, together with discontent at the low price of palm oil, flared into serious disturbance and bloodshed. And there can be no doubt that beneath the overt grievances lay a deep “unconscious, cultural protest.”¹ The riots made the question of reorganisation on a basis of indirect rule doubly urgent and more and more intelligence reports were demanded from Government officials on the subject of the “natural rulers” of the Ibo. An enormous amount of energy and goodwill was put into the work and much information was collected,² though certain factors militated against a full harvest of results. Lack of time often made it inevitable that the method of questions rather than of observation should be used. Moreover, the embitterment of feeling and the atmosphere of suspicion that followed the whole question of taxation and of the riots made enquiry a matter of great difficulty, and it is surprising not that so little but that so much was achieved. One may perhaps add, in passing, that for enquirers who came later still—my own tour on this work started in 1934—the difficulty was not lessened by the fact that the people were already on their guard where investigations were concerned.

This book attempts a rather different approach from that of the search for “natural rulers.” It tries to set out some of the ways in which the public or governmental affairs of an Ibo village are conducted. It does not claim to delimit the Ibo political unit. Whether or not such a delimitation is possible will depend partly on what is understood by political organisation or a political unit. It is not, I think, possible, at least among the Ibo people of the interior with whom I am concerned, to point to any definite territorial unit within which there is a sovereign governmental authority. Anything of the nature of the sovereign State, which has so largely dominated the political consciousness of Europe since the Reformation, is in conception and in fact absent in this part of Africa. Power politics appear also to be absent. That there is political organisation, on the other hand, in the sense that the ends of government are to some extent secured, is an undoubted fact.¹ But political institutions are as yet largely undifferentiated and the unit within which political measures are applied will vary according to circumstances. The village largely manages its own affairs. But there are times when the larger, but far less organised unit, the village-group, or part of it, may impinge upon the doings of the village. This will be seen in the course of the following description of village organisation.

When we consider the Ibo, or Ibo-speaking people, as a whole, in what sense are they to be regarded as a unit ? In the first place they occupy a common territory. They also speak a common language though with many dialectal variations. With a few exceptions these variations appear to be mutually intelligible, without undue difficulty, at least to those who are accustomed to travelling. The language is therefore, potentially, a unifying factor. How far the Ibo are culturally homogeneous it is difficult to say. Using the word culture here to include social organisation one can say that there are many factors, such, for instance, as kinship structure, which would seem to be common over much of the country. There are certain important cult symbols such as

f

[_ ^–] which are widely spread. There are, however, countless variations of custom from district to district and even within a small area. And peripheral or intrusive communities such as Onitsha or Arө Cuku or places bordering on other tribes will tend to show cultural features differing from those of the interior or central Ibo, particularly those of Owerri Division with whom we are concerned. But in all this matter we lack sufficient exact comparative data.

How far are the Ibo an ideological entity ? To what extent do they consider themselves one people ? There is, as we have said, no Ibo State, no central authority which welds the people into a political whole. Thus, having no paramount chief or other organ of government common to them all, they lack what to other peoples may be powerful symbols of unity. Among the Bemba, for instance, Dr. Richards emphasises the importance to them of their paramount chief.

As to the usage and significance of the name “Ibo,” I regret that I did not go more deeply into this matter while I was in the country. I record a few points from my experience there and some from talks I have had with Ibo people in England since I returned. There is no doubt that an increasing number of educated or sophisticated Ibo-speaking people are coming to use the name both about their whole people and their language and with a more or less clear idea of the unit to which the name refers. The name, in fact, is becoming a symbol of unity. When one considers the majority of the people, however, the situation is less easy to define. The Onitsha people, who are said by tradition to be of Benin origin, would tend not to call themselves Ibo and they use the word as a term of contempt for the non-Onitsha, Ibo-speaking people. “Nwa Onyε Igbo” [^{– – –} _ _]—“son of an Ibo”—is a scornful term. It has in this context a suggestion of “slave” in its meaning. Onitsha speaks Ibo, though its dialect is considerably different from that of the central Ibo. I asked two Onitsha men how they would answer a question as to what language they spoke. One said :

—“I speak the Ibo language of Onitsha.” The other said that he would simply say :

—“I speak Onitsha language.”

One of the members of my staff, A., from the interior district of Mbiεri, said that he would not call the people of Onitsha, or of Arө Cuku, or of Oguta, Ibo. The two former he would designate by their names. The latter he would call Nde Oru [^{– – –} _] because they live by the waterside. He added that both Onitsha and Arө people have big watersides, but Ibo people are those who do not have a big water—a river, that is to say, that a steamer can go up. He also added that they are the people who are under no one else. They are not under Onitsha or Are. On another occasion we were discussing witchcraft and he said that he did not think that Ibo people have witches. People who eat εdε [^– _]—coco-yam—do not have them, he said. It is Onitsha and Oguta and non-Ibo people like that—oru—who have them. How far he was using the word Ibo because he had heard me use it I do not know. But he was evidently conscious of a difference between the inland or central Ibo and certain communities which, like Onitsha and Arө, lie towards the circumference of Ibo country. A sophisticated Arө man to whom I have talked in London said that the Arө people call themselves Arθ okε Igbo—Arө, the big Igbo. An educated Mbiεri man to whom I also talked in London, where he had just arrived, said that the people of his district would not till recently have called the people of Onitsha Ibo, but nowadays they would, since they use the Ibo language. He said that his own people have always used the word Ibo about themselves. It comes into their proverbs and sayings. The old people would say, for instance :

—“In the country of all the yam-eating Ibo people I have never seen such a thing.” This would be true, he thought, of the people stretching from his town right down to Arө Cuku. Probably at first they thought they were the only people in the world. But if they we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to 1964 Edition
• Preface
• Part I. Village Organisation
• Part II. Exogamy
• Part III. Women’s Organisation
• Appendix. Temperament
• Index