African Women and the Shame and Pain of Infertility

An Ethico-cultural Study of Christian Response to Childlessness among the Igbo People of West Africa

Damasus C. Okoro

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725265707, 9781725265691
• eBook ISBN: 9781725265714
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In African Women and the Shame and Pain of Infertility: An Ethico-Cultural Study of Christian Response to Childlessness among the Igbo People of West Africa, Okoro discusses the shipwreck that is associated with infertility in marriage in Africa. Within this space, childlessness places a big question mark on a woman's femininity and the self-esteem of the man. The stigma of infertility most often leads to social isolation and humiliation, particularly of married women, even when the source of infertility may not have come from them. Unfortunately, this situation goes against the highly valued Igbo ethical principle of onye aghala nwanne ya, meaning "no kith or kin should be left behind." Therefore, the purpose of the book is to help married people in Igbo land and Africa at large to appropriate this indigenous principle in their response to the problem of infertility. To attain this, the author critically evaluates discrimination and oppression of infertile couples, particularly women, and shedding light on the paradoxes found in Igbo cultural expressions. He employs a constructive, ethical, cultural, religious, contextual, and theological approach that explores important Igbo religious paradigms like Chi (an Igbo religio-cultural understanding of personal destiny) and Ani (the feminine deity in-charge of the land and fertility) to argue the case for the liberation and integration of infertile couples.

1

A Historical and Socio-Context Analysis of Igbo World

Introduction

The culture and history of a people define who they are explaining what makes them laugh, cry, shout, express happiness and behave the way they do. Seen from a more encompassing anthropological perspective:

Culture is a people’s total way of living, the totality of what a person learns from the elders, peers, and teachers. It includes tool-making and behavior, customs and tradition, ideas of the deity and supernatural, beliefs of what is noble and good, technology which is the people’s major way of coping with environment, economy and social organization (kinship, common territory and special interest groups).35

Culture unveils a people’s strength, challenges and how they formulate solutions to human problems, and thus providing them with a sense of purpose and identity. In other words, culture is the “ideas, beliefs, values and judgement of good and evil that shape communal behavior.”36

To understand a people, one needs to engage in a contextual analysis of the people and their culture. In this case, it will entail paying special attention to their origin, geography, power structure, language, and connection to the supernatural. It will further entail how they process issues about life, how they engage with all the intricacies surrounding their being, including the gender of human persons, the ethical principles employed for making ethical decisions, and the values that guide them in life.37

Toward understanding a people and their world, analyzing the tools they use in navigating their world can help to make their world intelligible and meaningful, even to an outsider. In the anthropocentric understanding of the Igbo cosmos, humans are viewed from different perspectives—from the light of their origin, and of their final destiny. The social analysis of the Igbo socio-cultural context here will cover religious, cultural, and social connections. It is an analysis of the Igbo world, which includes: the “. . .—material, spiritual, and sociocultural—(and) is made intelligible to Igbo by their cosmology, which explains how everything came into being.”38

Victor Uchendu’s (veteran Igbo sociologist and anthropologist) analysis and knowledge of the socio-cultural context plays a major role in understanding an Igbo perspective on Christian ethics, “. . . which defines what the Igbo ought to do and what they ought to avoid . . .”39 This becomes their moral code, which could be either oral or written, and people are—de facto—called to religiously adhere to it. An Igbo moral code will be “the totality of the lore of the land, customs and tradition, a complex of beliefs and practices which every Igbo person inculcates as a guiding philosophy and code of behavior.”40 Examples from these Igbo moral codes include: “patricide, incest, killing of sacred animals, murder, women climbing palm trees, abuse of elders, improper sexual relations, stealing, lying, secretive life, poisoning, and witchcraft.”41

Generally speaking, Igbo people “are a distinguished group of people who live in Southeastern Nigeria. In numbers alone, the Igbo are one of the three dominant ethnic groups of Nigeria, with the Hausa and the Yoruba.”42 Igbo culture has come in contact with numerous other cultures and civilizations, which have changed other aspects of Igbo culture significantly, although other aspects have remained almost unchanged. Some of these catalysts of change include migration (immigration and emigration), meaning the movements of people in and out of Igbo land, and the movements of Igbo people in and out of different cultural spaces. Other factors include the devastating and excruciating experience of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, the Igbo war of secession known as the Biafran war,43 and the arrival of Christianity and its effects of change on Igbo culture, theologies, ethical principles and morality.

George Ekwuru is one of the many Igbo scholars who hold the strong opinion that colonialism was another disastrous form of slavery. He sees it as one of the major forces that depleted and eroded the values of Igbo culture:

[w]ith the coming of the white man as a strange form of cultural encounter, and its full-blown revolutionary impact on this society, the central pillars of the traditional Igbo cultural world ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Praise for and Quotes by Paul Frey
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Historical and Socio-Context Analysis of Igbo World
• Chapter 2: Infertility
• Chapter 3: Engaging African Female Theologies
• Chapter 4: Engaging African Male Theology/Ethics
• Chapter 5: Onye Aghala Nwanne Ya
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Umuokpara Family Marriage List
• Appendix 2: Umuokpara Family Women Marriage List