Afiliación (AF)

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situation, rather than invalidate the effort, challenges us to seek out what is central to the Igbo world view while retaining a consciousness of how modifications have been created by time and distances.

One significant thing about Igbo traditional societies is the absence of an all-embracing social and political system with the result that many writers and investigations have wondered in what degree one could reasonably talk of the Igbo as a unit? Answering the question, in what sense are the Igbo or Igbo-speaking people regarded as a unit, Green says,

they occupy a common territory, speak a common language though with many dialectical variations, despite countless variations in custom, there are a number of cultural factors which are common to all Igbo areas, such as, kingship structure, cult-symbols (like ofo and ancestral cults) which are widely spread².

The belief in the ancestral world serves the purpose of a watch-dog to the behaviour and thought of a person. To become an ancestor is to live in harmony within a person and his/her community.

According to Animalu, by examining the Igbo way of life, we hope to be able to guide our thoughts (akonauche) and co-ordinate our deeds in the wider world, so as to stay on the path of honour and humanity³. What then is akonauche in the understanding of a person in Igbo world-view and how does it mediate in the thoughts and actions of a person (s)?

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By making use of the abstract dimension of thought (ako na uche) it is possible to show that the Igbo world view leads to the inner curves which are shown in Figures 3a and 3b. In order not to bore you (our reader) with unintelligible mathematics, though philosophical, we have relegated the analysis of motion from the Igbo world view to drive home our points on how akonauche supervenes the individual‘s actions and thoughts in a way that social order is guaranteed. The result of the analysis is, however, easy to appreciate from a knowledge of the elementary fact that any plane curve can be described in two (dual or reciprocal) ways, either as the motion of points or as the motion of tangent lines drawn at each point of the curve. Moreover, at each point on the curve, one can draw a line perpendicular to the tangent, which is called the normal to the curve, and the envelopes of the normals is called the involute of the curve⁵. The involutes of the parabola and the ellipse are the inner curves indicated in Figures 3a and b.

Here we would want to sum up the idea of akonauche as a metaphysical term using the Igbo principle of causality and duality. The Igbo proverb that says, ―Wherever something (e.g. an ellipse) stands, something else (in particular, its involute) will stand beside it is an indication that a person is not just a physical entity but also a metaphysical/spiritual entity. This means that there is no one way of looking at reality. If there is Newton‘s law of motion which leads to the elliptic orbit shown in Figure 3b, there is also a second point of view – another law of motion- which is no less fundamental than Newton‘s law of motion is the basis of the recurrent motif in various forms of Igbo and African artistic expressions, as indicated in Figures 4a and b. In Figure 4a, we see that the four-cusped hypocycloid which is the involute of an ellipse is the shape of the uli (body art) motif for the head of the kolanut (oji) which adorns the ikenga motif of the Ahiajoku medallion and the Imo seal as well as the seal of the Njikoka Local Government Fair in 1989; and in Figure 4b, we see the same archetype on the African fabric design of Igbo origin

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exhibited by C.S. Okeke at the museum of the National Centre of Afro-American Artists in the United States of America. We do not believe that the recurrence of this motif is a mere accident.

Rather, it is probably the basis of the motif on the bronze altar in Thurstan Shwa‘s account of archeological discoveries at Igbo-Ukwu, shown in Figure 5, whose carbon dating is 800 A.D⁶. It also appears in the nsibidi writing collated by D. I. Nwoga. Figure 6 is an artists‘s impression of the precarious position of man, or should we say a woman, in the hypocycloid archetype which may be viewed, as indicated in Figures 7a-c, as the buoyancy locus of an elliptic ship of fate.

Fig. 3b shows the ontological and causal web of connection of a person. At the centre is the inner awareness of a person in his communal and religious exigencies.

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The position of stability of man in relation with his environment is captured inside such a ship as defined by the buoyancy locus, and the titling of the ship‘s centre of gravity outside this locus leads, as it were, to a catastrophic toppling of man into the sea by fate.

The fact that the hypocycloid archetype is shared by other peoples of Nigeria and Africa is demonstrated in Figures 8 and 9. Figure 8a is the relief decoration on the exterior walls of a house in Northern Nigeria and Figure 8b is the relief decoration on the exterior wall of a shrine at Eke-Ukwu in Anambra State⁷ while Figure 9 is a Gbaonese guardian figure in an ancestral shrine. Technically, the hypocycloid archetype represents the dual solution of the equation of option of a planet round the Sun generated by the envelopes of the lines of gravitational force and is the type of orbit envisaged in the Ptolemy wheel-within-wheel model of the Universe which was abandoned during the Renaissance in favour of the Coopernican model. It is as if the Igbo and African artists had an intuitive knowledge of Newton‘s law of gravity.

The foregoing analysis leads to the crucial question raised by Professor Willy Umezinwa in his epoch-making article entitled, A Semiotic Theory of Curvilinear Form in the African Novel which was the basis of the 1988 Interdisciplinary Conference on African System of Thought organized by the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPPS) at Kuru: Does there exist an African system of thought, and if so, is it symbolized by a curvilinear form⁸? If we may paraphrase his answer to this question, it is that just as the Caudwellian man (by which he meant the white races of man) engages in a struggle with nature, so also does an African man…

question nature, and in a bionic process engage in a mimetic reproduction of nature‘s characteristics of growth⁹. Thus, he continued.

Growth in Nature and growth in the Africa but fall into the same paradigmatic class. One is the evocation of the other. The round

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and conical shape of the hut is not an accident; it is an intuitive dialogue, the mimesis or the transposition of natural growth as exemplified by the breast and womb of woman. Some African populations, as if to consummate a one-to-one resemblance between the breast, the womb (and the vaginal entrance) and the hut cover the apex of the hut with a cooking pot. In this way, the nipple and the navel of the woman, each correspond to the geometrical shape of the reversed cooking pot; and the vaginal entrance to the womb corresponds to the door to the hut ¹⁰.

The significance of Professor Umezinwa‘s insight has been confirmed by the result of an experiment conducted by an arts reader in the United States of America. The arts teacher asked the children in her class to make four points on a sheet of paper and connect the points any way they liked. The children, all of whom were brought up in the Western culture, connected the point with straight lines leading to the rectangle. Hardly any children connected the points into the curvilinear forms. This goes to show that the eternal order of the Renaissance is linear, whereas the ―eternal order‖ of the psyche of African children is, according to Umezinwa, curvilinear, the former following a principle of minimal distance, or if we wish, a principle of rhythm. The latter agrees with the view which Fritjof Capra, a distinguished Chinese high-energy physicist, states in his book, The Tao of Physics., In his words.

The natural world…. Is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things to not happen in sequences, but all together, a world where- as modern physics tells us – even empty space is curved.¹¹

.It should by now be clear that the use of creative intelligence (ako na uche) which was called for at the beginning of this chapter ought to be applied to our entire

cultural matrix- world view, religion, politics, economics, military and so forth- as a way of life, in order to find our way forward in the modern scientific age that contains space travel, television, computers, energy crisis, atomic destruction, and drug addiction, among other societal ills¹²

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We do not think that the use of creative intelligence (akonauche) calls for any specific recommendations in the sense of a detailed programme for how such creative intelligence is to be inculcated in the nature of personhood. The important thing is that it should help us to guard against certain assumptions we have been making in certain emotional outbursts about what a person is and how the idea of akonauche became active in the ontological nature of persons. The idea is that the Igbo way of life, including our concept of persons, time, and ritual symbols, are indicative of an intuitive dialogue with nature, in a relational way, and are not only rational but are shared by other African and pre-Renaissance European cultures. However, when we formulate a new philosophic paradigm from the Igbo/African world view based on a creation axiom of immortal regenerative cycles of birth, death and rebirth derived from the Ufiejoku cult, we obtain an African system of thought that is as different from the Western World‘s imperial and capitalist system of thought as modern wave mechanics is different from Newtonian forum.

Anya‘s call for

an accelerated transformation of (our) cosmological framework within the traditional African thought system (as) an essential preliminary step to the development of a scientific outlook and culture in the general population…¹³

Our belief in endorsing this is that technological development does not exist in a cultural vacuum – it is culture supported; and scientific discovery favours the prepared mind- a mind prepared by a culture.

We hope that we have not given you the impression that the holistic (Igbo/African) paradigm on the idea of personhood that is anchored on akonauche is superior or inferior to the atomistic (European) paradigm. Such a value judgment lies outside the methodology and focus of this

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work. This method has helped us transpose into philosophy the peculiarity of personhood in Igbo world view that emphases the principle of duality or reciprocity and the relationality of the Ufiejoku cult; but it means that we ourselves should also behave like light, or as one puts it in biblical terms, we must be like ―children of life:, creative and intelligent, holistic and atomistic, spiritual and human, in all aspects of our lives. It is this significance of akonauche that we attach to the archetype representing the head of four-lobbed kolanut in the uli motif on the ikenga, which symbolizes the ―new order of personhood.