Somewhere in the forests around Owerri, in the Igbo heartland of what is now southeastern Nigeria, a community would every so often be told by a diviner that Ala, the earth god, wished to be honoured with a house — the mbari. What followed took months, and sometimes years. A group of men and women, chosen and ritually secluded, withdrew from ordinary life to build, out of nothing but mud and pigment, an entire world in miniature. Inside a great open-sided shelter they raised painted clay figures: the gods in their majesty, a woman nursing a child, a man on a bicycle, a leopard, a colonial officer, a market, a birth, a quarrel, the whole comedy and terror of existence modelled in earth. When at last the mbari was finished, the community gathered for a festival, admired it, and then walked away and left it to the rain. No one maintained it. No one repaired it. Over the seasons, the moulded figures softened and slumped and returned to the ground they had been raised from. The offering was never the house itself, rather, it was the making of it and the reclamation by the earth that had asked for it.
The art historian Herbert Cole, who documented the mbari houses of the Owerri Igbo, understood that he was looking at something more than decoration. He was looking at a philosophy that controlled a people's way of life. To understand why a civilization would pour years into a masterpiece designed to melt, you have to understand how the Igbo view the relationship between the divine and human life. For them, a crucial relationship exists between the divine and human. The former, often represented by gods and spirits, could demand, warn, punish and protect, and the latter, was expected to respond. Most often, a diviner had the obligation of interpreting divine will while the community had a duty to fulfil it.
This relationship sits close to the heart of Igbo ideas about personhood. For every Igbo, each person has entered the world with a spiritual counterpart known as the chi. The chi is somewhat difficult to translate in a single English word. It has however been described as a personal god, a spiritual principle and even a divine counterpart associated with a person's destiny.
The Igbo Concept of Chi
In Igboland, the concept of life is central to the Igbo understanding of the human person. Life is often viewed as invaluable and is even reflected in the names the Igbo people bear. Popular names such as Nduibisi, for instance, mean "life is supreme," while Ndukaku means "life is greater than wealth" and Nduka means "life is greatest." This naming culture reveals the importance attached to human existence in Igbo thought.
The value the Igbos place on life also shapes their understanding of the individual. While a human being exists as a distinct being, with distinct interests and responsibilities, he is also seen as a part of a larger community. This value is also seen in how the Igbos cherish and honour life-centred activities that preserve human life, such as child bearing and marriages.
The Igbo concept of the human person is firmly intertwined with the concept of Chi, commonly understood as a divine spirit/life-giving force/personal god/spiritual guardian, unique to each person. Every person comes into the world with a chi, a personal spirit, a portion of the divine, a guardian and a bearer of destiny, assigned by Chukwu — God — and belonging to that person alone. The uniqueness of a person's chi is depicted in popular Igbo parlance, 'Onyena Chi ya,' which means each person has his own chi.
The importance of chi in Igbo thought lies in the belief that the chi has a profound influence on the course of a person's physical and spiritual life. Human existence, in this understanding, is vulnerable to events that cannot always be foreseen or understood, yet these events are believed to be pre-arranged by a person's chi. The chi is believed to be so powerful that it gives a person infinite pathways to self-actualisation and the achievement of communal responsibilities. For the average igbo man, the chi is an ever-present spiritual force that shapes how he understands his circumstances, successes and failures. Hence, he will do nothing without first deferring to his chi.
Despite its seemingly omnipotent status, the Igbos also believe that the chi can be controlled. When a man is able to master himself to a certain extent, he is believed to be able to navigate any situation life presents successfully. Yet again, despite this portrayed possibility of mastery, it is simultaneously believed that the chi holds a certain power of determinism that subjugates a man's personal efforts to achieve desired results. This is especially manifested when he fails — he becomes an unlucky man when he fails and a lucky man with a good chi if he succeeds. When the Igbo want to say that a person has died, they can say that his chi has agreed to it.
The novelist Chinua Achebe, who gave the concept its most elaborate modern treatment in his essay "Chi in Igbo Cosmology," warned against reducing the concept of chi to fate. He explained it in the context of one of the most radical proverbs in igboland: onye kwe, chi ya ekwe — when a man says yes, his chi says yes also. The person and the personal god move together. The chi does not overrule the human being; it answers him. A man's affirmation comes first, and the spirit assents. Hence, in this context, destiny becomes more than a fate handed down in the spiritual world. Instead, it is a negotiation one enters with a strong bargaining power. He is, in a sense, the author of his own life.
Achebe drew out the duality that runs through the whole idea. The Igbo, he observed, are deeply suspicious of anything single, final, or absolute. Wherever one thing stands, they say, another stands beside it. For every force there is a counter-force, for every assertion a qualification, for every man his chi. This is a metaphysical principle, but it is also, as we are about to see, a political one. A people who believe that nothing stands alone and that no truth is total are a people constitutionally unwilling to let any single power stand over them unopposed.
The Body and the Soul
To the Igbo, a person is more than the physical body that can be seen. There is the ahu, the flesh and the physical body, the part of a person that exists in a space that can be touched, injured, healed and buried. The word ahu can also be used to represent the entirety of a person himself. When an Igbo person asks, "Ahu gi kwanu?" he is asking, "How is your body?" However, such a question is beyond the flesh and extends to the overall well-being of a person.
This is especially important in Igbo cosmology as a person's body is believed to be a mere part of the whole of him. Something else exists beneath the skin, something that cannot be held in the hand or measured by the eye — the spiritual counterpart.
The Igbo world is divided between ala mmadu, the land of human beings, and ala mmuo, the world of spirits. These two worlds, albeit separate, are believed to be in constant relationship with one another. What happens in one can disturb the other. A sickness, for instance, may have a physical cause, but it can also demand a spiritual explanation. A family may prosper, yet still ask what unseen forces have favoured them. A man may work hard and still encounter a run of misfortune that seems to resist every earthly explanation. The visible world and the invisible world are bound together by causes that are not always apparent to the human eye. To the Igbo, therefore, the physical and spiritual are different dimensions of the same existence.
But what, exactly, is the invisible part of a person? It becomes difficult to provide an explanation here as there is no single Igbo word that can be placed neatly over the English word "soul." Different scholars identify different elements of the person: obi, uche, chi, eke and mmuo. Each points towards something beyond the flesh, although they do not all mean the same thing. Obi belongs to the inner person. It is associated with the heart, with affection, desire and the will. Uche belongs to thought and understanding. Chi is associated by some scholars with the life-giving force within a person. Eke connects the individual to the ancestral line from which he comes.
And then there is mmuo. Mmuo belongs to the world that cannot be seen. It can mean spirit, but it can also refer to the spiritual world itself and to the beings who inhabit it. Within discussions of the human person, it encompasses things that cannot be reduced to flesh: consciousness, intelligence, feeling, emotion and conscience.
The Igbo belief that the human person is more than just his body becomes clearest at death. Here we also understand the interplay of some of the elements mentioned above. When a human dies, it is believed that he doesn't just go into oblivion. Rather, the ahu (body) remains behind, eventually returning to the earth from which it comes. The invisible aspects of the person, meanwhile, enter another state of existence. The dead become onye mmuo, a spirit person. This is why death does not completely sever a person from those he leaves behind in Igboland. The dead remain present in the lives of the living as ancestors. The living remember them, honour them, speak to them through ritual and offer sacrifices in the hope of maintaining the relationship between the two worlds. The boundary between the living and the dead is therefore never as absolute as the physical eye suggests, for the igbos.
A person can leave the village and still belong to it. Similarly, he can leave the world of human beings and still remain part of the world that shaped him. This particularly helps us understand why sacrifice occupies such an important place in Igbo religious life. People pour libations and offer sacrifices for different reasons: to express gratitude, to seek favour, to repair wrongdoing, to avert danger or to seek protection — all from forces they cannot see. Offerings, for instance, are not simply sent directly to the supreme God. Spiritual beings and ancestors may stand between the worlds, carrying the concerns of the living into the unseen realm.
The complete person, therefore, is never imagined as a solitary creature. He belongs to his family, his lineage, his village and the larger community of the living. He belongs, too, to the dead who come before him and to the unborn who come after him. His life stretches backwards into ancestry and forwards into posterity.
Yet there is something within him that belongs to nobody else. His chi. A man may inherit his father's name, belong to his mother's lineage, live among his kinsmen and carry the obligations of his village, but his chi is his alone.
The Role of the Chi in Freedom of Choice
The chi is not an excuse to surrender to fate. The old Igbo proverb mentioned above, 'onye kwe, chi ya ekwe,' gives us a deeper understanding of this. Translated as 'When a person says yes, his chi says yes,' there is something almost startling about the simplicity of this proverb.
The proverb does not imagine a human being sitting helplessly beneath a destiny already written for him. It places the individual's own decision beside the power of his spiritual counterpart. The man acts; the chi responds.
Essentially, this means that a person must still rise. In fact, it almost becomes a responsibility imposed by society. He is expected to rise and take charge of his destiny. He must work. He must struggle. He must make choices. He must try to become what he is capable of becoming. His chi may accompany his journey, but it does not make the journey meaningless by taking absolute control and being an ultimate determinant.
Most confuse the role of the chi as that of a dominating force that directs the affairs of a man. This is the tension at the heart of the Igbo understanding of destiny. If the chi has a hand in determining the course of a person's life, where does human freedom begin? If destiny has already been chosen, what can effort accomplish? Yet if effort means nothing, why admire the hardworking man, why celebrate achievement, why blame failure, why urge him to make something of himself?
The answer lies in the relationship between the two. The individual does not create his life entirely by himself, but neither does he simply receive it as a finished thing. There is something given to him, something that belongs to the realm of destiny, and something he must do with it. That is why chi is more than a religious explanation for good luck and bad luck. It is an explanation of individuality itself.
The community gives a person a place; family gives him a lineage; ancestors give him a history. The gods, on the other hand, give him a world governed by powers greater than himself. But his chi gives him something that cannot be inherited from anybody else — A self.
The Political Shape of Chi
At the centre of the old Igbo there was the Nri, a small theocratic community whose priests, claim the founding of Igboland itself.
In the Nri storyline, the supreme being, Chukwu, also called Chineke (the source that creates), sent down a divine ancestor named Eri into a world that was still soft, a waste of marsh and water with no dry ground to stand on. Eri complained that there was nowhere to settle. Chukwu answered by sending a blacksmith from Awka (the capital city of Akwa Ibom, a contemporary state in southeast Nigeria, where the Igbos occupy to date), who came with bellows and charcoal and fire and dried the earth until it was firm enough to hold a people. The Igbo, in this account, live on ground that a smith hammered into being, a fitting origin for a civilization that would prize the man who makes things with his own hands.
Then came a famine. In the tradition preserved at Nri, the first Eze Nri, the priest-king, watched his people starve and cried out to Chukwu for food. Chukwu's instruction was terrible and specific. The iEze Nri was to take the life of his own first son and his own first daughter, and to bury them. He did as he was told. From the grave of the son, grew the yam, the great staple, the king of crops; from the grave of the daughter, grew the cocoyam, the woman's crop that fed the household between harvests; and from the bodies of a sacrificed man and woman came the oil palm and the other gifts of the field. The Igbo eat, in this account, because a father gave up his children, and the food that keeps a people alive is the transfigured body of the innocent buried in the ground.
The Eze Nri who came out of the yam sacrifice was not a king who ruled but a priest who cleansed. He commanded no army and, by the deepest of taboos, could shed no blood; his power was the power to remove abomination from the land, to purify, to crown other men and then withdraw.
Beyond the rituals of Nri, the great majority of Igbo communities did without sacred kings altogether. Igbo enwe eze, runs the famous saying: the Igbo have no king. There were exceptions, riverine and central towns such as Onitsha and Aboh where kingship did take hold. But the dominant Igbo pattern, across hundreds of autonomous villages, was a republic without a monarch, governed by assemblies in which any titled man might speak. Curated systems comprising age grades, councils of elders, holders of the ozo title which a man earned through his own achievement rather than inherited, and oracles and diviners which were consulted when human deliberation reached its limit, governed this pattern. Power was scattered on purpose, held in so many hands at once that no single hand could close around it.
This is the political shape of chi. If every person carries his own portion of the divine and is the author of his own destiny, then no person is entitled to stand as god over the rest. If nothing in the cosmos stands without something beside it, then no ruler can stand without a check.
