Dominant ideas in Igbo religious philosophy -Chp 4

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‘CHUKWU’: THE ULTIMATE IN IGBO THOUGHT

Igbo scholars agreed that the Igbo world is principally a world of two interacting realities – the material and the spiritual, each impinging on the other. In this world, the material mirrors the spiritual in the different degrees. The Igbo believe in a life thereafter like many other Africans and also that the status achieved now in this life can be carried over to the next world. Thus though homo-centric in practice, yet the Igbo find ultimate meaning in transcendence. In other words, the Igbo see existence as future-oriented. This is the implication of the word ‘Nkiruka’ – future is greater.

As we indicate, reincarnation is the central Igbo concept which captures this Igbo sense of the future. This is related to the idea of death. Every Igbo believes that death is a necessity. The traditional Igbo believes that when you live well you die well in a good old age. Though Igbo myths, folklore and rituals, they believe that at death they rejoin their ancestors. In other works, their expectation of future is a rejoining of their ancestors whose abode is underneath the earth, the supposedly land of the dead. The world underneath is the abode of the ancestors and evil spirits. Ala Mmuo. On the other hand, christians look upwards – elu-igwe – the abode of ‘Chukwu’ and they believe that when they die they go to God in heaven the sky. Chukwu is the foundation of Igbo religious philosophy. Even though the people make sacrifices to the other gods who quite often fail them, Ndi Igbo still believe that Chukwu, Chineke is the last port of call.

I makwa na Chukwu no- Don’t you know there is God?

This is a saying referring to people who think they can do anything and that God will not see them or they believe they will go free. Their concept of God in terms of his creative power and absoluteness, the source of man’s origin dependence and protection when all others have failed is original in Igbo thought. The irony is why Igbo man inspite of this noble conception preferred to worship the spirit of the earth, and to also look downwards in rejoining the ancestors, instead of looking upwards in returning to his ‘Chukwu’ his maker. It is important that Igbo myth established the fact that originally Igbo ancestors had acknowledged that God created them and had maintained contact with him, a contact which was broken because they now moved away from God and focused on a created thing (the earth) as their god with elaborate sacrifices and worship. The coming of christianity into Igbo land in 1841 was rightly perceived as a civilizing mission. It meant the introduction into the relatively stable Igbo traditional religious framework of an alternative view of the world, a rival cosmology and a different way of understand the place of Igbo man in particular in creation. This encounter marked the beginning of the restoration of the broken link and what has been the developmental implication of either looking downwards to rejoining our ancestors or looking upwards to returning to Chukwu on Igbo man and his society.

 

 

 

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