Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Speech by Catherine Acholonu at the Umunneochi LGA (Okigwe) Cultural Day Celebration

LECTURE DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR CATHERINE ACHOLONU AT THE UMUNNEOCHI LGA CULTURAL WEEK CELEBRATION, OKIGWE, ABIA STATE, NIGERIA, 15TH MAY, 2009 (The Lecture was delivered in Igbo language)

Barely two weeks ago, precisely on the 5th of May 2009, the First Igbo Women’s World Conference kicked off at Aba, hosted by the Abia State Governor, Chief Theodore Orji and his wife Mrs. Mercy Orji. That conference saw a gathering of over 1,000 Igbo Women from all five South East States and Rivers and Delta, led by the First Ladies of each state and or the Commissioners of Women Affairs. It was the first conference in Nigeria to bring under one roof four Governor's wives, a Deputy Governor (and wife), a Governor and to crown it all, the Wife of the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Dame Patience Goodluck Jonathan – a daughter of Abia State (by matrilineage), who was the Special Guest of Honour. After two days of deliberations, crowned with a visit to the historic town of Nchara, Ikwuano, Umuahia, to pay homage at the tomb of Madam Ikonna Nwanyiukwu Enyia, Nigeria’s most indomitable Woman warrior, who led Igbo women on the world famous Aba Women’s war of 1929 and defeated the colonial administration and its militia, the women came up with the resolution, which I now deliver to you, royal fathers of Igbo land, friends and people of Abia State.

The women ruled that wherever Igbo people gather, henceforth, whether for meeting, for conference or for celebration, the language of communication and delivery must be Igbo language. Speakers must first deliver the core of their message in Igbo and then, where necessary, translate into English. They have also requested that we beg you, our sons, brothers and husbands, to abolish ALL customs and traditional behaviours and observances that are abusive to the woman and the girl child; to abolish all customs and cultural observances that impinge on the very existence and progress of the women folk and those that denigrate women as a gender group or classify them as inferior.

Aligning themselves with the position canvassed by Chinua Achebe, in his 2009 Ahiajoku lecture and in his novel Things Fall Apart, that the failure of the hero of his novel, Okonkwo, is brought about by his disregard for the womenfolk, the women decried decades of denigration in the form of inhuman widowhood practices, non-ownership of property, lack of title to family land and joint resources of couples. They stressed Professor Achebe’s advice to Igbo men not to be like Okonkwo who was destroyed by the wrath of Agbala, the local goddess representing the Almighty Earth Goddess and the collective embodiment of the women-folk, for Agbala is also the collective name of women in Anambra Igbo.

The main thrust of the deliberations at the conference was Achebe’s insistence that Igbo cosmos is matriarchal; that its roots and foundation are embedded in the all pervading presence and authority of the female Entity of Ala/Ani, making it sine qua non, that in order to regain that which they have lost, the Igbo must return gender balance into their daily living and their observance of customs and traditions. Deliberations centered on the lessons from Achebe’s emphasis on two gender-centric Igbo adages: Nne ka ‘Mother is supreme’, and Aturu muru ebele gba aka nwa - ‘A sheep that begets only male issues is childless’ (Rams are used for sacrifice and only the female issues remain to propagate the family tree). Achebe’s concluding advise to the Igbo that “achuba unu na-ala nna unu, gbalatanu na-ala nne unu” (when they pursue you from your father’s community, take refuge in your mother’s patrilineage, just like Okonkwo did in Things Fall Apart), summarizes his core message that salvation for the Igbo lies in its womenfolk, for, traditionally, it is the women folk who are the final arbiter and succor of every Igbo family and community; the ultimate defenders of the peace, unity and balance in the Igbo world and the protectors of Igbo identity and sovereignty as a people (as exemplified in the Aba Women’s war of 1929 against the colonial administration, in defense of Igbo human rights).
Finally, the women begged their men to eschew all practices whereby the kolanut ritual, which is the instrument for the restoration of unity, peace, love and bonding within the Igbo nation through Communion of body and spirit from which no one ought to be excluded, is being used as a weapon of gender division and segregation and the denigration of the women-folk by those who understand little of its import. They reminded the men that Kola nut is Life, Love and Truth, hence it is the body of Deity, and as such inflicts Curse, Judgment, and Death upon those who abuse it. Therefore, mindful of the Igbo provision for change embedded in the adage ‘ndi nwuru anwu kee ekpe, ndi di ndi ekegharia’, they enjoined the traditional rulers of Igbo land to use their good office to harmonize the kola nut ritual to suit the mood of the 21st Century, bearing in mind that since, as the Igbo also say, oka anaghi aka onye kuru ya - hence no child can be taller than its mother. The women made it clear that they were not demanding to partake in the act of Breaking the Kola nut, but that due respect should be given to women as partners in progress in the prayers that accompany it, as opposed to the general practice whereby, contrary to Igbo tradition, men take joy in denigrating the female gender and abusing women’s sense of self-worth in the ritual-prayers and during the sharing of the kola nut proper. Such abusive prayers, they insisted, would never go down well with the Earth Goddess, whose Eucharistic Body the Kola nut is.
Distinguished royal fathers of our great nation, ladies and gentle men, having delivered the message of the Women’s conference, let me now address myself to the demand by the chairman of this occasion, that I address the question of why the Igbo are lagging behind in the national scheme of things. I would say that cosmologically speaking, it is not hard to see, that the Igbo are suffering from the Okonkwo syndrome addressed so pointedly by the philosopher king, Professor Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart and in his interview with Carol Cooper published in The Village Voice, February, 2008. If they experience marginalization from their god-given place as co-creators in governance and leadership in the country and elsewhere, it is a natural consequence of their marginalization of their womenfolk – the bedrock of their existence, the collective visible representatives of the Eternal Matriarch who rules their world and drives their individual and collective progress and or failure. It is also not hard for anyone who has a good grasp of the Igbo cosmos to know that whenever Igbo men get together as a family, organization, gender group, kindred, community or nation and raise the kolanut in prayer, the blessings and curses they utter take effect within the group. Therefore the Igbo should take a hard look at the import of the Kolanut ritual as an instrument both of self purification and or self-condemnation, as a law giver and as judgment inflicting instrument, handed down from the beginning and gathering momentum in every age.
According to the findings of our research, the Igbo gene is a divine gene, and no one has the power to pull down a god-man or god-woman except him/herself; that is to say, unless the god-man/woman gives that person the instrument to do so through acts that are inimical to the Golden Rule of life and nature. Thus blessings and curses such as “oji bu idi n’otu (kola is unity); onye wetara oji wetara ndu, ihunanya, ogologo ndu na ahu ike (he who brings kola, brings life, love, long life and health); egbe bere ugo bere, nke si ibe ya ebele, nku kwaa ya (let the kite perch, let the eagle perch; if one says the other should not perch, let its wings break), which have been repeated since the very beginning of creation by innumerable numbers of our living and dead ancestors of every age, should not be taken lightly. An Igbo is not free to chose whether or not to commit any act of injustice against any man, woman, child, entity or system, because he brings curses upon himself anytime he/she does so by the very law set down by his ancestors and repeated whenever any group of Igbo people raise the kola-nut in prayer.
Our research which we conducted in and beyond Igbo land, for a period of almost twenty years beginning from 1990, involving, Archaeology, Paleontology, Anthropology, History, Oral Traditions, Linguistics, the Science of Genetics and the Study of lost and hidden Writings of the Ancients, including Rock Writings and so called Cave Art of ancient Africans, exposed us to a wealth of information that challenges every existing knowledge, especially the knowledge presently being touted by colonial mentality about the place of the Black man/woman in the global scheme of things.
We found, based on archaeological discoveries of Professors F.N. Anozie and G. Ijeoma of the university of Nigeria, Nsukka, that the Igbo race is descended directly from the Homo Erectus or so called Early Man, who lived in this very land of Okigwe, 1,600,000 – 500,000 years ago. Homo Erectus was directly descended from another Hominid, Homo Habilis, whose skeletal remains was found in the Chad Basin by French paleontologist Professor Brunet, dating to 7million B.C. - a discovery that rocked the very foundation of Paleontology in 2002. Okigwe’s geographical closeness to the Chad Basin indicates that the mainland Igbo are DIRECT PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION; PRODUCTS OF AN EVOLUTIONARY TREE THAT REACHES BACK TO MILLIONS AND POSSIBLY BILLIONS OF YEARS TO THE VERY BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS. The Ugwuele, Uturu base of Okigwe Homo Erectus Igbos have been found to be the one-stop shop of the Homo Erectus global culture; and most probably, the place where all the stone tools used by Homo Erectus all over the world was produced, considering that over seven tipper loads of stone hand axes, picks and other diverse stone tools belonging to the early to late Homo Erectus era (1.6m – 500,000 B.C.) were unearthed at Ugwuele.
These finds indicate that the earliest ancestors of the Igbo nation were on earth before Adam, the prototype of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, otherwise called Modern Man, whose direct precursor on the evolutionary tree is Homo Erectus. We know that Adam was the link between Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens because in his time mankind learned to farm and domesticate animals, which Homo Erectus did not do. Geneticists say the domestication of Adam was a result of genetic manipulation of the natural process of evolution (creation) and that that change on the human evolutionary process took place 280,000 to 200,000 years ago somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
Our thesis is that it was from among Okigwe Homo Erectus Igbos that Adam was taken and genetically altered, because we have found records of instructions given to Ham by Noah to return to Africa, the place of his Ancestors and his people in ancient extra-Biblical scrolls unearthed in a cave over 40 years ago in the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Following these instructions, Ham and his children left the rest of Noah’s family, after the deluge and headed for West Africa. Medieval Arab historian and geographer, Wahib Ibn Munabbeh and El Mas’udi insist (and this is confirmed by foremost Historian Basil Davidson) that the children of Canaan marched towards West Africa. Nag Hammadi texts, which experts place within the Gnostic Christian Gospels, confirm Ham and his lineage as belonging to the “People who come from the realm of the Eternal Day, where there was no darkness, no sleep, no sin and no death; a time when people were fed divine substance directly by God – a condition broken by the presumptiousness of a woman called Sophia. These people,” says The Nag Hammadi Scripture, “are known by the fact that they have no kings and have no kingdom over them, as well as by the fact that the Eternal Goddess as Father, Mother and Child “ who abides in perceptible speech in three nnn”, manifests among these people as a cosmology based on the number four.
In our new book They Lived Before Adam, we provided blow by blow evidence (including an oral tradition from Ihube, Okigwe) to the effect that the mainland Igbo believe themselves to emanate from the realms of the Eternal Day where there was no darkness, no toil, to sin, no sleep, but endless glory in the all pervading presence of the Deity, who continued to feed them from divine substance until a woman’s sin changed everything. The mainland Igbo are the people of the Eternal Goddess, the people whose names for Father/Mother/Child and male/female/neuter begin with nnn (nne/nna/nwa; nwoke/nwanyi/nwata): the people “over whom there is no kingdom/the never been ruled” (Igbo Enwe Eze); the people whose cosmos is rooted in the number four – the Igbo four-day week Eke, Orie, Afor, Nkwo.
With these in mind, it became clear that Ham’s returning children who headed into the forests of West Africa were seeking to be rejoined with their mainland Igbo lost kith and kin, the children of the Homo Erectus, their forefather Adam’s original ancestors.
We tracked the migration route of these Hamite children of Canaan, otherwise called Kwa, as recorded in the oral traditions of the Benin, the Yoruba and the Nri, and found that they first sojourned in Altantis, after whose sinking in the Deluge, they lived in Egypt where they built the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx before being driven away by those degenerate gods whom the Bible called Nephilim. They then migrated to the Nok region where they built the thriving civilization of Biafra located in the Center of the earth (a place marked in Old maps of Africa as ‘Biafra Median’) with its capital in the Niger-Benue Confluence. It attracted great masters from all over the world. When their Great city was destroyed by fallouts of the nuclear explosion that decimated the Sahara, they moved down through Nsukka and settled all around Northern Igbo land in the areas of Onitsha, Awka, Enugu and Nsukka. The center of their Theocracy was then cited at Nri.
The interesting thing about these people who came from Atlantis through Egypt to West Africa, is that like the Homo Erectus they met when they arrived at Okigwe area in their homeward migration, the Atlantean migrants of the Deluge as well as their ancestor Adam, spoke Igbo language – a language that was dispersed through Adam and his children through out the early world, traces of which have remained in practically every language spoken today including Chinese, English, Mexican Indian, Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, etc., as we have fully demonstrated in They Lived Before Adam. Oral traditions of the Bini people published under the title Great Benin 1 by Osaren Omoregie demonstrates that the migrants, led by a man called Idu (Ham) and his son Akka (Awka) came from the Nok (Middle Belt) region of Nigeria, through a fertile, plateau land with rocky earth onto a range of hills after which they encountered an “expanding horizon of the New Earth before them”, and here they encountered a community of dwarfs whom they called “little Heaven Beings” (people of the Eternal Day?) who were the “original inhabitants of the land” – a people who “used hand-axes and non-polished stone tools” – the exact same kind of tools found at Ugwuele, Okigwe, just a stone throw from Umunneochi LGA, where we are now standing; a people who neither farmed nor toiled but gathered their food from the bounty of Mother Nature (divine substance?).
It is clear from Omoregie’s description, that the topology of the lands encountered by the Hamite migrants conforms to those of Nsukka and Enugu; and that the “expanding horizon land of the New Earth” described by the migrants is no other place than this very endless horizon that we see before us behind us, to the right and to the left, reaching all the way to Enugu, Ebonyi, Abia and Anambra States and beyond. Incidentally, as I am told Umunneochi is one LGA that has borders with all five states of the South-East – a confirmation of its place as the New Earth (City Four Square) - the New Jerusalem, whose length is equal to its width, described by Omoregie’s as the seat of Idu Kingdom (Idu being the first god-man who ruled the Adamic world from Atlantis, Egypt, the Niger-Benue Confluence and lastly from Nri), emphasized in the annals of the migrant Hamites as well as in the Christian Book of Revelation authored by the Gnostic followers of Jesus Christ – the original authors of The Nag Hammadi Scriptures.
On this note we invite the leaders of Umunneochi to do more research to discover more about this blessed land, this great Local Government of Umunneochi and to read our book authored with a team of researchers, to find out more than I am able to put across to you in this short presentation. Thank you for listening.

Professor Catherine Acholonu.

1 comment:

  1. The Father Of All Mankind is 340,000 Years Old
    March 11, 2013
    This genetic study appears to confirm and support the Catherine Acholonu Research Center for African Studies thesis and findings, that the West African Niger River Valley is the origin and source of humanity and world civilizations.

    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-all-men-is-340000-years-old.html

    ReplyDelete