A SPEECH PRESENTED BY PROFESSOR CATHERINE ACHOLONU ON THE OCCASION OF THE USA LAUNCHING/PRSENTATION OF THE BOOK THEY LIVED BEFORE ADAM:

A SPEECH PRESENTED BY PROFESSOR CATHERINE ACHOLONU ON THE OCCASION OF THE USA LAUNCHING/PRSENTATION OF THE BOOK THEY LIVED BEFORE ADAM: PRE-HISTORIC ORIGINS OF THE IGBO, THE NEVER BEEN RULED AT THE IGBO STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE, HOWARD UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON DC, 3RD-4TH APRIL. 2009

Fellow scholars of Igbo and African Studies, last year at this very conference, my co-researcher Dr. Ajay Prabhakar and I, presented a paper titled “The Sons of God and the Unshakable Generation: Tracing Igbo Divine Rights through Pre-History, Forgotten Scriptures and Oral Tradition”. It received excited reactions form some members of the audience, keen interest from others and laughter from a few. But we remember keenly that at the same conference, one Dr. Abdul Salau, a Hausa/Fulani presenter from Delaware University gave a paper detailing Igbo linguistic influence on ancient Egypt. Our paper dwelt on Igbo language influences on ancient Akkadian, Sumerian ancient Canaanite/Hebrew, modern Chinese, English and other far-flung languages. But it did something more, it followed the Igbo story through the Oral Traditions of other Nigerian and Kwa peoples through North Africa onto ancient Greece and so forth using information gleaned from ancient and esoteric literatures and lost Scriptures.

Since the time we last stood before this venerable audience, we have in fact concluded the first phase of the research and we have published our findings under the title They Lived Before Adam: Pre-historic Origins of the Igbo, The Never Been Ruled (a CARC Publication, Abuja, 2009).

They Lived Before Adam traces the unknown and lost History of the people of Igbo extraction all the way to 500,000 – 1,000,000 B.C. It is the result of more than 20 years of painstaking search and research through mainstream scientific discoveries in the area of Archaeology, Paleontology (the study of Human fossils), Genetic and DNA Engineering, Linguistics but also through ancient and esoteric records, lost Scriptures and Mythologies of Africa, Europe and Asia, as well as through the Histories and Oral Traditions of various nations and continents of the globe, for traces of Igbo presence.

This search revealed that the Igbo are the oldest single group of people on planet earth; that Igbo presence on planet earth goes all the way back to Early Man, otherwise called Homo Erectus, the direct ancestor of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Modern Man/Thinking Man); that it was the Igbo who seeded other races and gave culture and civilization to the rest of the human race; and that Igbo language was a direct off-shoot of that One World/Mother Language of Humanity supposedly lost at Babel.

The now late Professor Adiele Afigbo, may his great soul rest in perfect peace, foremost Igbo and Nigerian Historian, who was to review the book for the Abuja launch that took lace on 25th of March, 2009 before he fell ill a few weeks before and never recovered, said of our work in this regard, “They Lived Before Adam is out of this world. It is not only a work of History. It’s a work of Revelation.” And he admitted to Prof. T.U. Nwala, that “the area of Pre-History is an area we have not given serious attention to. And I find Catherine’s work a bold challenge to not only Historians in this part of the world but to scholars in all areas of Cultural Studies…”

Senator Uche Chukwumerije who is spear-heading an all-Igbo re-launch of the book describes They Lived Before Adam as “a life defining-landmark, a central literature for Ndi Igbo”.

Ambassador Raph Uwaechue, Elder Statesman and President, Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo said of They Lived Before Adam, “The information contained in that book makes our work of Igbo emancipation, spiritual empowerment and moral and ethical re-engineering a lot easier. It is a veritable tool for Igbo Renaissance.”

At the just-concluded world presentation of the book at Abuja, requests were made that an all-Igbo launch of the book should be held at Enugu state in the not-so-distant future. HRH Light Eze Ezedioramma Aniagu, Shikagumma of Enugunato-Ihe, whom we were meeting for the first time, kindly offered to promote the book by buying one hour weekly airtime on NTA Network Service towards the dissemination of the contents of the book.

They Lived Before Adam is a roughly 500-page compendium of hitherto unknown facts about Ndi Igbo in Pre-historic times. It details the forgotten and lost Igbo past from their earliest beginnings and supplies the missing links that have created the foundation upon which Igbo Philosophy, social systems, belief systems, politics, culture and tradition have been crafted through the millennia. It details the results of decades of research on the lost and forgotten roots of Ndi Igbo and brings to the fore Professor F. Anozie’s archaeological conclusions that as early as 500,000 to one million B.C. Igbo heartland land was inhabited by an Early Stone Age race of people whom paleontologists have classified as Homo Erectus or Early Man. These people, whose culture was characterized by the stone axe, were the direct ancestors of Homo Sapiens. They were the products of a very long evolution in the Nigerian environment and French Paleontologists working in the Chad Basin have dated their earliest known ancestors to 7 million B.C.

The archaeological findings at Ugwuele documented over twenty years ago by veteran archaeologist of the Nsukka School, late Professor F.N. Anozie, have lain dormant, excised from the realm of Igbo Studies because the esteemed Professor Adiele Afigbo had written that the Ugwuele Archeulians were not Igbo. But our work shows that they were indeed Igbo, and that they were both the products and the carriers of an unbroken bloodline of sons and daughters of the Uncreated God and, being themselves uncreated products of evolution, were the ancestors of Adam – the man who was hand-made.

We have evidence from recently translated cuneiform records of ancient Sumer that Adam was a product of genetic mutation of Homo Erectus specimens taken from West Africa by so called Nephilim Gods or Annunaki. These earliest humans were in fact the source of the claim by the mainland Igbo that they are ‘sons of the soil’. Along with other pockets of Homo Erectus inhabitants of Africa, the Igbo Early Man was the direct ancestor of Modern Man (Homo Sapiens Sapiens otherwise called Adam). Specimens of Adam’s words and the words spoken by succeeding generations of his children show that Adam spoke a language very close to the Igbo language still spoken today in Nigeria; and that through him and his seed, Igbo culture was dispersed in its earliest form, throughout the first world and took root in ancient Palestine, Asia, Europe, the Americas to name a few.

Linguistic evidence found on all five continents of the globe, indicate that all pockets of Homo Erectus people on the African continent spoke one single language and that that language was inherited by Homo Sapiens. This singular Mother Language of mankind, which was said to have been lost at Babel, was in fact not far removed from the language spoken today in Igbo land and to a lesser extent among their Kwa brethren – Yoruba, Benin, Igala, Ashanti, etc. Its traces still abound in almost every language spoken by man to this day. Igbo linguistic, cultural, philosophical and ideological gifts to the world, which have survived to this day, are legion. They include Democracy and Monotheism.

Leaning on Archaeology, Linguistics, Historical, Anthropological and Paleontological sources, but also using Igbo, Yoruba and Benin Oral Traditions (for all these peoples are related), Biblical and extra-Biblical sources such as the Hebrew and Chinese Cabbalas, our researchers trace the presence of Igbo-speaking, ichi-bearing god-men world civilizers all the way from the ancient Nok region of Nigeria, to the Sahara Desert of North Africa and to Pre- and Post-Deluge civilizations around the world, all the way to Egypt, China, India, Greece, Babylon, Assyria, Palestine, etc.; their Pre-Deluge connections to the lost continent of Atlantis where the Igbo language was also spoken; their contributions to the shaping of Hebrew culture, Judaism, the Cabbala and ultimately, Christianity; and their role in ancient Egypt in shaping world Democracy and Philosophy as inventors, architects, philosophers and masterminds of Theocracy and of the egalitarian society known in Greece and the world over as Democracy. Indeed Ndi Igbo have never ceased to be world travelers. As they populate the remotest parts of the planet today, so have they done since at least 500,000 B. C.

In fact the ‘Out of Africa’ phenomenon whereby Early Man left the African continent to populate other continents of the globe, was a Mega-Igbo Phenomenon, occasioned by the incurable Igbo urge to expand, discover and settle. We found evidence of Anambra-speaking ichi-bearing Igbos in Anatolia (Turkey) and the Aegean as far back as 2,500 B.C. The Awka/Nri/Nkanu/Nsukka/Enugu cultural phenomenon was an offshoot of ancient Nok, the lost Holy City of Light, Old Ife/Ihe, the seat of Idu - a world-renowned sovereign who ruled the world from the center of the Earth, which is in today’s Nigeria - a place marked in ancient maps of the world as Median Biafra (a ‘Median’ in any map is the center of that map). They gave Egypt its first god-men or Pharaohs (Opara-Ihe) before 9,000 B. C.

Speakers of Ngwa, Onitsha and Umuahia dialects were writing Igbo on sticks and on stone in the British Isles by 5,000 B.C. and were the inventors of the ancient Irish Ogam (also called Ogu ama) alphabet whose stone inscriptions have now been transcribed, revealing an ancient Igbo Bible on Stone. The only surviving vernacular word from Atlantis recorded by Plato from Egyptian priests is a word still in use in Anambra State.

300 carved ancient stone monoliths with strange inscriptions known as Akwa-Nshi were discovered fifty years ago by colonial anthropologists in the forests of Ikom in Cross River State. The natives claim the ancient inscriptions were made by “Stone Age Early Man” dwarfs known in Ikom as Monkom and in Igbo land as Nwa Nshi. The linguistic connection between Akwa-Nshi, Nwa-Nshi and Nshi-biri – the local name of the inscriptions (which translates into Igbo as ‘written by Nshi’) reveals that the inscriptions were made by a people who spoke Igbo Language. Ikom description of these people in their oral traditions shows that they were the same Stone Age Homo Erectus Igbo of Anozie’s archaeological discovery.

Professor F.N. Anozie’s archeological work in Ugwu-Ele, Uturu, Okigwe and his revelation that Early Man (Homo Erectus) was living in Igbo land in Okigwe and environs by 500,000 to 1 Million B.C. places ancient Ndi Igbo in Igbo land at least 250,000 years before the creation of Adam following the calculations of Geneticists from Mitochondrial DNA analysis conducted in four leading US universities. Orlu/Amaigbo/Isu migrated from Ugwuele, Uturu, Okigwe under the umbrella of a man called Ele (alias Okwara-Ugwu-Ele) and are thus the direct descendants of the Ugwuele Homo Erectus or sons of the Soil. They and the people of Mbaise and Mbano and others within the heartland still retain in their native customs, cultural traits that are aboriginal, perhaps belonging to the Homo Erectus period, 500, 000 B. C., a period defined in the works of Adieele Afigbo as “the Age of Innocence when our earliest Igbo ancestors walked with God and were fed divine substance as food: an Eternal Day with no night, sleep or toil”.

Yoruba Ifa Oral History maintains that the greatest god known to the Yoruba was Obatala (Oba ntu ala), who is the ancestor of the Igbo nation. Ifa claims that Obatala was the god who saved the earth after the Deluge. Ifa priests refer to him as “Osere Igbo: the Ancient of Days, the First Son of God … the Prince of Peace … the one who conquered death by rising from the dead after 16 days in the grave”. These are, to say the least vital discoveries about Igbo origins and identity unknown to the Igbo themselves.

The 2,000 year old Nag Hammadi Scriptures of Jesus Christ and his chosen disciples, uncovered sixty years ago deep in the desert-sands of Egypt, adds the final missing links to the mystery of Igbo identity. It tells about a people whose cosmology is rooted in the numbers four and eight, who emanated from the realm of the Eternal Day where there was no Darkness, nor toil, nor sleep; a “kingless generation with no kingdom over them because they are all kings” (Igbo Enwe Eze); a people whose most central symbol is the quadrangle (the basic geometry of Igbo ichi); a people who worship the Primal Goddess (as in Ala/Ani); a people among whom “the three entities Father, Mother and Child exist as perceptible speech having within it three names abiding in three nnn” as in Nne, Nna and Nwa or Nwoke, Nwanyi and Nwata – the Nag Hammadi Trinity. The Nag Hammadi also called The African Gospel of Jesus Christ calls this people the First Sons of the true God, and says of them,
“the fourth generation, which is the most exalted, is kingless and perfect. These people – kingless, perfect generation – will enter the Holy place of their Father and thy will reside in rest and eternal ineffable glory, and ceaseless joy. They already are kings. They are the immortal within the mortal and they will condemn the gods of chaos and their powers.”

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures is not alone in ascribing divinity and royalty to the Igbo, in fact Yoruba oral tradition says in Ifa that the greatest of all the divinities in the Yoruba pantheon is the ancestor of the Igbo nation. They call him Obatala and Ifa says he is the ‘First Son of God’ who was sent to save the earth after the deluge and to repopulate it with life; that he was the creator of man. Benin oral tradition says that the Deluge took place over quarrels between the gods arising from the birth of an Igbo child under illegitimate circumstances.

We studied the esoteric meanings of Igbo symbols and etymons from a global perspective, and found that they are not only universal, they are leading symbols used in all major religions to describe the nature of God or the Goddess as the case may be. Thus the double concentric circle of Igbo Ukwu fame and the Kwa in Okwa-ra both represent the First Son of God, while the ichi is a representation of the children of the Earth-Goddess. Chi is the name of the god-man and the etymon –ka- [as in Nkanu, nka, dioka, ka (greeting)] means Sacred Fire or Holy Spirit. It is also synonymous with Kwa.

Our ongoing research shows that the Igbo were the first sons within the Kwa language family, thus we were able to prove Adiele Afigbo’s Mega Igbo/Proto-Kwa hypothesis, and we told him so at the Ahiajoku lecture, and he was very happy. We found very deep-rooted Kwa and Igbo links with the Nok civilization and with the lost continent of Atlantis. We found that Nri was an offshoot of the Nok civilization of the Niger-Benue confluence, which was the so called Old Ife of Idu fame, the locale of the famous filial rivalry between the Yoruba ancestor and his Igbo senior brother Obatala which led to their parting ways and to the loss of the Oduduwa title by the Igbo ancestor.

They Lived Before Adam is a must read for every Igbo man, woman and child and a vital source book for Igbo scholars. This book restores our self worth as a people and makes an undeniably powerful case for the preservation and study of Igbo origins, native language and dialects, culture, oral traditions and philosophies. It was through our good understanding of Igbo dialects that we were able to draw most of the vital conclusions that were critical to our theses. For that, we join professor Chinua Achebe in calling for the preservation of Igbo dialects as is being done in all other languages at this time.

Ndi Igbo at home and abroad can give our children something to believe in at last – themselves and their ancestral values. They Lived Before Adam does this for us. In fact the magic and mystery that surrounds Igbo identity as a divine race is known to all and sundry, except Ndi Igbo themselves. To paraphrase the words of the iroko himself, Chinua Achebe, the failure of a people begins when the belief in themselves is taken from them; then the detractor needs do no more (Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day).

Ndi Igbo happen to be among the few groups of people in the world whose core traditional philosophies of life consist of virtues rather than vices – Justice and fair play (Ikpe kwu oto), Impeccability (ikwuba aka oto/ijide ogu), Peace and the brotherhood of Man (onye biri ibe ya biri), right action and right judgment (ofo na ogu/ome ihe jide ofo), right is might (ofo ka nsi), Eucharistic communion with God and man as demonstration of purity of mind and soul in one and all (onye wetara oji wetara ndu, egbe bere ugo bere). The Igbo are perhaps the only group of people in the world whose basic custom, Grundnorm and Philosophy of life is rooted in the observance of personal and collective Holiness, sinless-ness and living in a state of grace. This is totally at variance with what obtains in the customs of the Hebrews for instance, where the Law of God gave approval to a people to exterminate their hosts and take over the latter’s land. In all these, ancient Igbo culture shows itself as the likely fore-runner of Christianity, and The Nag Hammadi revelations confirms it to be so.

It is worthy of note that in ancient Akkadian, Egyptian and Greece the words Paraa/Peraa/pr/phar/pal all mean First Son, Divine Prince and Royalty - another Igbo gift to the world, which implies that the Igbo were the first kings the world knew and that the word ‘Prince’ (Opara Nshi?) was most likely derived from Igbo language and ancient global tradition of kingship of the world. This appears to be so because the Greeks and other Aegean nations got their kings from a clan of god-men of unknown origins who called themselves Pelop (translated as ‘Crown Prince’), a cognate of Igbo Opala Okpu. It was obviously these Igbo-speaking Crown Princes who gave the tradition of royalty to Greece and the rest of Europe.
Our analysis of the language of the earliest settlers in the Americas also reveal that Igbo was the language of the land chiefs who brought culture and writing to the Andes and environs. As in Greece, these migrants bore the ichi scarifications on their faces and their boats and named their installations and cities in Igbo language. All these details are clearly delineated in They Lived Before Adam, a must read for every Igbo and Black African; a must read too for everyone who is keen on truth.

The compilation and release of They Lived Before Adam were planned to coincide with the Ohaneze Ndi Igbo, CODES and Aka Ikenga sponsored First Festival of Igbo Civilization, as our contribution to the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and to honor Achebe’s achievements for the Igbo on the global scene. Accordingly it was formerly presented to the President of Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo, Ambassador Raph Uwaechue and to Chinua Achebe who received his copy along with his wife after his Ahiajoku Lecture at Owerri. They Lived Before Adam is a vital step in the process of piecing together those Things (that) Fell Apart in the Igbo world. It is a labor of love from a woman who has spent the best twenty years of her life searching out the truth about Ndi Igbo. The book also addresses Igbo-phobia in African Studies and the Olaudah Equiano/Vincent Caretta controversy. It was launched in Abuja on 25th March 2009 and the President Gneral, Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo is hosting an All-Igbo Launch/Rally in support of They Lived at Okpara Square, Enugu on 27th June, 2009.

Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo, the apex Igbo organization, has requested that a simplified edition of They Lived Before Adam be produced for the less educated readers and that schools editions be made available for children in Nursery, Primary and Secondary schools. We are therefore calling on interested individuals and organizations to sign up, join and/or support the second phase of the project and take the Igbo Story to all Ndi Igbo and to the world.

On behalf of my co-authors, I thank you all as I salute and bow before the Divinity in all Igbo and in you.

Catherine Acholonu,
Washington D. C., April 4th, 2009.

WELCOME ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR CATHERINE ACHOLONU

WELCOME ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR CATHERINE ACHOLONU
CHAIRPERSON FIRST IGBO WOMEN’S WORLD CONFERENCE,
Aba, Abia State, Nigeria
5-7TH MAY, 2009

WOMEN EXCLUSIONISM IN IGBO LIFE CULTURE, MATTERS ARISING FROM THE 2009 AHIAJOKU LECTURE. BY PROFESSOR CATHERINE ACHOLONU

Your Excellency, Dame Patience Goodluck Jonathan, wife of the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; Your Excellencies, Chief and Mrs. Theodore Orji and wives of Governors of five South-Eastern States.

The 2009 Ahiajoku lecture was delivered by Professor Chinua Achebe. It was the highlight of the events lined up to celebrate the Festival of Igbo Civilization in commemoration of the Golden Jubilee celebration of Things Fall Apart, Africa’s greatest novel.

One could say that the 2009 Ahiajoku lecture has come, but not gone, reason being that Achebe’s main lecture for that day is yet to be seen. He did not deliver it, he put it aside and changed his topic on arrivals at the conference and opted rather to speak on Women Exclusionism in Igbo Life and Culture. And we ask, why? I myself would have delivered an academic paper at this conference, but the circumstances surrounding Achebe’s change of his Ahiajoku lecture topic and decision to jettison his well researched paper, to speak on women in Igbo land, their indispensability in Igbo life and culture, and the dire implication of their being excluded from their vital role as supporters and partners and mothers of Igbo society and Igbo culture, made me equally shelve my otherwise academic engagement for this conference and engage myself into the socio-political/cultural implications of Achebe’s worries.

It is important to note that history was made on that occasion for it was the first time in the long history of Ahiajoku that a lecturer changed his topic at the nick of time and addressed an issue different from the topic of the day. Achebe as a philosopher-king would have measured the full implication of his change of topic and, yet still went on with it which, goes to indicate that he wanted to give global attention to the matters that caused him to change gear, namely Women Exclusionism in Igbo Life and Culture.

I am very sure that most of the papers today will dwell on women exclusionism, just as it happened at the first festival conference where three women pointed out and questioned the dwindling importance of women in Igbo cultural life and practices – Edith Chikwere, Nkechinyere Chidiadi, and Euckay Onyeizugbo. Onyeizuigbo’s paper “Kolanut in Igbo Culture: Is it a Unifying or a Divisive Factor in the 21st Century”, sparked off a wild controversy. The author insisted that the kola nut ritual was being used as a means of demeaning the women in today’s 21st century Igbo land. She insisted that change is a constant in life and that because as the Igbo say, “ndi nwuru anwu kee ekpe, ndi di ndu kegharia; and omenelu gbaa afo oburu omenala”. Ndi Igbo in the 21st century should take a hard look at some terribly demeaning nuances of the practice of emume oji. These two proverbs which are my own way of paraphrasing what I understood her paper to be saying, show clearly that the creators of Igbo culture and tradition understood clearly that nothing is static in life, and that Igbo ancestors built change into their cosmology and philosophy.

“Omenelu gbaa afo oburu omenala” simply means that cultures, customs and traditions are man made and can be changed and altered any time circumstances call for it. Part of the argument that ranged on that occasion was the fact the women were prevented from partaking in the broken kola nut being shared around at the opening ceremony, the day before. They were not allowed to dip their hand into the tray to take their individual shares of the broken kola nut lobes, which had been cut for sharing, rather men did it for them. I was one of the victims of this flagrant abuse of our culturally accepted right as citizens of Igbo land. And I complained bitterly about this particular phenomenon during the question and answer session. Many men present agreed with the women that it was contrary to Igbo culture not to allow women to take the broken kola-nut lobes with their own hands, because kola-nut sharing is a communion from which none whatsoever should be excluded. It is even unhygienic to let someone else pick your share for you. Most importantly, Kola nut is Judgement. It kills and takes instant retribution when shared unjustly or eaten with malice.

It was therefore against this backdrop that the masquerade suddenly saw the need to change the line of the dance. Needless to say, when the masquerade changes the dance, the beat should follow suit. Achebe is, without question, telling the Igbo nation to take a hard look at the rubrics of our culture, customs and tradition, and see what needs to be reshaped to make for peace, unity, progress and live and let live.

Chinua Achebe’s 2009 Ahiajoku lecture gave a new tilt to his often publicized philosophy of “ife kwulu ife akwudebe ya”. In fact the main thrust of “ife kwulu ife akwudebe ya” centers on gender mainstreaming. “Ife kwulu ife akwudebe ya” is the Igbo definition of gender coexistence, interdependence of men and women, partnership between male and female as a vital component of the matrix of family, the community, the Igbo nation and of every nation for that matter.

Thus, Achebe’s in his Ahiajoku lecture posed the same question that Okonkwo’s maternal uncle asked him when he was banished by his umunna – the men-folk – “Do you know why it is that when things go well in a man’s life, his umunna are with him, but when things change for the worse they abandon him and he returns to his mother’s people?” “Do you know why we name our daughters Nneka (Mother is Supreme)?” “Do you know why the Igbo have a saying that “aturu muru ebule gba aka nwa?” Achebe concluded his lecture by enjoining the Igbo men folk “achuba unu na ala nna unu, gbatanu na ala nne unu”. (When they pursue you in your Father’s land, return to your mother’s land.) Need we say any more?

Achebe’s insistence that Okonkwo’s failure as a hero is as result of his disregard for the women in his life says it all. (Interview with Carol Cooper published in The Village Voice, February 2008, and noted by Sabine Jell-Balsen in her own First Festival article). He has thrown a new challenge to Igbo men folk to ensure that the practice of culture is not used as a weapon to pull down or abuse their mothers, sisters, wives and female partners in progress, for after all said than done, the woman is not just a woman, she is Agbala and in Things Fall Apart, Agbala is the name of the woman as woman; as power wielding priestess; and as deity representing of the Earth Mother ala/ani the final arbiter and rulers of our lives and our death, she, who holds the power to make and mar.

It is on that note that this inaugural Igbo Women’s Conference has been given the theme “Nneka – Mother is Supreme”. I welcome you all to historic city of Aba, noted for the Aba Women’s War of 1929 against the excesses of the colonial administration, for the First Igbo Women’s World Conference. Thank you.

Professor Catherine Acholonu
Chairperson, First Igbo Women’s world Conference.

THEY LIVED BEFORE ADAM: PRE-HISTORIC ORIGINS OF THE IGBO - THE NEVER-BEEN-RULED – AUTHOR’S PREFACE

THEY LIVED BEFORE ADAM: PRE-HISTORIC ORIGINS OF THE IGBO - THE NEVER-BEEN-RULED – AUTHOR’S PREFACE
BY CATHERINE ACHOLONU
With contributions by Eddy Olumba and Ajay Prabhakar
FIRST PRESENTED IN PART AT THE 6TH ANNUAL IGBO STUDIES CONFERENCE, HOWARD UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON D.C., APRIL 4TH-5TH, 2008.
The writing of this book came about by accident. I did not intend to do any specific research on the Igbo phenomenon because somehow or the other, it didn’t quite look to me that there was anything that had not yet been written about the Igbo people of Nigeria by its Historians. After all, I thought, I am not a history scholar. I am first and foremost a student of Literature and Literary Studies, a linguist, a literary critic and a self trained philosopher as well as, but most importantly, an incurably inquisitive researcher on the general subject of life and especially on the phenomenon of Black African Life and Culture. What I found out about the Igbo, therefore, came wholly by accident. In 1990 I had embarked upon a major research about the Black African identity. It was a search for the contributions of ancient Black Africans to world civilizations – in other words, to the development of the human species. That search led me to discover in 2001 after more than 11 years of searching, (again by accident) a library of ancient stone inscriptions made by the common ancestors of what I chose to refer to as the Niger-Benue sub-family of Nigerian tribes, which include the Igbo. These stone inscriptions are located in Ikom, Cross River State, Nigeria. That discovery buoyed up my research interest and created for me an unprecedented access-window into the lost civilizations of ancient Nigeria (known in prehistoric African maps as Median Biafra), the founders/creators of that specific concept known as Black African culture, the creators of the Nok culture of the Niger-Benue confluence and of the later Bantu phenomenon that colonized 90% of Black Africa. The ancient name of a large part of the country now known as Nigeria was originally known as ‘Biafra’. This word Bi-afra is the origin of the word Africa, which esoteric records say, is derived from the word Afra – the name of the god-man who founded the continent. By its name, Bi-afra proves to have been the spiritual/cultural capital or home-base of this god-man Afra. In fact in Igbo language the word ‘Bi-Afra’ (Be-Afra/Obi-Afra) translates as ‘The Home Place of Afra’! This would confirm ancient Nigeria as the spiritual/cultural capital of Africa. This is in consonance with recent research findings by linguists and ethnographers that the Niger-Benue region of Nigeria is the original source of the Bantu migrations across all of sub-Saharan Africa. The Bantu were the ministers of the cultural phenomenon known as ‘Black African culture’ and they were Nigerians in origin, from the same Niger-Benue, otherwise called, Nok region.
The global course I had set for my search led me ever more and more to information indicating that in times beyond memory, the Igbo and their Kwa brethren bestrode the continent of Africa and in time became instrumental to the making of an indigenous Nigerian civilization that had birthed, not only the Black African civilization, but also all known world civilizations. Traces of this phase of Igbo and world history have all but been lost and buried in millennia of dead history, consigned to the period now generally known as Pre-History. Yet traces remain in myths, legends, scriptures and histories of other continents, in the languages that people still speak today all over the world, as well as, and most importantly, on the stone inscriptions of Ikom and the strange engravings and symbols on the bronze and copper monuments of Igbo Ukwu. After our general findings were published under the now famous title The Gram Code of African Adam: Stone Books and Cave Libraries, Reconstructing 450,000 Years of Africa’s Lost Civilizations (2005), I decided to put together, all the accidental but intriguing finds we chanced upon about the Igbo in the course of our research, their origins and identity and their contributions to the world. The shocking truth is that wherever we looked and no matter how far backwards in time we delved, we found traces left by a people who spoke the Igbo language that is still spoken today in Nigeria largely by the people of the South East zone and to a lesser extent by their Kwa neighbours. Thus were we able to confirm Adiele Afigbo’s thesis about a Mega Igbo proto Kwa phenomenon, which the ace historian pronounced but did not amply substantiate to invoke acceptance even among adherents of his school of thought.
Call for Igbo Renaissance:
Today, as the world and the Igbo nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, that eloquent celebration of the indigenous African identity and an equally eloquent description of the process of the dissolution of the African soul-center, we are pleased to present our publication – They Lived Before Adam – as part of the healing and restoration process that the Igbo so desperately need. The breaking of the Igbo soul-center at the Beginning, like the breaking of the kola nut, should not have led, as it did, to the shattering of the chalice of communion. Rather it should now be understood for what it is and what it was meant to be by the Creator of All: the division of the cells of the body of the god-man, so that each cell may be planted and in the fullness of time, yield a plenitude of harvests in the souls of all peoples and nations of the world. Now that seed is ripe, and that plenitude of harvest (Obia-nuju/ Oba-nuju) is ripe for the plucking. It is time to put together through the process of Ntikonu (what in Hebrew Cabbala is known as Tikkun) that which had fallen apart by default. It is time for the resurrection of the dead, for even though The World Was Silent When We (the people of The Yellow Sun) Died, the god spirit that is every individual Igbo Chi (immortal soul) can always rise without prompting. There is a time to die and a time to live again. There is a time for burial of the dead and a time for the Resurrection of the Ever Living Soul of the God-man and the God-woman! This we bequeath to our children, the leaders of tomorrow, the Chimamandas of this world, the Ifunanyas, Nnekas, Chidozies and the Kelechis (the last four are my children, the first is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun) that through our death they may live more vigorously and dream greater dreams than we dared. We bring to them and to the youths of Nigeria and the world the unstoppable personality of the coming Christ, the King of Kings, the Nze-nze!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Arch-Bishop Anthony Obinna of the Catholic Diocese of Owerri, in his inaugural Millennium Odenigbo Lecture (2000) titled Ujunwa: Anuri Uwa Niile, and in a ground-breaking sermon preached in my presence the same year, gave what he considered to be the Igbo basic interpretation of the Christian concept of ‘Jesus Christ’. His conclusion, based on field research, was that the Igbo name that best translates the name ‘Jesus Christ’ as Child of Grace and the Hope of the World is Ujunwa (Obianuju in full) - ‘Plenitude’. I have to confess that ever since listening to that sermon, I have felt a growing burden occasioned by the uncanny coincidence of the fact that even though I live 900 kilometers away from the venue of the sermon, I just happened to be present in church on that very day, and it just so happens that my native Igbo name is Obianuju and my mother calls me Ujunwa! In fact just as I am writing these very lines, my aged mother, who has been in my house convalescing from a long illness is calling out to me, “Ujunwa!” Yet another uncanny coincidence! When the Bishop saw me after the sermon, he gave me an assignment – to translate the Ujunwa Odenigbo Lecture which is written and published in Igbo into English. I must confess that even though I started the assignment immediately, and covered ninety percent of it, I did not complete it. Politics got in the way. I do hope I shall recover the manuscript and complete it.
What I am trying to say is that writing this book is an act of fulfillment of Destiny for me. In 1990 when I began my tenure as a Visiting Professor/Fulbright Scholar-writer-In-Residence at the Westchester Consortium for International Studies/ Manhattanville College in Upstate New York, I did something strange – I wrote a long prayer-letter to God asking to be guided into the forgotten and lost records of Africa’s contributions to world civilizations so that I can reveal them to the teeming seekers for African’s lost identity. This has been my deepest desire in life. I have never desired riches or a big house and flashy cars. Of course it helps to be relatively comfortable. But that’s as far as it can go for me. Anything more than that would actually scare me. I like my life simple and ordinary. The Gram Code book project and this very book on Igbo origins are my two contributions towards the fulfillment of that personal mission I set out for myself. I have been lucky that God actually answered my prayers, just as HE/SHE/IT does all sincere prayers. Everyone bears their own cross, the loadstone of their existence. My particular loadstone is that I have no “I” to call my own. My personality, my identity is part and parcel of the Collective Consciousness of the peoples among whom I have found myself. I desire nothing, want nothing, I crave for nothing, I accumulate nothing. I have no property. I carry no baggage. I always travel light. This is how I love my life. And I am enjoying it like this. I have something of an Okigbo syndrome also: a life that is ever on fire to pour itself out for the good of the mass, ever seeking for answers to the Black Human condition and ever willing to sacrifice its all that the other may be filled. This, I think is Ujunwa, the fullness that ever seeks to transfer itself ad infinitum. I crave the indulgence of my readers for this digression, for when the heart is filled to over-flowing it must pour itself out or else suffocate under the weight of its unbearable loadstone.
The Christ phenomenon is for me an ever present reality. It is the urge to be the most that human-kind can be as a representative of its creator. As a mother, the Christ phenomenon is an ever present reminder that every child in and out of one’s womb and the womb of other mothers is ‘the deity in waiting’. For me and for the children that have been born through me, this is the only reality we know, and this, we believe, is the lost message of Jesus Christ. In my life two persons have inspired me the most: my late father and my late maternal grand mother. My late father was a god. He was not like anyone else I have known. He was not what you call human. He was different from humans in everyway, save one – he had a body. In every other way he was something I have been trying to describe since he died in 1973. I have not succeeded. So I give up with just these few words: He was like Jesus except that he did not perform the Jesus kind of miracles. His own were more practical: life-changing opportunities he gave to every needy, unprivileged person who crossed his path. But he was fearsome in the powerful personality he exuded, his unbending honesty and straight-forwardness. We didn’t quite have a father because he was father for everyone we knew first and for us last. But it was great knowing this god, for no other word can describe him correctly. Today, thirty four years after his passing, the whole town still mourns, literally. Two months ago, a distant cousin, a twenty-six year old man, who lost his wife during child-birth and, saddled with the new born, did not know where to begin, said to me, “Sister Obianuju, if your father were alive, I would not suffer like this.” I replied, “My brother, you were not even born when my father died.” His name was Lazarus Emejuru Olumba, Nwoke-na-etoro-ibe (The Progress of a Man is for the Good of his Peers) of Orlu, alias OWUS – Orlu Wake Up Shops (his business name). He and I were quite close in terms of our beliefs about the important things of life. I don’t quite meet up though. As for my grandmother, her name was Oyidiya Onyenekwe. She was born in Urualla and married into Umueshi, both in Ideato clan. She was about eighty years old when I came into this world, yet we were best of friends. She taught me many things about Igbo life and culture. I lived with her during the war while I was going to school. That was when I observed her closely. She too carried like a deity – straight and honest to a fault; powerful beyond measure and stubbornly resilient. She used to wield the gun, so her nick-name was “Nwanyi na-agba egbe” (woman that wields the gun). She married four wives in her lifetime… She lived to about 135 years old. These were my models. The reader can then understand what I mean when I say that where I come from we do not know what it means to say “This can’t be done!” or “This is impossible!” Nor do we know the meaning of fear.
I think it is important to state that the world knows who the Igbo really are, only the Igbo themselves do not. Igbo-phobia as demonstrated by the pre- and post-colonial British administration, as illustrated in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, is an indication that the colonialists were intimidated by the prospects of rising Igbo self-awareness. I was shocked by how much non-Igbo people know about the peculiarity of Igbo identity and how little Igbo people themselves know about these matters. More annoying is the fact that Yoruba Ifa tradition holds much of the mystery of Igbo identity, yet Igbo scholars have hardly tapped into it. I was surprised to hear from a Yoruba colleague that the Igbo presence in the Moremi myth was denied by an Igbo professor of English Literature at University of Ibadan in the seventies, who insisted that the Igbo mentioned in the myth are not the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria, as if there is any other group of people going by that name anywhere in the world.
In fact this present book was motivated by a strange occurrence – a strange visit in 2008 by an African American woman, an avid researcher who travels all over Africa seeking answers to the unknown, who against all my promptings refused to have her name mentioned in this book, but who insisted that I should write this book detailing the fact that the Igbo were the earliest humans to inhabit the planet. She had seen my work The Gram Code on the Internet and came to Nigeria to look for me – “to drink from the mouth of the master” as she called it. In the end it was I who drank form her mouth instead. We held several sessions of late night discussions about Africa’s Prehistoric past, comparing notes on each other’s findings and on work so far done in the field. She was convinced that the Igbo are direct descendants of the oldest sojourners on the planet, the ‘Sons of the Earth’, the autochthons, the so called Bushmen who have been here longer than every one else and who taught the rest of the world every thing they know. She referred me to a number of other African American researchers who have touched on this phenomenon, but who do not have the opportunity I have to bring up materials from the homeland to support their theses. In fact we actually argued about this because the idea sounded too far-fetched to me! Imagine that! She told me the Igbo were here before the north-south Hamite migrants, the Kwa, came into the land and that Yoruba mythology, Benin mythology and others confirm this. I remembered several issues I has encountered in my research that pointed in this direction, including the fact that when I visited the Yoruba Center in Havana, Cuba I saw among the Yoruba pantheon of gods at the center, the statue of a god named Obatala whose inscription/explanation said: “Father of the Igbo nation, Master of all divinities, Creator of man in various forms, Gentle Lord of the Pure White”! This was a great puzzle to me – that the Father of the Igbo nation was revered not just as a great god among the Yoruba, but that he was seen as the master and head of all known Yoruba divinities and as THE CREATOR OF MAN??? This was the explanation I got from the head of the center who also informed me that the center was set up under the guidance and approval of Prof. Wande Abimbola, well known authority on Ifa.
The question of Igbo identity:
The question of Igbo identity has always been a subject of great interest among the African Diaspora. At the Eze Nri palace in Anambra State (plates 59a, c, d), I was shown evidence that all Oba kings of Benin originally received their mantle of office from the Eze Nri, and that the ‘Oba’ title was the highest chieftaincy title reserved for members of the Executive Council of the Eze Nri. I had also heard it eloquently argued that the Idu and Oduduwa titles originated from a pre-historic period dominated by the Igbo. Another shocker is the Edo/Benin oral tradition published under the title, Great Benin 1, by oral historian Osaren Omoregie, which insists that the Deluge was occasioned by the anger of God in connection with circumstances surrounding the birth of the first ancestor of the Igbo Nation. Imagine that! These were enough to tell me that the Igbo were there before the beginning of everything, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, THAT THEIR ROOTS ARE TO BE SOUGHT AMONG THE GODS THEMSELVES. The opinions expressed by the African American woman was just the final push that I needed - another witness, for as the Igbo say, agwo otu onye huru wu eke (one person’s witness is not trustworthy). I prayed her to allow me give her due acknowledgement for inspiring me, but she said no “for security reasons”. I do hope that when she reads this book she will change her mind and allow me to give her due credit in subsequent editions.
She herself had successfully traced her roots to the royal family in Benin Republic and had even gone through a ritual reunification process with the Benin Royal family, so she had no personal interest in the Igbo issue except as part and parcel of reconstructing what she called “the authentic history of Black Africa”. Another pointer to the general belief among the African Diaspora that Igbo people are autochthons is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade story of an entire ship-load of Igbo people who drowned themselves off the coast of South-Carolina rather than submit to slavery, captured in a movie called Daughters of the Dust – an allusion to the Igbo stock as sons of the earth. The Igbo people themselves frequently use the terms ‘ab-origin’ and ‘son of the soil’ to indicate that they are autochthons.
To my mind the most intriguing aspect of this work is the way we have followed through the journey of words through time. We have followed words from the present time backwards through millennia to the very first time they were pronounced by individualized man, talking man, thinking man – a man who was called Adam - the first man who fell from divine grace: Adaa m! In the absence of recognizable written records left behind by our Black African remotest ancestors, we have chosen to follow the journey of spoken records through time, and these spoken records have produced a mine of information that we believe are more trust-worthy than written records which are usually subjective and doctored. The study of written records belong to the domain of History while the study of spoken records belong to the domain of Linguistics, an area where I happen to have had some training during my student years at the University of Dusseldorf, Germany, which I have continued to practice and research in as a scholar of African Literary Studies. This exposure has come in very handy in the study of the monoliths of Ikom, Cross River State, Nigeria, published under the title The Gram Code of African Adam as well as in this present work.
This work was presented in part at the 2008 Igbo Studies Association Conference at Howard University, Washington DC, USA. It received very excited reactions from the audience of Igbo and non-Igbo scholars who participated in the conference, many of who signed up for copies. I think I need to mention that in the course of my presentation at the Igbo Studies Association Conference at Howard University, one Dr. Abdul Salau, a northern Nigerian and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Political Science and Philosophy, Delaware State University, USA, presented a paper detailing Igbo linguistic connections with Egypt and specifically stating, to everyone’s surprise, that many ethnic groups in Northern Nigeria have Igbo origins, and that the Kwa/Ka element in such place names as Kaduna, Kwara, etc. have very ancient Mega Igbo links. Someone in the discussion group also mentioned that the cult language used by Igbo initiates of traditional masquerades is understood all over Nigeria by cult members of other ethnic groups. This is an interesting subject of research. I was deeply moved to hear this because I have always had a soul-fascination with the Igbo masquerade, always feeling as if I am the hooded one inside the masquerade. I wept the day Isseke indigenes raised their seven highest masquerades, mmanwu, in a ritual ceremony to herald home their lost son Olaudah Equiano during the First International, Interdisciplinary Conference on Olaudah Equiano International Conference convened at Imo State University, Owerri sponsored by my organization the Catherine Acholonu Research Center for African Cultural Sciences in partnership with the United Nations Forum of and Culture and Imo State University in 2007. I was shaking all over. Something deep within my soul was at one with the spirit of those masquerades. It is inexplicable. This thing must be the spirit of the earth abiding within the soul of every autochthon. My own personal discovery in this regard is that most traditional Nigerian masquerades and cults use the same symbol-language and inscriptions, which I have designated as a form of writing.
Aspects of this work have also been presented under the title “Revisiting the Olaudah Equiano Global Legacy” during a solicited lecture I gave for the 2006 Black History Month Celebration at the Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, USA. That particular lecture was solicited by the College authorities, in partnership with neighbouring institutions, as a pointed response to Harvard Fellow, Vincent Caretta, who, had been spreading malicious and embarrassing lies regarding Olaudah Equiano’s claim to having been born in Igbo land. I am happy that my response, which has now been published in two leading Journals in USA, has put paid to Caretta’s hatchet job. In fact, I am infinitely grateful for that opportunity offered by the invitation of the office of the Dean of Humanities, Community College of Southern Nevada, because it exposed me to the depth of Igbo-phobia that is prevalent in our world. Caretta used unprintable invectives to qualify the Igbo stock. It made me deeply angry to read his description of my ancestors, myself and my children. No one deserves to be insulted the way Caretta insulted my people, calling them the “lowest and most wretched of all the nations of Africa”, that “the conformation of their face …resembles that of the baboon …” and that “the Eboes are in fact more truly savage than any nation of the Gold Coast.” I just couldn’t let him get away with this. After all I come from a lineage of proud Amazons of the Aba Women fame, where women go to war to defend their husbands and their children. I have therefore included my reply to Caretta’s invectives against the Igbo in the Postscript at the end of this book, but I mention him here because it was his insult that induced me to do more and more research to find out who the Igbo people really are.
I have always said that the story of the Igbo people is a metaphor of the story of the Black man. In every respect, the Igbo experience in Nigeria is a parody of the Black man’s experience in the world. Thus Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is an appropriate testament and an apt description of the black experience as the true wretched of the earth under the white man’s burden. The ideology of divide and rule, employed by the British administration in Nigeria, in India, in China, etc., did not just divide the tribes among themselves, its most potent power was in dividing the mind of the individual and the consciousness of the tribe. It split a person’s consciousness into separate parts, so that he/she was no longer a unified entity. This is the inner meaning of “Things Fall Apart” - ‘Ife Esekasia/Ihe Aghasasiala’. The damage done by the British colonialists to all those they colonized is unquantifiable. And the Igbo were specifically singled out for demolition because of the fear of the great promise they held. It is little wonder, then, that they derailed in their course. In this book I have delved into the unknown in search of the lost path of the Igbo stock through Pre-history, the course of the Igbo gene before and after the creation of Adam as revealed in ancient records such as the Gnostic Nag Hammadi Scriptures, and The Dead Sea Scrolls both of which were lost for two thousand years and then found in the twentieth century. I have tried to make sense of my findings. But most importantly, I have succeeded in providing my Igbo readers with the material to at last attempt to make sense out of their very existence as a people, to assist me to make sense out of the wealth of information I have exhumed from the buried and forgotten records of mankind, and ultimately, to continue this project in our universities, culture/research centers, seminaries and schools.

Africa the Hope of the World:

The Dogon possess the full records of the origins and structure of the universe. Their mythology is a detailed Astronomical record of the origin of the Milky Way Galaxy and of the structure and behaviours of the stars in the constellation of Sirius – which is said to be the origin of our solar system. Several Western scientists have studied Dogon Astronomical records and have found them to not only be in conformity with modern Science, but to contain details only recently discovered and others yet to be known to modern Science. This is another reason why Africans should take their ancient heritage more seriously and not wait until Westerners discover our past for us, because when they do, they always take it away to prevent us from discovering the Truth; they take it to their museums for ‘study’ and tap the powers contained in them to enhance their own civilization. If this were not the case, what was the essence of the Western powers borrowing the ancient Tibetan Chintamani Stone to aid them in the creation of the ‘League of Nations’? It was simply to enable then create the necessary rallying force and sustainable spiritual impetus required to keep the League together. True to type, they never would have returned it if the highly celebrated Russian painter and mystic, Nikolas Roerich, had not personally taken it upon himself to secure the stone from the West and personally convey it to Tibet (For more on this, consult the Internet). All said, the monoliths of Ikom and other pre-historic Rock Art of Africa, the Igbo Ukwu Serpent Science Writings and a host of other symbol Writings yet to be taken seriously by Igbo scholars, are the written Scripture of the Hamite/Idu/Old Ife civilization. There is need for an African Renaissance of Learning that will resurrect these lost literatures and scriptures from all over the continent and make them available to our children so that they too shall not be the wasted generation that we have been, because everything that we have so far studied tells us that Africans are meant to be the teachers of the rest of the world, their leaders in true Knowledge and true Wisdom. As I write this, the Western Economic System has crashed like a pack of cards. And when a nation’s economic system collapses, that nation is forced upon its knees. What follows is the Fall of its civilization. It happened to Rome, Greece, Babylon and Egypt. It is happening to USA, Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, Iceland, etc. African countries are above it because he who is down needs fear no fall. As I write, Western environmentalists are predicting that in less than five years the effects of climate change and global warming which have brought about rising tides of natural disasters in Europe, Asia and the Americas (Africa has been mostly spared from these disasters too), might tip over and bring about floods that can sink large portions of these continents and bring an end to Western civilization! These are all signs of the turning of the tide that has long been foretold; a turning of the tide of civilization that will place Africa on the top of things. Already a son of Africa has become the President of the most powerful nation in the world –the United States of America. The race is still on as I write, and this is the month of October 2008; but I have known without a shred of doubt from the very day I read about him in The Time Magazine in 2006, that Barack Obama is riding on the tide of the fulfillment of the prophesy that Africa shall rule the world in the new millennium! I knew then as know now, and had stated then, that no power in heaven, on earth or under the earth could prevent Obama from being sworn in as President of the United States of America come January 2009, as every one who ran against him, the Clintons in particular, must have painfully realized.

Communion of Healing and Renaissance:
I am proud to be able to provide my people, the Igbo, and through them the rest of the black race with the material, the tools to begin the process of healing, of re-birthing. This is communion wine and bread. This is oji, the life, the love, the union. This is the dawn of Igbo and African Renaissance. As The Gram Code of African Adam was my offering of a handbook of African Renaissance, so is They Lived Before Adam, a handbook of Igbo Renaissance. This is my offering to the healing waters of Igbo consciousness as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart and launch the Festival of Igbo Civilization under the insignia of Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo through the instrumentality of its foot soldiers: Prof. T.U. Nwala (Conference of Democratic Scholars, Monsignor Prof. Theophilus Okere (Whelan Research Academy) and Hon Chris Asoluka (Aka Ikenga) –
For Chinua Achebe
Ndi Igbo,
Ide Mmili Ide Mmadu.
Ndi Igbo
Ide mmadu
nkea bunu oji.
Matanu na Onye Ka mmadu ka chi ya.
Ndi Igbo
Ide Mmadu
kunie nu!
Ide Mmadu bu Ide Mmuo.

Chinualu-anyi-ogu Achebe
Onu –na-ekwulu-uwa
Ode Akwukwo okpu Africa nyelu uwa
Nkea bu oji… Kakwuolu anyi nka.
Chris nwa-Okigbo,
Ide mmadu nwa Ide Oto
Oja eji atute mmuo
Une ka une.
Chris, oje na mmuo
Kunie na echi abulugu taata
Na Taata abulugokwa unyaafu
Ka-asuzikwaa ifea na-onu Anambara
Obodo okpu
Une k’une…umu anambara
Oko akuko ndi Igbo
Ndi oje-na-mmuo
Umu Nri na Igbo Ukwu, Ogidi, Ide Oto, Ide Mmili…
Olaude, Zik, Enwonwu, Achebe, Okigbo, tinyekwuo Adichie…

For Chris Okigbo:

Chris, the Future you sang about is here
Tomorrow has become today
And today has become yesterday…

This is your Path of Thunder
This is the unsealing of ‘What the Seven Thunders Said’
For now at last, has mother earth unbound you…
This is the secret thing in its heaving…

That last lighted torch of the century,
once threatened with extinction
Now becomes a bonfire
That dream that has lain smouldering for millennia in a cave
Now becomes reality …
A nebula immense and immeasurable asserts itself at last …
And roaring, Thunder announces itself among the clouds …

An Old Star had departed, left us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for the New Star approaching;
The New Star appears, approaches, announces its name
from a long unbroken lineage of God-men:
NZE NZE, the Lord of Lords!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As our readers progress through this work, they shall have the opportunity of understanding our thesis as it concerns the Nwa-nshi phenomenon, otherwise called the Children of the Earth Goddess – the native Igbo name for the little people/dwarfs who were the first earthlings. Nwa-nshi was the Igbo native name for the Bushmen/autochthons, which became confused with Nwa-Nri – ‘native of Nri’.
Professor Catherine Acholonu.
Nigeria Country Ambassador,
United nations Forum of Arts and Culture.

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.