Uwa Bu Ahia

By

Obododimma Oha.

The metaphorization of earthly life or of the earth itself, as a marketplace or as going to market to make some purchases, is very strong in Igbo thought. To go to the marketplace, one has to make a journey. That means that coming to the world involves a journey, from somewhere to somewhere. That is based on the assumption that we do not just come into existence through biological means, through sexual reproduction, growing in the womb up to the moment of delivery. Where was the person prior to that conception in the womb? The assumption was that there was something that did not have form, which was given a human form to manifest, and will discard that human form one day and move on. This taking on and throwing off of the human form are a journey, the journey of earthly life.

An Igbo highlife musician sang:

Uwa bu ahia

Uwa bu ahia

Eluuwa bu ahia

Onye zuchaa nke ya, o laa …

(The earth is a marketplace

The earth is a marketplace

The surface of the earth is a marketplace

When anyone finishes their transactions, they go home …)

That is a very effective image: the configuration of coming to this life as going to market for some transactions and going home unfailingly when they are over. That means: the journey to the market has a purpose or is dependent on the purpose of going; the person who has gone to market needs to go home or must go home when the transactions are over; and the transactions cannot last forever: they  must be over at a point. The conclusion of service encounters in the market is to be anticipated. Normally, the conclusion is the fixing of the price which one party has to pay, in cash or other recognized legal means. If that is the case, the termination of mortal life, the discarding of earthly form called “death” is inevitable; it is to be expected. What cannot be predicted is HOW that exit is to be made, what would lead to that discarding, whether a gunshot or a knife slash.

Uwa bu ahia, indeed, and everyone has to go for the transactions and return home. There is no question of ordering the domestic servants to go to the market and make the transactions, and then return at the appointed hour. Igwe niile ga-eje n’uzu (All bicycles will eventually visit the welder), the Igbo say. The blind and the sighted; the lean and the obese; the beautiful and the ugly; the king and the servant, all must visit the market stall and haggle.

Nigerian public discourse has a way of humoring this journey to the market. It says that if somebody goes to the market for the transaction and refuses to return home at the end, that person is “government pickin,” a euphemism for insane, homeless people who make the marketplace their home. There are two entities that I know make the marketplace their home. One is the mad fellow already mentioned. The second is the vulture. Both are united by the idea of being the rejected that cannot reject themselves; both are free as the rejected. Above all, both are considered already dead to societal membership, even though we know it is a lie because they enter or are part of society. Don’t we have proverbs, wise sayings, attributed to mad people in many cultures and to vultures? Don’t male ritualists and those with uncontrollable sexual urge go and have sex with mad women and get them pregnant? Are mad people sometimes not robbed of their little monetary possessions by petty thieves? And so on.

In spite of the fact that discarding the adorable or lovely flesh and carrying on is inevitable and will happen one day, some people are filled with fear concerning the experience and mainly because they do not know what is waiting for them over there. Just as they opened their eyes and found themselves in one miserable country and not another they would wish, they do not know what and where it would be next. They do not know whether they would die here and only to be born there – in which case their families would be wailing hereonearth and another “family” would be rejoicing that another journey has started in another world.

Ancient Egyptians even took it further. Their kings had their tombs stocked with valuables, which they would need in the afterlife. They had gold vessels and even food items inside the grave. But even if the man were buried along with his mansion, or as is rumoured today, he as a rich man is buried with his customized Benz car, he may not know the whereabouts of these material things. He might not even know that they are in the tomb, not to talk of driving the car to the spiritworld. 

Given this uncertainty and the fear it occasions, some faiths try to provide a little consolation, not only by helping to install an idea of a definite place where the journey might end, but also by euphemizing the exit after the market transaction here. No, don’t get scared: he is not dead but asleep. The idea of being dead implies that it is finished. Asleep implies that there is still hope: the person asleep will eventually wake up. He will not wake up! He is stone dead! Use his flesh as barbecue, if you like. Whether you send the body to evil forest or to a shrine to assuage a god, or to an incensed church, he is gone for good. All the prayers and songs and vigils will not help him or define where he is going.

The euphemization is to raise the hope of survivors and cater for their fears, to give the impression, from a human perspective, that that earthly familial relationship will one day be reconstituted. There could be not family over there. And where is there? There could be a different family over there!

The idea of earthly life as a journey is rich in spiritual reflections. Any person on a journey, a trip, surely has to have a destination. (Sorry for that person if the luggage is excess and if the luggage is an undue interference with another person's market transactions!) But we do not know that destination. So many things are hidden from us humans. We cannot fully understand that configuration of going to the market for transactions unless we are allowed to remember even that we once went the marketplace, which I doubt. Once out of the market, memory may be erased so that another phase of the journey can begin and go on uninterrupted.