Ogbenyealụ

By

Obododimma Oha

In our village, some women are named “Ogbenyealụ” or “Ogbenyeanụ” (A poor man does not marry her”), which is both a warning and a statement about a barbed-wire fence around her. Such bearers are rare now, with Christianization and modernization. I do not know how its bearers feel (in  fact, in the past, it seemed they had their heads in the clouds, being identified as special).  In today’s society that looks for adjectives to turn to nouns and names, she would be called “Precious." But “Precious” is silent on gender and denies us of so many cultural menu surrounding "untouchability" by the poor. Indeed, in that kind of Igbo society, poverty was not liked. In fact, the Igbo highlife musician, the late Oliver de Coque, sang about this cultural dislike in one of his songs:

Oke ịta ahụhụ n’eluụwa na ubiam adịrọ mma!” (“Too much hardship and penury are not good in this life”). 

As expected, many wage relentless war against want, some like Unoka, in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, being very lazy and unambitious like their peers and being satisfied with their condition. Such unambitious folks may end up with a terrible disease symbolic of laziness and go to the Evil Forest when they die.

So, now we know the society where “Ogbenyealụ” featured as a name for the precious (and probably pampered) female. That culture saw the precious female, not merely as a rare commodity but as a thing to die for. And, surely, some young men can blindly work themselves to death in order to qualify to marry her. It is a noble thing to answer the husband of the uniquely beautiful. So, they can afford to go on epic trips, fight with the ọzọdimgba (gorilla), cross seven rivers populated by alligators and water spirits, etc, in order to win “Ogbenyealụ’s” hand in marriage. Double sacrifice if she happens to be the king’s daughter! Let Nollywood, please, give us the cast.

But let us return to what qualifies one to be called “Ogbenyealụ.” We have already said that person must be exceptionally beautiful, even though the Igbo can scoff at beauty sometimes and say, “A na-eri mma eri?” (Who eats beauty?). Probably because of this beauty, she runs the risk of being spoilt, badly spoilt, such that while her siblings are about the chores or are working in the farm, she is allowed to sleep or play with her toys. When “Ogbenyealụ” cries, the spoiler would rage and quickly attend to her. In a sense, she is psychologically controlling her parents or spoiler with her cry.

The compensation would come: Ogbenyealụ cannot even boil some water, not to talk of cooking. If care is not taken, you would find out that she would not be able to cross the road on her own because she is always being driven in a car, or at more, shown where to step on. Ogbenyealụ ends up not being able to wipe her own nostrils.

But who is going to bear the brunt of Ogbenyealụ’s tantrums? Her parents will surely not marry her. It is the man who has defeated poverty by working himself to pieces that will marry her and live with her! That Heaven is for him! Sorry for him. That is why the Igbo say, “Onye hụrụ nwaọkukọ ka ọ na-abọ nsị, ya, biko chụpụ ya, n’ihi na ọ maghị ma ọ bụ ya ga-emechaa taa ọkpa ya” (“Whoever sees a fowl scattering faeces, should please drive it away because that person does not know whether he or she would eventually eat those legs on a later date”). But the young man laboured to have Ogbenyealụ; so, let him have his trophy.  As it is also said in Igbo, “ọ chọ iheukwu ya lekwa agba enyi” (Whoever is looking for a big thing desperately should receive and enjoy the jowl of an elephant”). Is the jowl of an elephant not a big thing? Does the person want a bigger thing? Bigger than Ogbenyealụ?

“Ogbenyenyealụ’´ is configured earlier, not just as a praise for possessing something of inestimable value, but also containing a warning! Poverty should not go near her. That equally suggests to us that she must have been raised to love affluence and its display. Thus, that early warning is enough for the wise. Only fools still rush in where angels fear to tread, what more when angels no longer “tread” but use other superior means of technology to go to their destinations. That they fear to “tread” is just your own imposition of human signification on aliens!

Yet we should feel for the person named “Ogbenyealụ.” Can’t you see a praise becoming a condemnation or imprisonment? She is given a label, an ideology, that creates a problem for her. This not a matter of being named by the male other who appropriates her as one of his property. It is just that she carries around a narrative that is undermining her association. If we call “Ogbenyealịụ” a female Unoka, is that a rescue from an abduction? No, it means that he is characterised as the same type of weakling as the male Unoka. But it is not her fault. It is the fault of the system that named her.

Female naming by the male other will continue to throw up issues of labelling one’s property, of the perception of the piece of property labelled. But it is important for the bearer of the label to look closely at the label, to know whether it is a condemnation or warning still against the interest of the bearer.