By
Obododimma
Oha
It is bad
enough that the patrons of the imagined cattle farm in the land of the spirits
are putting hard-earned money into the accounts of their enemies terrorizing them. Worse still
when people who have embraced Christianity and Western education are being
fooled into thinking that their dead relative, maybe their late great
grandfather, is asking for ihe maghara ọdụ
(what throws its tail that way and that way, a local Igbo metaphor for a cow). If
one is unable to provide the cow offering, or provides one when his father-inlaw
dies, the dead great grandfather gets angry in the spiritworld and comes and kills his grandson who has just married and is struggling to find his
feet. His late envious grandfather must be a heartless and thoughtless
terrorist! An utterly useless fellow, was he not there when someone killed his
other son and he could not retaliate as a spirit? He has a cattle farm in the
spiritworld, just as humans may be mere cattle to spirits who are rearing them
on a farm called “the earth”. And he could not lobby or convince them to stop
slaughtering us for their meat! This idiot who slaughtered his grandchild from
the spiritworld was there when a dictator became head of state and has been
perpetrating atrocities and promoting others.
Another
paragraph on his idiocy! If this terrorist really left the spiritworld for our
world and came to kill his grandson, maybe with an AK-47 rifle, he must have
come as a terrible demon. Apology to pastors who know demons by their names! He
must have been a demon right out of Hell for him to just come and kill his
struggling grandson. And how can God allow the demon to come out of Hell and
cause mayhem? Why didn’t he just clip his tattered wings? I thought that the
archangel defeated him when he attempted to cause mayhem last time? The point
is this: the envious great grandfather must have been in hell all the while to
be able to ask for a cow in our world; he couldn’t have come from Heaven and
God would sanction the terrorist act! For him to leave Heaven and come and do
an evil act! It is unthinkable! So, he must have come from hell! And has been a
demon.
When some
people try to modernise and rationalize their superstitious inclinations, I get
worried. Do you know how spirits reason? they query. Have you been to the
spiritworld? And all such funny questions. No; I have not been to the
spiritworld and do not know how spirits reason, but I know that spirits are
spirits and have no need for a mind. So, they don’t reason or have no concept
of reason, at least, “reason” as we know it. When the cow is slaughtered, the
spirit of the great grandfather won’t drink its blood; won’t even eat its shit!
Not to talk of partaking in eating the beef. Spirits have no business with
concrete things like cow blood and cowshit! Spirits are spirits, intangible.
My suspicion
is that his great grandfather was reformatted long ago and he lost all his
files. It he meets his grandson, he won’t even recognise him. He has even forgotten
that he voyaged to our world once upon a time and that there is something
called “candy”. The great grandfather has another life now and has forgotten
our world. So, he has no business with ihe
maghara ọdụ!
When some
people in their crafty nwannadi politics want
to pull you down or retard your progress, they start recruiting the fictitious
spirit of your great grandfather to ask for a cow. Or when they want some beef
to share, they start speaking for the
dead ancestor. That is even why you have to understand nwannadi politics and the economic dimensions of this insistence on
giving ancestors cows, instead of treating them as mere folktale. When you
speak of postcolonial Africa and its backwardness, think of the cattle farm in
the spiritword, too. What devours the okra plant is crawling underneath and
even lives there permanently.
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