Stepping on the Footmarks of a Thief

By

Obododimma Oha

Contemporary crime fighting received along with colonisation in Africa gives a wrong impression that Africans had no valid crime detection and prevention techniques. The techniques may have weaknesses, but they served their societies in crime fighting. The idea of maintaining total silence over them or rather erasure and criminalizing them (as we saw in the Ogwugwu Okija case in Nigeria) is quite wrong, and gives one the impression that colonisation is being subtly justified, sanctified, and endorsed in the so-called postcolony. Perhaps one way of rescuing these indigenous methods that are valid is by talking and writing about them. That is one reason for the authoring of this essay: one needs to examine the ancient Igbo theory of crime detection and distortion of evidence, which one can simply call “stepping on the footmarks of a thief.”

Does that not naturally  make signification (or semiotics generally) central to crime detection and fighting? For want of a single concept that is indigenous, we would translate that significs of crime the way we have done. But that does not mean the concept never existed or cannot be created. In Western crime fighting, that dependence on a sign that wrongly points out the criminal or suspect has been called “symbolic assailant.” In that crime fighting tradition, agents wrongly interpret the appearance or outlook of a suspect as suggesting actual criminality. They may confront the suspect with lethal force and later try to cover up their professional misdeed. In other words, “looking like a criminal” does not make somebody a criminal. If there is anything a crime fighter should know how to do in relating sign to crime, it is not to be too hasty in finalizing interpretation. To hastily finalize likelihood or suspicion in crime fighting is to be crude and uncivilized, as one finds in some “shithole” contexts.

“Stepping on the footmarks of the thief” is, first of all, tied to temporal context. In the distant past in many African societies, many people were going about on bare feet. Thus, in many villages, many people knew everyone’s footmarks. Also, large footmarks were sometimes fallaciously associated with criminals, and was a kind of symbolic assailant case. Large footmarks could be owned by good people and non-criminals. Anyway, whenever burgary occurred, footmarks on the crime scene (which is still valid) were used in profiling and determining who could have been involved. Sometimes the suspicion widened to other villages where footmarks were known.

You would call this a crude method. Well, crime fighting and prevention were simple among those simple folks who lived simple lives. To prevent crimes like burglary, they sometimes called for and had blood covenants and swore by the oracle or powerful deity like Ogwugwu. That was it and enough for people to sleep with eyes shut, not like the case police officers going on robbery instead of night shift!

“Stepping on the footmark of the thief” was a distortion or insertion of oneself in criminality, a grievous error, which relatives were warned not to do. That caution was meant to protect them, not to make themselves suspects, or to distort  and/or contaminate evidence.

Also, “stepping on the footmarks of the criminal” was figurative. It meant not appearing like a criminal to others and being treated with suspicion. We can step into the footmarks of a thief through the kind of talk we engage in, the kind of  company we keep, the way we walk, the clothes we wear, etc. Before it can be proved that one is not really a criminal, one must have been thoroughly messed up. Imagine a university professor sleeping in a police cell with criminals, later to be released because he is able to find a powerful attorney. Has that professor not been messed up by simply “stepping on the footmarks of a criminal”?