posted                      

quote:

---

Can An Igbo Govern Nigeria At This Time?

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Politics is of the ego, by the ego and for egos. To participate in politics one must be an ego. The ego is the separated child of God on earth. Each of us sees himself as separated from God and from other people and as having different interests. He, therefore, tends to have conflicts with other people. Because we have social conflicts, we must engage in conflict resolution, in efforts to organize our affairs in such a manner that all are protected from each others harmful behaviors. This is how Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, sees Politics.

In as much as to be on earth is to be in ego state and human beings are egos, they are necessarily prone to politics. All human beings participate in politics. Politics is the effort by egos to decide how their ego based societies are governed.

There is no human society, no ego-based society, without political activity in it. The only way we can have a society without politics is a society where all people see themselves as one, as the same, as equal and as joined and a society where there is abundance of resources so that no one has any lack. Such a society does not exist on planet earth. As long as resources are scarce and people struggle to have access to it, there will be social conflict.

Politics is any effort to manage, not prevent, conflict by making sure that people get some scarce resources without necessarily stepping on other people?s toes.

Politics creates laws that protect all members of society from each others harmful behaviors. Governments enforce laws that make sure that all human beings play by the rules of the game, rules specifying who gets what, when and how and punish those who step outside the rules of the game. (This is Harold Laswell?s definition of politics.)

In as much as Igbos are egos they must attempt to govern themselves, they must engage in politics. However, the question is whether they can adequately govern themselves and other people or whether they need more political tutelage before they are mature enough to be able to adequately govern themselves and other people?

I ask these questions because my dealings with Igbos impressed on me with how woefully inadequate they are in governance.

The purpose of this essay is to alert Igbos to how they are seen by other people so that they may, hopefully, change and attain a more mature political behavior. Their current lack of political sophistication baffles me. How can these people be so naﶥ when it comes to the struggle by egoistic creatures for control of their society?

These people do not seem to understand the nature of politics and behave as if politics consists of their asking other Nigerians to give them power just because they think that it is their turn to have it.

No one gives you power just because you think that you deserve it; you struggle for power and get it, if you are more powerful than those you are struggling with. Politics is war by other (peaceful?) means and, as in all wars, the more powerful win and the weak loose. You get and keep political power by force. Politic is not a Sunday school affair where other folks give you power to govern them just because you wish to do so or think that it is your turn to govern them.


IGBOS AMAZING CHILDISHNESS


For many years I had nothing to do with Igbos and, therefore, had not observed them up close. But a couple of years ago, circumstances placed me in their midst and I had no choice but to observe them in action. What I saw was amazing. I saw a people whose childishness makes you wonder if they are human beings at all. Their total lack of reality testing was stupefying. Here is what I found.

Igbos are constantly calling other Nigerians derogatory names. They almost always called Hausas, awusa cattle (nnama). They assume that they are smarter than Hausas. I was amazed at this stupidity for it was even engaged in by so-called educated persons, including those who call themselves university professors. Why would adults engage in such infantile behavior?

Facts appeared not to be the motivator in Igbos behavior. The fact is that all human beings are the same, be they black or white, men or women, adults or children. In terms of intelligence testing, Igbos do not do better than other Nigerian groups. At school, Igbo students do not do better than other Nigerians groups. There are smart Igbos as there are smart Hausas, Yorubas, and Edos etc. As everywhere in the world, about ten percent of the population is above average in intelligence (IQ over 120), while the rest of the population is average (IQ 85-118) and some mentally retarded (IQ under 70). This is the way it is with Igbos and other Nigerians. But despite this fact you actually find average Igbos assuming that they?re smarter than other Nigerians, even gifted Nigerians. You ask yourself: where on earth did these people get the false idea that they are smarter than other Nigerians?

Igbos behavior in this regard reminds you of what white racists do. Even the dumbest white racist assumes that he is smarter than all black folks, unaware that there are black folks with superior intelligence. But just because he is white, he assumes that he is more intelligent than all blacks. This is what Igbos are doing; it is called prejudice, bias and bigotry. You see an average Igbo person and he assumes that he is smatter than all Hausas or Yorubas. You shake your head in amazement as to why he should have such a nonsensical view of reality.

I participated in an Internet group called Naijapolitics. What struck me was how the Igbos who posted their mails there made assumptions of their superiority. On the average, the Igbo that posted their mail there were less educated than the Yoruba or Hausa that posted their mails there. In fact, the average Igbo who posted his mail there had poor understanding of the English language. Their writing level was, perhaps, sixth grade. Some of them write what can be referred to as Engli-Igbo and were laughable. I used to wonder whether these folks even went to secondary schools! Yet, in their letters were grandiose assumptions of their superiority to other Nigerians.

There are no indices of development on which Igbos are ahead of Hausas, Yorubas and Edos--those Nigerians I related to quite often. As a matter of fact, by every accepted indicator of civilization, these other groups are considered more developed than Igbos. Igbos are what anthropologists call a stateless people. This is because Igbos did not develop large scale political structures. Their level of social organization consisted of rudimentary social organization: each town made decisions that affected it. There was no development of Igbo-wide political structure. There was no Igbo-wide government, no Igbo-wide bureaucracy, no Igbo-wide police, and no Igbo-wide army.

The Igbos did not develop writing and, as such, are a preliterate people (preliterate is euphemism for primitive). Compare and contrast that to Hausas, Yoruba?s and Edo who had large kingdoms, bureaucracies, police, army and other aspects of governments.

The Igbo was, in fact, a wild bunch and only knew large scale social organization with the coming of the white man. Frederick Lugard superimposed his famous indirect rule system on Igbos, a system he apparently copied from the politically more sophisticated Hausas. The warrant chiefs he appointed to rule Igbos became as corrupt as any human being could become.

I really do not see what is in the Igbos past that would make them feel like they had a glorious history! They did not have large scale governments; they did not develop writing, they did not tame animals like horses, asses, donkeys and used them to improve their life. They did not invent the wheel. They subsisted at primitive level of development. They had nothing that any one could point to with pride of accomplishment. (See Elizabeth Isichie?s attempts at Igbo historiography. Only from late nineteenth century to present day is Igbo history ascertainable.)

The only thing that Igbos seem to have contributed to human history is capturing and selling their fellow Igbos into slavery. A particularly amoral and vicious group of Igbos, the Aros, made arrangements with the Efiks to supply them with Igbo slaves and did so beginning in the 1600 until 1902 when the British finally put a stop their iniquity.

Aros invented a diabolical religion, the long Juju of Arochukwu, with which they oppressed their fellow Igbo people. Other groups invent religions to elevate the human condition; these criminals invented a religion with which to enslave their people. They presented themselves as priest-judges and spread out in Igbo land and manipulated the people into bringing their interpersonal disputes to them to settle. Losers in such disputes were supposedly sent to prison at Arochukwu. Prison meant been sold into slavery by these religious charlatans. These heinous criminals did not stop there; they engaged the services of a head hunter groups called Abam and these roamed throughout Alaigbo, capturing innocent children and women and selling them into slavery. These people were some of the greatest murderers humanity has produced. (See Olauda Equiana?s account of how these sadists captured him and marched him to the coast and sold him into slavery.)


BOASTFULNESS


Whereas many human beings are prone to boasting, Igbos are particularly prone to boasting. The Igbo is always telling you about his supposed great accomplishments. Whereas it is true that he tends to work hard and is achievement oriented, his actual material accomplishment is not more than other people?s accomplishments. The Igbos are not more accomplishing than Hausas, Yorubas and Edos.

If you listened to Igbos, you would think that other groups are just sitting on their behinds and doing nothing and only Igbos are the ones accomplishing much in life.

Igbos are always comparing themselves to other people. If you are the humble type that does not toot your horns, Igbos will see you as not accomplishing and as a failure in life. Even if, in fact, it is true that you are not a social success, what business of theirs is it? Some human beings are not motivated by social success. Some Indians, Sadhu, for example, walk into the forest and contemplate the nature of God and that is all they want to do with their lives. Some such persons made the greatest contribution to human knowledge. For all their bravadoes, Igbos have contributed zilch to philosophy, psychology and the physical sciences.


Analytically, what struck me as I observed Igbos is that, as individuals, they tend to feel inordinately inferior to other people and, like most neurotics, seek to seem superior to other people. The neurotic, as Alfred Adler tells us (The Neurotic Constitution), for any number of reasons feels inordinately inferior and does not like his felt inferiority and compensates with desire for superiority. He feels an obsessive-compulsive desire to seem superior to his environment and ?Acts as if? he is superior to other people.

Generally, the neurotic tells other people lie about himself; he tells tall tales that would seem to make him seem superior in other people?s eyes. He hopes that he has deceived those he is lying to and that they have accepted his make belief stories of success.

I related to a third rate Igbo community college instructor. He called himself a professor. He claimed that his father was the Nigerian ambassador to Italy, and talked about how he was born in Europe and went to schools in Europe etc. What he was really trying to say is that he is superior to other people. On the other hand, one was able to judge his class background. He behaved like a man born in the slums of Nigeria?s emergent cities. He lacked cultural sophistication and exhibited peasants? uncut behaviors, such as talking loudly and laughing in a non-self conscious manner. Simply stated, he lacked the refinement that old money and good breeding gives members of the upper class.

This man?s behavior is symptomatic of Igbos behaviors. They feel inordinately inferior and want to seem superior. They are not superior to any one. They merely act as if they are superior to other people.

To act as if one is superior to other people is a sign of mental illness. A mentally healthy person assumes that he is the same and equal to all people. It is a neurotic who pretends that he is superior to other people.

Certain types of neurotics, paranoid personalities, want to seem superior to other people. They are grandiose and have inflated sense of importance and want other people to collude with them and tell them that they are the imaginary important persons they want to be and pretend to be. If you validate their imaginary importance they feel happy, if not, they feel angry at you. The paranoid personality is interested in being seen as a very important person and fears being seen as if he is not important. He easily feels demeaned, degraded, belittled, humiliated and insulted by other people. When his imaginary sense of importance is not affirmed by other people, he reacts with anger at them. His temper tantrum is designed to rehabilitate his injured vanity. Like a little child, he thinks that narcissistic rage would make those he is angry at to see him as their boss. He beats his chest like a gorilla to impress you with his power, when, in fact, he is a scared little child. A child you could call his bluff by putting a bullet into his ape head.

I have not seen an Igbo man who does not exhibit some paranoid personality traits. Many of them also have narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.

The narcissistic personality generally feels inferior but works very had and seems to have had some success at school and work. As a result of his apparent social success, he comes to think that he is special. He feels that other people ought to see him as special and, as such, admire him. He wants to be seen as a superior person. He feels that other people are inferior to him and that he is justified in exploiting them, using them to get what he wants out of life and discarding them like they have no worth when they are no longer useful to him. Generally, he uses other people to achieve his objectives and discards them afterwards. He wants other people to pay attention to him and to see him as a very important person. While seeking other people?s attention, he does not reciprocate that attention; he does not pay attention to other people, he does not admire other people; he does not love other people. Since he does not pay attention to other people and expect them to pay attention to him, he is obviously childish for, if there is anything we know about human beings it is that they all want to be paid attention to. If you do not pay attention to other people, they will not pay attention to you. Thus, the attention which the narcissist is desperately seeking he does not get.

The antisocial personality generally feels a sense of entitlement. He feels special and feels as if the world owes him a living. Not getting what he thinks that he deserves from other people, he steals it. The antisocial personality, aka sociopath and psychopath, has no sense of remorse from taking what does not belong to him. He does not feel guilt from stepping on other peoples toes. Indeed, he enjoys hurting other people for that kind of makes him seem powerful. (Igbo slave sellers used to feel powerful from capturing and selling Igbo slaves; that is, they felt proud from hurting other people. The antisocial personality is the most spiritually underdeveloped human being on earth; in fact, he is more like animals and not human beings. He belongs in jails and prisons, not in normal society.)

The Igbos expects other Nigerians to see them as an achieving people, and as a very important people and to admire them. In the meantime, they do not pay attention to other Nigerians. They do not admire other Nigerians. They are obviously not going to get attention from other Nigerians and generally do not get positive attention from other Nigerians. They are then baffled by their not getting positive attention from other Nigerians for in their narcissistic delusion they had convinced themselves that they deserved attention from other Nigerians.

I believe that the tendency for other Nigerians to attack and sometimes kill Igbos is a response to Igbo boastfulness and tendency to put other Nigerians down. Igbos, for example, constantly denigrate Hausas. Given human nature, Hausas naturally feel insulted by Igbo derogatory name calling and react with anger at them, attack and sometimes kill them. To pure reason, it is perfectly understandable why Hausas attack Igbos.

Igbos degrade other Nigerians and other Nigerians take that degradation until they reach a breaking point and snap and let Igbos have it---exhibit violence towards Igbos.


While it is they that brought hatred unto themselves, Igbos see themselves as innocent victims of others attacks. They talk about Hausas killing them, what they do not talk about is the untold insults they heaped on Hausas.

I have dealt with these people and come to appreciate how insulting they could be. They are so insulting hence infuriating that you feel like putting them out of their miserable lives.

Alas, I have the capacity to understand human beings. To understand people is to forgive them. Thus, I forgive Igbos and do not take recourse to smacking them around, as my ego felt like doing to them. I realize that Igbos are infantile and unrealistic in their behaviors so, instead of being angry at them, I am motivated to help them understand their annoying derogatory behavior and change it.

Here is an existential fact that seems lost on Igbos. Every human being you see, if he wants to, can kill you. That is correct; every adult human being has the capacity to kill other human beings, as they have the capacity to kill him.

A human being?s life is a bullet and it is over. A man puts a bullet into your head and you are dead within six minutes (the time it takes for your brain to die from lack of oxygen) and become food for worms.

That is how important you are: you are food for worms. Your body is composed of particles, atoms and elements, the same materials that compose animals, trees and rocks etc. You are not that different from a dog, despite your delusional imagination that you are special. Insult somebody and he puts a bullet in your idiot head and your silly mouth is shut up forever and ever. This reality ought to teach you to watch what you say and humble you.


If you understand the fragility of human existence on planet earth, and you want to live on planet earth, you are compelled to be respectful of other people, for they could kill you. Every time you call another human being a put down name, you have injured his pride and invited him to attack you.

Perhaps, Igbos are so dense that they do not understand that all human beings are proud? But Igbos are a proud people, so they ought to understand that other people, too, are proud. Perhaps, they think that they are the only ones who have a right to be proud? Perhaps, in their delusion of specialness they think that their ego-god made them proud and other people lacking in worth?

Insult a person and he can come after you with a gun and kill you. You may defend yourself but the fact is that if another human being is determined to kill you, sooner or later, he will succeed.

We human beings keep each other alive by respecting each others presumed human dignity. (Human dignity is a social construct that normal persons buy into; you can choose to discard it and treat other people as garbage and will get away doing so; Hitler did.)

Disregarding existential reality, Igbos put other people down and act as if they are not aware that those they insulted could kill them. This behavior of theirs shows that they are not an intelligent people. They do that which generates violence towards them and when they are eventually attacked they make themselves seem like victims and tell the world that others are committing genocide against them.

In human history, some groups have been wiped out; white Americans, for example, almost wiped out Native Americans. There is nothing particularly unique about Igbos to make them immune from pogrom.

If you do not want to be killed by other people, then grow up and relate to them in a respectful manner.

I dealt with a bunch of Igbos and they went about calling me all sorts of degrading names. The thought went through my mind to destroy them. I could think of a thousand ways to punish them, even kill them. All it would take is only a few minutes of planning of how I would do it and it is done. Since, in my mind, they are uncivilized and not that much different from apes, I would not loose sleep if they died. They are a very unproductive crowd and their death would not be a loss to humanity. They are useless criminals; the death of criminals does not disturb my mental equilibrium.

But, I told myself, leave them alone, they are chronologically adult but emotionally children. If they are adult they would have realized that I could come after them with vengeance. If they were adult and realized how fragile human life is, they would behave in a respectful manner towards every human being. But given their infantile mental status, they are not aware that if they degrade other people that other people can put them out of their miserable existence.

It was at this point that I gained insight to why Igbos are persecuted in Nigeria. These people are like children under twelve years old. They degrade other Nigerians, unaware that those other Nigerians could attack and even kill them. When other Nigerians have had enough of Igbo bad mouthing, they attack Igbos. Then Igbos cry wolf and make themselves seem innocent. They are not innocent.

If you were so innocent how come your behavior brought you negative consequences? No human being is innocent, for we all do take the consequences of our behaviors.

If you do not want other people to kill you, then, stop boasting too much and stop putting people down; stop pretending that you are superior to other people.

No human being is superior to other people. It is neurotic and or psychotic to see ones self as superior to other people.

(We, black persons, resent it if white persons see us as inferior to them. If that is the case, how come Igbos do not recognize that other Nigerians resent them if they see them as inferior? Considering that most other Nigerians are developmentally ahead of Igbos, one does not even understand why Igbos pretend to be superior to them.)


Igbos have other delusional habits. For example, if a few Igbos in the Nigerian government seem to be doing a good job, Igbos claim that but for the Igbos the Nigerian government would be hopelessly lost. In the present political dispensation at Abuja, it seems that the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Ngozi Iweala and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr. Soludo, are doing a good job (?). Igbos take pride in them and on their account claim that it is Igbos that make the Nigerian government work well. They conveniently forget the musical chairs Igbos have been playing at the Senate where one Igbo president of the Senate after another was incompetent and booted out. They forget corrupt Igbo politicians like the sacked minister of education.

As already noted, Igbos did not have large bureaucratic governments. Therefore, they did not acquire knowledge of how to run large scale political organizations.

To run large scale social organizations, we need bureaucracies and in bureaucracies individuals subordinate their egos to group goals. In large scale organizations, what matters is not the individual but the organization?s goal attainment. The individual is a means for accomplishing bureaucratic goals. (See Max Weber, Bureaucracy.)

Bureaucracies use people to achieve their goals. Those socialized to bureaucratic behavior subordinate their egos to achieving organizational goals. As result, they develop compliant organizational personalities, personalities needed to work in large scale organizations. (See W.W. Whyte, Organization Man.)

Because Igbos did not have a history of working in large scale bureaucracies, they tend not to subordinate their egos to organizational goals.

Hausas, Yorubas and Edos had historic bureaucracies and tend to subordinate their egos to organizational goals hence tend to work well in government bureaucracies.

Igbos tend to work well in sole proprietorships where they work for their own individual goals. They seldom do well in partnerships and certainly do not do well in corporations. They are egoistic and do not like to subordinate their egos to group goals. They tend not to do well in large scale organizations. Many of their businesses are individually owned and suffer from all the disadvantages of such business. When the owner of the business dies, the business may die with him. Corporations guarantee the continuity of businesses.

Igbos are unable to subordinate their egos to large business organizations and make things work in groups. If you have ever tried to form business ventures with Igbos, you probably have learnt from first hand experience that they are always trying to knock you out and take it over. They are unable to work in a cooperative manner.

In fact, many of them are criminals and would do everything to destroy you and take over a business that you started and invited them to join in. In this sense, they show aspects of antisocial personality disorder. They have no conscience, no sense of right and wrong and no remorse feeling for their wrong doing. Like their ancestors, they would sell you into slavery and use the money they obtained to buy alcohol or buy trinkets to adorn their bodies and in their eyes seem like they are very important persons. These people?s pride and vanity is unsurpassed in the world. (The primitive is vain, the civilized person is humble. The Igbos are not aware of this fact and take their primitive egoism and vanity as sign of existential importance.)

All that matters to many Igbos is to appear big in society?s eyes but not to serve human need. In their traditional society, they used to have Ozo titles. They sold people to get the money to join the Ozo society and not feel one iota of remorse for the evil they committed in getting the money to buy the all important Ozo title. All that matters to these amoral persons is to seem like they are very important persons.


COMPETITION AND IGBO FEAR OF FAILURE

Igbo society is very competitive. Those who are more able to compete tend to be rewarded with valued social goods. Igbos allot social goods conditionally to those able to out perform others. As they say: Igbo ama eze, Igbos do not accept inherited leaders.

If a child wishes his hands well he eats with elders, meaning that if a person is highly achieving that no matter what his background is, poor or rich, he is allowed to become the leaders of his society.

There is no doubt whatsoever that in traditional Igbo society people are rewarded according to their performance in competitive activities (although these days bribing ones way into social positions are also allowed). Because Igbos tend to reward winners and ignore losers, Igbos tend to fear becoming losers.

The average Igbo man is filled with fear of losing out in society and is inordinately motivated to succeed by fair or crook means. He knows that if he succeeds that his people would recognize him as somebody important and that if he loses that they would see him as unimportant (okpokoro manu, anuoha). He is driven by desire for success and fear of failure. This makes him perpetually anxious.

The Igbo is an anxious neurotic, a person who wants to seem important and successful and fears failure.

Igbo pathological culture socializes and produces pathological persons, particularly narcissistic, antisocial and paranoid personality disordered persons.

Igbo society is a sick society; a sick society produces a sick people.

I learned from relating to these people that they are, as it were, the victims of their pathological society. Their society taught them to approach every person they see from a conditionally accepting manner. (See Carl Rogers, Client Centered Therapy.)

An Igbo man quickly evaluates you and decides whether you are an achieving person or not, and if not, he has no respect for you. In the language of Adorno et al (the Authoritarian personality) Igbos are like fascists who admire the strong and hate the weak. Given the opportunity, Igbos probably would behave like Germans and follow a demagogue, a fascistic leader like Hitler who tells them that human beings are to be ranked in order of importance, from high to low achieving, and that low achieving persons ought to be ignored, hated and or killed.

If Igbos come to power, given their present pathological psychological make up, one can see them killing other Nigerians, those they construe as not highly achieving. They would do so and not feel guilty, just as Germans killed Jews and Slavs and did not feel guilty because they were told that those people were not important because they had not achieved much to life.

In my opinion, Igbos need to be re-socialized, as the West re-socialized Germans after the Second World War, to accept people in an unconditional positive manner. If they learn to accept human beings in an unconditional positive manner, they would become mentally healthy. At present, they are mostly neurotic and, as such, if in political power could be dangerous to other human beings.


FRAGMENTATION

Each Igbo clan has a clan level identification. Thus we have Owerri Igbo, Onitsha Igbo, Ika Igbo, Ngwa Igbo, Ikwerre Igbo, Umuahia Igbo, Okigwe Igbo, Orlu Igbo, Wawa Igbo etc. There is no such thing as a pan Igbo wide feeling among the Igbos. In fact, until the twentieth century, Igbos from one area did not even know about other Igbos. It was with the advent of the British that Igbos began to relate to other clans. It was only when Igbos traveled to other parts of Nigerians and were treated as if they belonged to one group that they began to develop a sense of oneness, a feeling of Igboness.

The sense of Igboness is still incipient and not well developed. A people need to undergo many common experiences to develop a solid sense of oneness. The only common experience Igbos have jointly undertaken is the Biafran war. That single historical experience is not enough to help them develop a sense of nationhood.

(If other Nigerian groups are Machiavellian, they could take advantage of Igbo cleavages. Real politics practitioners from other groups could stroke one Igbo group to hate another. It is, for example, very easy for an Owerri person to hate an Onitsha person.)

If Igbos were sensible, they would work to create an Igbo-wide state, a state that encompasses all Igbos, from Ikwerre to Agbo, from Nsukka to Arochukwu. A state that is, nevertheless, within the framework of Nigeria. And better still, within a Federation of West Africa States or within a Federation of Africa where each tribe is a state.

Such a political arrangement would give Igbos the opportunity to keep experiencing common histories and therefore develop a pan Igbo identity. At present, they merely pretend to have a pan Igbo identity when they do not. Certainly, Owerri people do not see themselves as the same people as Onitsha people, nor do Ikwerre people see themselves as the same people as Umuahia people. At present, there simply is no such thing as an Igbo nation. (Igbos should concentrate on developing their political skills in this enlarged Igbo state before they aspire to governing larger polities like Nigeria, West Africa and, ultimately, Africa.)


Thoughtful persons observe historical trends. Nation-states are expanding their geographic reaches. Europe, for example, is moving towards one unified nation state with each of its tribes a state in it: Germany, France, England, Poland, Czech, Italy, Portugal, Spain, etc are increasingly transformed into states in a unified Europe. That is the only way Europe will compete with such large countries as the USA, Russia, China, India and Brazil.

By the same token, Africa will eventually become a federation, with each of its 400 or so tribes a state. We will, by the end of this century, have an Africa Federation with 400 states (each tribe a state). This will be real federalism, with each state essentially governing itself and leaving the central government to take care of national defense, foreign affairs and such other duties performed by the USA federal government.

This is the future of Africa and if Igbos are a sensible people they would be working to make all of Igbo land a state, first in the context of Nigeria, and later in the context of West Africa and, ultimately, in the context of an African federation.

(I visualize an Alaigbo state with a unicameral legislature consisting of no more than 50 members; a parliamentary form of government with a premier and cabinet of twelve ministers, and a governor who performs ceremonial functions. I visualize an Alaigbo divided into twenty districts, each with a district council of no more than seven members and a chair person who heads the administrative wing of governance. I visualize Igbo towns and cities, each with a city council of no more than five and a mayor heading the administrative wing of city governance. I visualize an independent judiciary headed by a state high court of no more than five judges, with district and town courts under it.)

This policy means giving up the quest for a separatist state called Biafra. If Biafra were to become an independent country, each of the Igbo clans would probably fight for independence and resist the ruler ship of others and the result would be a Somalia like perpetual conflict.

The only way to keep all Alaigbo together is to have it in a larger political framework like Nigeria/West Africa and Africa.

The quest to call Alaigbo by the name of a village in Portugal, Biafra, is futile. For Christ sake, do not call yourself by a European name; call yourself by your true name, Alaigbo.

In North America, Igbos generally do well as individual stars. They obtain jobs as university teachers and are often rewarded with professorships. Generally, that is just as far as they go. To move beyond that, to become departmental chair, Dean of a school, Provost and President of a university, one must have managerial and leadership skills, which requires transcending ones individual ego and serving the group?s interests. Igbos do not transcend their egos and serve group interests. What matters most to them is serving their self interests, not group interests. As a result of their egoism, Igbos seldom make it to the top of America?s bureaucratic organizations.

On the other hand, Yorubas tend to more readily subordinate their egos to organizational goals and tend to be found in the administrative ranks in America?s universities and corporations. I have seen Yoruba vice presidents of American universities. I have not seen any Igbo in high administrative position at an American university.


THE IGBO IN NIGERIA?S POLITICS


In Nigerian politics, I see Igbos, who, as individuals, are motivated to satisfy their self interests. I see Igbos who work hard to seem like they are very important persons.

I see narcissistic, paranoid and antisocial personalities in politics. I see folks who want all Nigerians to give them attention and to admire them and to see them as superior persons but persons who do not reciprocate such attention by paying attention to other Nigerians.

I do not see Igbos who seem genuinely caring for other Nigerians. I do not see Igbos who seem like they are adult human beings who have transcended their egos self interests and work for Nigeria?s public interests.

I see Igbos who are users of people and not giver to people. I do not see loving and socially interested Igbos in Nigerian politics.

I have looked at most of the present crop of Igbo politicians, particularly those aspiring for the presidency of Nigeria. I am sorry to say it, I see mostly emotionally retarded children. I see those who seem under twelve years old, emotionally. I see children seeking public office because they think that it would make them seem very important persons. I do not see folks who are motivated for public office by the desire to serve public good.

I do not see Igbos who have burning agendas that they want to accomplish while in office. I see folks who want to steal from the government and redirect government money to their pockets but not to do anything positive for Nigeria.


I hate to say it, but I must stick to the truth: I do not see any Igbo on the political horizon that would make a good president of Nigeria. I would not vote for any Igbo candidate for the presidency for I do not think that they are capable of governing Nigeria at this time.


I think that Igbos need a little more political tutelage before they can govern Nigeria. They need, at least, a generation (33 years) to learn the nature of politics and governance before they should be given the awesome responsibility of governing a large polity like Nigeria.

Clamoring for office and boasting about ones ability is not the same thing as having those abilities. As noted, Igbos are inordinately childish and do not seem to understand that every utterance a leader makes could result in war or peace. If an immature Igbo politician puts other Nigerians down, as I see foolish Igbos do, the result could be war in Nigeria.

To allow the infantile Igbo personalities I see to rule Nigeria at this time is to guarantee conflict in Nigeria.


As I see it, Igbos are, at present, too politically immature to rule Nigeria. They do not know how to pick their fights. They pick fights with persons who can destroy them. They are not thoughtful persons, for a thoughtful person immediately understands that his life is in other people?s hands and therefore is diplomatic in dealing with other people.

In their infantile need to seem powerful, Igbos put other people down, unaware that those they derogate could bring about their end, physically or psychologically. We need adults to rule us, not boastful children who are masking their inferiority feeling and pretending to be superior persons.


One may ask whether what I said here applies to the giants of Nigeria?s yesteryears politics, to such persons as Azikiwe, Okpara, and Ojukwu. We will never know since those persons were not really national leaders. Aguiyi Ironsi was briefly placed in a national leadership position. His record is not exactly one that any one would be proud of. He was uninformed about Nigeria?s tribal politics and allegedly tried a form of government suitable for a homogenous country like France and England, unitary government, and was killed for that foolish mistake. Clearly, a multi ethnic country like Nigeria requires a decentralized federal structure, if peace is to be obtained.

Reading books by such folks as Azikiwe gives one the impression that they, too, were full of boastings, arrogance and bravadoes and lacked realistic understanding of human nature. One is forced to conclude that were they in power that they, too, would have made a mess of things? But this is speculation, so one will limit oneself to the Igbos one knows of, contemporary Igbos.


How about other Nigerian ethnic groups, are they any better than Igbos? The Hausas and Yorubas have ruled Nigeria during the past 46 years; what good have they done Nigeria? I am not, at present, interested in talking about other Nigerians. In other writings, I pointed out that most Africans are self centered and need to be trained in self transcending leadership. Until the black man learns to subordinate his self interest to public interest, I doubt that any African country would be well governed.


Human beings live in flesh and blood and, as such, are limited by their bodies; they live in the world of space and time and cannot be perfect creatures. In spirit they are perfect but in body they must remain imperfect. It would be idealistic to expect real human beings to be perfect in their political behaviors. One is not an idealist; one is a political realist who accepts that human beings must necessarily be imperfect in everything that they do, including their politics. I am not expecting perfection in Nigerian politicians but I have every right to expect folks in public service to transcend their ego interests and serve public good. They are not going to be angles but a situation where most Nigerian politicians are criminals and 419 shysters is unacceptable.

We have governments because we human beings are imperfect. If we were perfect we would not need politics, laws and governments that enforce those laws; we would do the right thing untold to do so. But we are not perfect and must have governments to make sure that we have and obey laws.

Real politics involves imperfect people bargaining for power, giving and getting something in return, logrolling and making trade offs. Politics is horse trading and no rational person expects perfection in it. Perfection lies in formless spirit, not on earth. Yet on earth one expects people to be governed by the rule of law, not the lawlessness of brigands.

Some folks have alluded to what they think is my hatred of Africans. May I ask them whether the black man must always be corrupt? Should we accept him even if he is a criminal? To accept him despite his corruption is to show him disrespect. If one truly respects the black man, we must hold him to the same standard that we hold other people to.

I do not hate Africans; I just want them to behave like other human beings do: care for one another, rather than only seek ways to steal from one another.


CRITICISM


Since what I said in this essay, in effect, is that Igbos, at this point in time, do not seem capable of governing Nigeria, one can look at that statement from several perspectives. One can construe it to mean my negative self assessment projected out to those most like me, Igbos. That is, that I see myself as incapable of ruling and project that negative self assessment to all Igbos.

One can say that I hate myself and project my self hatred to hatred of those most like me, that I hate all Igbos.

If any of these views makes sense to you, by all means embrace it. As for me, all I know is that I am stating what my empirical observation shows me about Igbos. You are entitled to your perception of Igbos, just as I am entitled to mine. One must to himself be true. I must be true to my perception of Igbos. Whether my truth is the truth or not is for you to decide.

However, there is a legitimate argument against my conclusion. I made a sweeping and generalized statement about Igbos. One can ask me whether I have related to all Igbos to be able to know all of them. I have not related to all Igbos and in the nature of things should not talk about all of them. Therefore, what I said could not possibly apply to all Igbos. Every general rule has exceptions, so I imagine that there are a few mature Igbos who are able to rule Nigeria? If so, let those mature Igbos enter the fray and compete to rule Nigeria. Nevertheless, we all know that there is such a thing as a national character trait. There is such a thing as the typical English man, French man, a German, Italian, Russian, American etc. Whereas no one fits his national character traits completely, the fact is that each person tends to be more like those from his group. There is such a thing as an Igbo character. The generalized Igbo character I see seems incapable of political leadership that transcends his self interests; I think that Igbos need to learn how to subordinate their self interests in the service of public interests. This is my view.

I see Igbos as a people with identity crisis. They are like African Americans; they do not know who they are; they are trying to know who they are; they are trying to define themselves. If you recall, African Americans used to be called Negroes, then that was no good, so they called themselves blacks, then Afro Americans and now African Americans. They are trying to define themselves apart from the way their slave masters, whites, defined them. This is fine. They will succeed. By the same token, Igbos do not know who they are. Hitherto, they were Onitsha or Owerri etc but now they are thrown into one another and are trying to develop a larger collective identity, but, so far, have not succeeded. In the meantime, they try many definitions such as. Ndi Igbo (Igbo people?here they refer to themselves as a third person would refer to them. Who has ever had of a people referring to themselves as other people would refer to them! Obviously, this term is part of their identity crisis and will be discarded for another one, perhaps, Onye Igbo? Some would like to call their country Biafra, a name of a village in Portugal. This is an insult to them. Those engaged in this self abuse rationalize with the claim that Biafra has historical symbolism for them, that the name represented a past when they unified and struggled as a nation. They will toy with many names until they accept their true name, Ala Igbo (Igbo land).

Given my experience with Igbos, some of them will not concentrate on trying to refute my points but, instead, will attack my person. They will direct their anger at me. I have been called all sorts of names by these people: Waco, sicko is among the names these mentally retarded persons could muster for me. It is as if these folks believe that calling one a negative name would dispose one to accept such names, see ones self as such and desist from articulating the truth as one sees it. They want to scare one off; this is familiar antisocial personality tactic of criminals trying to scare their opponents off the tuff and win arguments through fear tactics. These folks have arrested emotional development and are wasting their time and energy calling me names. I have internal locus of authority and define myself internally. I do not define me as other people define me. I have unconditional positive self acceptance. I see me as good. I do not predicate my acceptance on living up to any other person?s ideas of what I should be. Therefore, what other people say about me means nothing to me. I certainly am not disturbed that deranged Igbo children call me negative names. If I choose, I could write their psychological profiles to the T and no mental health professional out there would disagree with my assessment of them. At any rate, I am not perturbed by being called put down names; what else is news? Isn?t that what Igbos do to other Nigerians, call them put down names and in the process get killed by them?

These folks are yet to grow up and learn respect for all human beings and give up their infantile tendency to put other people down while expecting those they derogate to respect them. It is delusional arrogance to derogate people and then expect them to respect you. It is playing an infantile god to insult other people and expect them not to insult you in return. In truth, those you put down want to whack you on the head, and, or to kill you, so that you grow up and stop being a child in an adult body. An adult understands that his life is in other persons hands and respects all persons.

I have dealt with many Igbos and learned that they are often very amoral and lacking in principled behaviors. For example, many of them do not believe in what the current ruling party of Nigeria, PDP, stands for, but, nevertheless, join it and make bleeping noises from its umbrella. Their goal is to get some crumbs from the powers that be in Nigeria. They will do anything, including selling their mothers, to be appointed to political positions in Nigeria. It never occurs to them to stand up for what they believe is right. I respect principled persons and have contempt for opportunistic pragmatists.

If ones motivation is grievance and vengeance, to fight back, to insult those who insulted one, one will be insulted. There are no victims and victimizers in this world. Each of us experiences exactly what he wants to experience. I know that many Igbos see themselves as in a war with other Nigerians and fancy themselves victims and since the content of this essay would seem to please their enemies, will see me as their enemy and come at me with their rusted swords, slashing blindly at me. So be it. I do not defend myself, nor do I expect any one to defend me. If I defend myself I am attacked. In love, truth, defenselessness and forgiveness lies my strength.


July 4, 2006

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

---

posted                      

quote:

---

I am an Igbo Diala. I was socialized into Igbo Omenala. I internalized Igbo culture and operate from its parameters.

Igbo culture is very republican and democratic. Igbo culture is individualistic, achievement oriented and realistic. Igbos are not a sentimental people, they accept life as it is without unnecessary adornments. Their language is overly realistic. Consider: Owu manu ji ara edebere otu? (I will not interpret it for you, you try to figure it our for yourself, after all, if I have taken the trouble to understand your language, English, the least that you could do is take the trouble to understand my own language, a language, we believe is the best in the world. The Igbos say: Speak Igbo and then die, indicating how proud they are of their language.)

My grandfather grew up in the early 1900s Alaigbo (Igboland), a world that the British had recently conquered. What did him and his contemporary Igbos do? They would tell their children: Look, children, the British defeated us, not because they are better men than we are but because they have advanced science and technology. We must acquire science and technology, if we ever want to compete with them. Therefore, we must all go to school and study science and technology. We must work hard. With science and technology and hard work, in a few generations, we shall be able to do what the British do. We might even surpass them. Thus, these hardy men and women resolved to send their children to school. Going to school and working hard became their mantra. Today, many of these amazing people’s children are university graduates and are found in the best universities of the world.

The Igbo does not countenance laziness. He does not listen to excuses as to why one is poor. He says: if you say yes, your Chi (personal God, your real self) will say yes. (See Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart.) He does not accept the thesis that he is a victim of circumstances. He sees himself as in charge of his life. He has internal locus of control and believes that no matter what the external environment is like that it is up to him to do what he could to extract a decent living for himself and his family. However, he is not naïve as to the powerful effect of the external environment on the individual; he recognizes the reality of the external world but does not resign himself to it.

My grandfather’s generation recognized that, for the time being, the British were in charge of their affairs. But that was a temporary situation. With hard work, they believed that sooner or later they would be able to compete with the British on their on terms.

The Igbo does not want you to pity him, see him as a victim and give him anything out of pity.

(When the Igbo comes to North America and beholds such policies as Affirmative Action, he is annoyed by it; he says: if you cannot get into the school you want to attend on merit, and then do not go to that school. When I was in secondary school, my father would say to me, Tom, I want you go to Oxford or Cambridge University. To do so, you must have excellent grades in your studies, including your GCE Advance Level. He could not tolerate mediocre grades. I had the requisite grades to attend those top colleges, not because I was particularly smart but because father could not let go of my case until I behaved realistically, studied hard.)

The Igbo context from which I came from is one where individuals are expected to compete and receive from their world whatever their abilities could give them in the competitive world they live in. I am an Igbo and carry the Igbo culture in me to wherever I go. I brought that culture with me to North America. I view the social phenomenon of North America through the lenses of my Igbo worldview. My perception is biased by my individual personality and by my cultural upbringing.

---

posted                      

quote:

---

Certain types of neurotics, paranoid personalities, want to seem superior to other people. They are grandiose and have inflated sense of importance and want other people to collude with them and tell them that they are the imaginary important persons they want to be and pretend to be ... The paranoid personality is interested in being seen as a very important person and fears being seen as if he is not important. He easily feels demeaned, degraded, belittled, humiliated and insulted by other people. When his imaginary sense of importance is not affirmed by other people, he reacts with anger at them. His temper tantrum is designed to rehabilitate his injured vanity. Like a little child, he thinks that narcissistic rage would make those he is angry at to see him as their boss. He beats his chest like a gorilla to impress you with his power, when, in fact, he is a scared little child. A child you could call his bluff by putting a bullet into his ape head.--July 4, 2006 Ozodi Thomas Osuji

---

posted                   

quote:

---

Igbos Personality and Fate

by Ozodi Thomas Osuji

This essay ponders whether there is such a thing as group personality and group fate? Is an individual like most individuals in his cultural group, and do they all share the same destiny? Is each person destined to be treated as members of his group are treated and, if so, why?
There is the phenomenon of stereotype; this means that we tend to be treated as members of a group. In North America, for example, many white folks have certain assumptions about black people: that they are unintelligent, given to criminal behavior, childish, not industrious, lazy, prone to dancing, good at sports etc and treat them as such.
Stereotyping people leads to prejudice, treating all members of a group as if they are all alike. We all feel that we are individuals and resent been treated as members of certain groups. We want to be seen as individuals and treated as such. Nevertheless, in the real world we tend to be perceived as our group is perceived.
Men of goodwill, aware of the dangers of bias, make efforts to treat people as individuals and not from a group’s perceived characteristics. But they do not always succeed. For example, most men try to treat women as individuals but when push comes to shove treat them as their assumptions about women dispose them to do. Generally, men assume that women are emotional, hysterical, histrionic, melodramatic, narcissistic, pay too much attention to their bodies and beauty etc. When a woman is seen, these stereotypes of what women are supposed to be entering men’s minds.
Common sense tells us that each human being is a unique individual and should be treated as such but in the real world we tend to see people as we see their group members. When we see an Englishman we conjure up what that means for us: thoughtful and cunning and wants to win at all costs and generally does so; a Frenchman conjures up the image of a sophisticated, urbane, cosmopolitan, enjoys refined conversations; a German, conjures up the image of a very disciplined person, a person who takes orders and does as told and is an efficient worker and also an efficient solder, an killing machine; a Russian, presents the picture of a chaotic person, a person who nevertheless in the end steps up to the plate and does what he has to do for mother Russia to survive, usually after sacrificing millions of his own people; an Italian conjures up the picture of a very artistic, friendly person, a person who enjoys life but not a good soldier; an American conjures up a picture of a childlike man but a man that knows what he wants out of life, a man who goes for his self interest and like a sociopath will not hesitate killing others to get his needs met, no conscience, amoral, like an antisocial personality etc.
All these assumptions about groups are wrong, but if we ignore them we pay a regrettable price. If we ignore the fact Germans are disciplined we live to regret our lack of reality testing for it is the case that a German battalion could defeat an undisciplined army. We know that at war Russians are likely to initially loose but that subsequently they will rally around and fight like driven devils until they drive you out of mother Russia. Thus, whereas it is true that all stereotypes are wrong, there is always some truth in all of them and a wise person pays attention to them.

For many reasons social scientists do not like to talk about group characteristics. Perhaps, they are afraid that such talk could lead to treating people in stereotypes and make it easier to discriminate against them? The Nazis perceived Jews, Slavs and other non Germanic groups as unproductive and killed millions of them. It is safer to talk about individual persons rather than talk about persons as members of groups.


Let us talk about individuals. Each human being is born with a set of genes and experiences society differently from other people. As George Kelly pointed out, the human child builds on his biological and social experiences to form a personality. Every individual has a unique personality.
Personality is a product of the individual’s inherited biological constitution and social experience.
There is a debate as to which plays a greater role, nature or nurture, in the formation of personality. Some would argue that biology plays the greater role in the formation of personality than social experience. Indeed, some believe that biology plays, at least, 75% role in the etiology of personality and social experiences less than 25%. Conversely, some argue that social experiences play the greater role in the genesis of personality.
If we accept that biology plays a greater role in the origin of personality we risk returning to stereotyping people. If it can be shown that biology determines personality and personality affects what the individual gets out of life, it follows that biology is fate. This conclusion would seem to justify discrimination and not caring for the poor.
Many social scientists would rather we stressed only the social factors that affected personality for if such is the case it is difficult to justify discrimination against people. If culture determined people there is hope that if that culture is changed that people would be changed.
The social science approach to personality is optimistic for it gives us the impression that it is not peoples fault that they are who they are, that circumstances determine who they are. It makes people the victims of their society and culture and they are not to be blamed.
Whether personality is determined by biology or society is not the objective of this essay. This essay assumes that people have personalities.

PERSONALITY

The individual’s personality is his habitual pattern of responding to stimuli from his environment. Each individual has a habitual pattern of behaving, of responding to other people and to his environment in general.
Personality is formed in childhood. Generally, personality is formed before adolescence (age13). Once formed, personality is very stable and is not easily changed. The individual, at sixty behaves as he did at thirteen. In the few instances where personality is changed, it is often due to trauma to the brain (such as from accidents that injure the brain) and from conversion to religion. By and large, the individual’s pattern of behaving is stable from childhood to old age.

The term personality is derived from Latin, persona. Persona is a mask worn by actors to hide their true identity as they enacted the behaviors of other people. The idea is that the individual’s personality is like a mask, his social presentation but not necessarily who he is, in fact. Each of us learned ways to present himself to other people. Each of us play acts roles expected of him by society and in time that play acting congeals into what is now called his personality. For example, in childhood children want to be accepted by what Harry Stack Sullivan calls their significant others (parents, siblings, peers, teachers etc). If those significant others posit high standards that must be met before the children are accepted, children try to live up to those standards and where they cannot, they pretend to do so. Such children learn to pretend to be who they are not to be accepted by their society. Where this process is pronounced such children deny their real selves and invent ideal selves and pretend to be their ideal but imaginary selves. The rejection of the real self and pretending that one is the ideal self is the nature of neurosis. (See Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution; Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth.)
Neurotic children are afraid to be their true selves for they think that if they are so that their parents and society would reject them. To the child, social rejection is a serious business. A child under twelve years old cannot fend for himself. Left alone most children would die. Aware that they need adults to support them materially and emotionally or else they die, children do whatever adults expect them to do, including denying their true selves and pretending being the ideal selves that their society reinforces.
In the process, neurotic children develop two selves: their real selves and their ideal selves, the inferior self and the superior self. These two selves are perpetually in a state of conflict. They experience inner anxiety from desire to be the desired ideal self and fear of being the rejected real self. Neurotics generally live with free floating anxiety disorder. (There are different kinds of anxiety disorder, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Social-Anxiety and so on. I will not discuss these disorders here.)

If personality, normal or abnormal, the question is a mask: who is the real self, the person beneath the mask of personality? Carl Jung believes that the real self is spirit.
If the real self is spirit, how do we verify the existence of spirit? I do not know. My view is that there is something beneath the mask of social self, what that something is, I will not speculate on here.

NORMAL AND ABNORMAL PERSONALITIES

Most people have normal personalities. By this is meant that most people in society adjusted to the normative realities of their society and pretty much do what enables them to survive in their world. They are able to get along with other people and to hold down jobs and provide for their families.
Some people have abnormal personalities. Within this disordered spectrum are mild to severe personality disorders. Those with the severe personality disorders are psychotic. Psychosis is characterized by the presence of hallucinations and delusions. Examples of psychosis are schizophrenia, delusion, mania, depression and organic mental disorders. Others have mild personality disorders such as paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal. Narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial, borderline, avoidant, obsessive compulsive, dependent and passive aggressive personality disorders. (I will not elaborate on these nosological categories. See the American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, for definition of these mental states. In Igbo language, there is only one term for mental disorder, Onye Ara. Thus, we see Igbos employing that all encompassing term for every one whose behaviors they do not seem to comprehend. It would be nice if they were a bit more educated on the various types of mental disorders. There is a world of difference between schizophrenia, which is probably the equivalence of “onye ara” and other forms of mental disorders.)

Each individual has a personality, normal or abnormal. That personality was influenced by his inherited biological constitution and social experiences during childhood. It is difficult to ascertain the degree of influence of either of the two variables that shape personality (and I do not propose to get into that debate here).
What is self evident is that once personality is formed it tends to influence the individual’s life chances.
The individual responds to other people from the stand point of his personality. Other people respond to him from their own personalities. However, how other people respond to him is a product of their own personalities and how they perceive his personality.
The individual’s social experience is an interaction of his and other persons’ personalities.

PERSONALITY AND FATE

What the individual gets out of life is largely dependent on his personality. In fact, some argue that personality is fate. Character is fate, said the German writer, Novalis.
Until an individual changes his personality, generally, other people tend to respond to him in a similar manner and he therefore tends to get similar results from other people, making his fate dependent on his personality.
Consider the paranoid personality who wants to seem very important in his and other people’s eyes. He fears being demeaned, insulted, humiliated, disgraced, degraded, belittled, criticized, degraded and generally made to seem small. Further more, he believes that other people are no good and are out to do him harm. He avoids other people to prevent them from harming him. He is suspicious of other people’s motives and is forever questioning why they do what they do to him. He does not trust that any one could look after his interests; he believes that the world is a hostile place and that only he could look after his self interests. He tends to accuse other people of demeaning him and of wanting to harm, even kill him. He is very defensive, guarded and untrusting of other people’s good intensions.
Given this compendium of responses to other people, other people tend to resent the paranoid personality. They resent his always accusing them of doing what they did not do. (This is called paranoid self fulfilling prophecy: if you accuse other people of doing what they did not do, they will likely do it to you, hence fulfill you prophecy that people are not good.) People resent the paranoid person’s suspiciousness and lack of trusting behavior. They resent his defensiveness around them. They resent his wanting to seem important and better than them. Cumulatively, other people quarrel with the paranoid person because they see him as not a nice person.
This means that the social relationship of a paranoid personality tends to be conflict ridden. It is conflict ridden because of his basic untrusting and hostile approach to life. If he changed his personality and became more trusting of other people and less accusatory of people they would relate to him differently. If he did not want to seem superior to other people and related to all people as the same and equal with him, and treated all people respectfully, he would improve his problematic social relationships.
The individual’s personality influences how he relates to other people and how other people relate to him and if he changed his personality his social relationships would change and he would receive different outcomes from society. If personality is changed the individual’s fate would change.
The real question is whether personality can be changed? As noted, personality is formed in childhood and thereafter stable and difficult to change. We know that where the individual undergoes religious conversion and or had a trauma to his head that he tends to change his personality but besides those it is very difficult to change the individual’s personality. Psychotherapy generally has very little effect on personalities, particularly personality disorders. Age does mellow people but does not completely change them.
At the individual’s level, we can pretty much say that personality affects how other people treat him and that what he gets out of life is influenced by his personality hence that personality is fate.


IS THERE SUCH A THING AS GROUP PERSONALITY AND FATE?


Is there such a thing as group personality and, if so, is there such a thing as a group’s fate?
I ask these questions in light of the fact that people from the same group tend to behave somewhat similarly and tend to be treated alike by people from other groups. Because they tend to be seen as alike and treated alike, people from the same group tend to, more or less, have the same fate. Of course, there are some individual differences in people in the same group.
Is it possible to make the assertion that people from the same group are more alike than they are unlike and tend to be treated in the same manner and therefore have the same fate?

I ask these questions because recently I have been observing Igbos. I have noticed that they tend to have similar personalities (with individual variations within what can be called a general Igbo pattern of personality) and that other people tend to treat them similarly.
As I pointed out in a different essay, Igbos tend to be politically naïve, in fact, so naïve that they make you want to cry. They have little or no understanding of human nature.
Consider: they run around putting other people down, insulting other people and boasting about their imaginary superiority etc. All these behaviors add up and other people resent them. Other people so resent them that they occasionally attack and even kill them. Very few persons can stand Igbo arrogance for long without hatred for Igbos.
I speculated that somehow Igbos feel inferior and compensate with desire for superiority and believe that they are their wishes. The desire for superiority is not the same thing as actual superiority.
Generally, Igbos act as if they are superior to other people. Obviously, they are not superior to any other group. In the main time, their haughtiness brings about other people’s resentment of them. Their tendency to disrespect other people makes other people furious at them and occasionally takes out their frustration by attacking Igbos.
In Nigeria, those people that Igbos disrespect and generally put down the most, Hausas, tend to attack and sometimes kill Igbos.

I predict that if Igbos continue with their present neurotic superiority feeling and insulting other people, that they would be attacked and killed in the future. I think that Igbo personality patterns make it inevitable for other people to persecute them. If Igbos remain as they currently are, they will always be a persecuted people.
Unfortunately, Igbos see the persecution coming their way but not the role they played in bringing about such persecution. They point two accusatory fingers at other people for attacking them, but do not see the three pointing right back at them, telling them that they play a role in what happens to them.

I reached these conclusions about Igbos from personal dealing with them. I tried my best to be helpful to them. They tried to exploit me. I caught them and did something about it. Instead of owning up their antisocial behaviors and apologizing, they went about saying nasty things about me, all of which are lies and based on the figment of their neurotic imagination. They felt that they had every right to say nasty things about me. They did not even feel the need to respect my privacy and talked about my family members.
All these behaviors infuriated me (and I can see how it infuriates other Nigerians). Initially, I felt like punishing the persons involved. I could punish them in the most severe manner humanly imaginable, including having them shot.
However, in processing their incredible behaviors I learned a lot about Igbos. They are so deluded that they think that they are invincible. A bullet into a human being’s head and he is dead. A human being’s life is not that much removed from death. Every human being is food for worms.
Unaware that any person could attack and kill those Igbos who bad mouth them, Igbos go about putting people down. They put other Nigerians down. They feel that they have a right to do so. Then other Nigerians feel angry at them, attack and kill them and they feel surprised that they were killed!


It dawned on me that Igbos have a certain type of personalities that dispose them not to perceive reality as it is. They seem deluded (paranoid) and ignore reality as it is.
Every rational person quickly learns that other people could kill him, if they want to; therefore, he treats other people respectfully. But here are apparent adult Igbos always insulting other people, unaware that those they insulted could take umbrage and kill them.
What does this make them? It makes them not operating in the world of reality; they are living in the world of fantasy, a make belief world where what they wish is real for them; they wish to be superior and fancy themselves superior and fancy other people inferior and fancy themselves the only proud persons, unaware that other people, too, feel proud and could feel narcissistic injury and in narcissistic rage attack and kill them. These Igbos do not seem to understand what human beings can do from injured pride and vanity.
I believe that as long as Igbos remain the obnoxious personalities they currently are they would be persecuted by other Nigerians. That is, they have a destiny, a horrible one, I might say. The Igbos destiny is to be occasionally attacked and killed by other Nigerians.


FORGIVENESS AND UNDERSTANDING

This does not mean that one is endorsing the attack and killing of Igbos. The function of science is to help us understand people and, ultimately, to help them correct their self defeating behaviors.
I have carefully observed Igbos and noted what they are doing. I conclude that they feel inferior and are trying to seem superior to other people. This means that they are neurotic (have personality disorders, mostly paranoid, narcissistic and antisocial types). The roots of their inferiority feeling are very complex. Part of it is probably because they had a primitive society. Until the white man came to Igbo land, they had no society that any one could be proud of. They did not discover writing or the wheel; they did not even have the rudiments of large scale social organization. Simply stated, they had one of the world’s most primitive social organizations, even by African standards. So, as they look at themselves they cannot believe that their ancestors were that primitive. They are a very vigorous people and are astounded that their people did not even manage to have an Igbo-wide political organization. They feel inadequate from this reality.
Of course, other factors, those factors that ordinarily contribute to inferiority feeling, such as inferior organs, colonialism, racial and tribal discrimination, poverty and so on played a role in their inordinate sense of inferiority and restitutory superiority.
Whatever is its cause, the average Igbo person acts as if he is superior to his neighbors, when, clearly, he is not. He boasts about his imaginary accomplishments. (One of them, apparently, an average man, was telling me how superior he is to me. I smiled. I had the doctorate degree from the University of California at an age he was still in secondary school.)

We must understand why Igbos do what they do. We cannot afford to be angry at them. If you know that some one is pathological and is doing what he is doing as a result of psychopathology, you do not feel angry at him. Instead, you do what you can to heal his illness.

Understanding does not mean condoning other people’s hurtful behaviors. What it means is to explain to those people what they are doing wrong, and why they are doing it, the possible consequences of their behaviors and for them to change.

IGBO CULTURE PRODUCES NEUROTIC PERSONS

In another essay, I described Igbo culture. Briefly, it is very competitive and rewards winners and shuns losers. As result of its conditional acceptance of people, most Igbos grow up desiring to be accepted by their culture and fearing being rejected by that culture.
Carl Rogers tells us that a healthy culture accepts all people in an unconditional positive manner. A culture that accepts people conditionally, only when they seem to excel in certain activities, may produce achievers, as Igbos are, but tends to produce neurotics, people who fear social rejection and sometimes pretend to be who they are not, to live up to the criteria for social acceptance.
Failing Igbos tend to invent ideal selves, to seem like the persons their society would approve and in the process become neurotic.
The neurotic is a person who rejects his real self, posits an imaginary ideal self, and strives to become him. Whereas he compulsively tries to become the ideal self he is aware that he is not the ideal self. Nevertheless, he experiences anxiety from his efforts to become an ideal, socially acceptable self and fears of being a rejectable self. The neurotic is still able to test reality.
On the other hand, some persons flip into psychosis. The psychotic has lost the ability to test reality. He now takes his imaginary ideal self as his true self. Neurotic wishes to be god in existential importance; psychotic claims to be god, already.
There are significant differences between the two maladies; Igbo neurotics wish to be important; those Igbos think that they are already important, exhibit delusional grandiosity, are psychotic. Only about two percent of the population, anywhere in the world, is psychotic.
A psychotic would not be able to read this essay, for he would be bothered by his hallucinations 9auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory etc) and delusions. If you are reading this essay, you are either normal or neurotic. A neurotic is like a normal person in every way but his felt anxiety.

I believe that Igbo culture tends to produce, a higher proportion than normal for most cultures, neurotic persons who want to seem superior to other persons.
In other essays, I pointed out that this leads to resentment of Igbos by other Nigerians. I have pointed out that this leads to attack and killing of Igbos. I have said that given their irritating neurotic personalities, Igbos will invariably be persecuted.
If Igbos do not want to be persecuted, they must work to understand their apparent disordered personalities and change them.
This is why I write this essay. I am trying to help these people to understand themselves and change their annoying personalities and the behaviors predicated on them.

To understand is to forgive; but to forgive is not to condone evil. We must all work to help people understand their personalities and behaviors and change them. Where people have problematic behaviors that could bring about social problems, we ought to help them change them. We cannot afford to ignore folks with obnoxious personalities to run around insulting other people and therefore eliciting attack towards themselves.

KARMA

Asians have a concept called karma. Karma is the principle of cause and effect. It states that every behavior we engage in has consequences for us. What the individual does has public consequences, that is, it affects him and other people.
Therefore, we must make sure that what we do is good for us and for other people. In the meantime, if we see other people do bad things and we understand why they are doing it, it behooves us to explain to them why they are doing it. We should not keep quiet as we see other people indulge in behaviors that could generate untoward social consequences.
Moreover, we should not respond to them in a punitive manner. As noted, if one is on the receiving end of Igbo verbal abuses, one is tempted to punish them, including putting them in jail, even killing them. But one must not do so, for if one punishes them, one has committed a crime that will elicit punishment for one.

I suggest that folks acknowledge their irritation at Igbo obnoxious behaviors but to not punish them. This is what I now do when I run into neurotic Igbos and they start boasting about being god and being all achieving, all important, being superior to me and every person under the sun. I smile at them. I see them as scared little children who feel vulnerable and inadequate and escape into neurosis and invent fictional superiority and think that they are such imaginary persons. I treat Igbos as I treat children.
I want you to treat Igbos as you treat children. They are mostly under age twelve, emotionally. This is so even if they are 70 years old.
For some reasons, Igbos are emotionally arrested. Folks with emotional retardation ought to be treated as such. You do not treat them as if they are adults.
If an adult insulted you, you could possibly justify feeling angry at him, but if a ten year old child insulted you, you do not have to feel angry, you smile and understand that it makes him feel grown up to put adults down. I suggest that other Nigerians understand Igbo brand of neurosis, and smile at them and not punish them but seek ways to help them grow up. To be a healthy grown up is to see ones self as the same and equal with all people and to respect all human beings.

Do not punish Igbos, for if you punish them despite understanding that they are doing what they are doing out of emotional sickness, you too would be punished. The principle of karma stipulates that what you do to others would be done to you. If you killed Igbos because of their irritating behaviors, you will breed social conflict in Nigeria. The right thing to do is to understand these annoying people and place them in proper perspective. We must overlook their verbal abusiveness and instead try to help them grow up and stop insulting people.
I have taken it upon myself to help these folks to understand themselves and stop insulting people.

DISCUSSION

I am fully aware that like most neurotics, Igbos deny that they have problems and, indeed, see me as the one who has problems. (I am not denying what I see in me and projecting it unto others. I understand the various ego defenses and how they work. I have undergone psychoanalysis and understand transference relationships. See repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, projection, displacement, rationalization, avoidance, justification, minimizing, adjustment, reaction-formation, sublimation, fantasy, fear, anger, pride, shame and others.)
The typical personality disordered person does not want to acknowledge that he has issues. If forced to come to therapy he sees the therapist as the sick one. In his perverted mind, his bravadoes are a sign of health. He does not yet understand that his boastfulness is a sign of personality disorder and why he is having social problems. He sees the quiet and humble therapist as foolish.

I brought to the attention of certain Igbos their unacceptable antisocial behaviors. Instead of dealing with their amoral behaviors, they embarked on a campaign to discredit me. They wanted to destroy the messenger to avoid paying attention to his message, their psychopathology. (See Harold Laswell, Psychopathology in Politics.)
We need to understand Igbos and help them understand their neurotic behaviors. We cannot change them for no one can change other people, only individuals can change themselves. Our only task is to make information available to other people and, hopefully, they will do something about their problematic personalities.
We do not need to punish people, as we are tempted to do when we see them engage in antisocial behaviors. We need to assume that we are dealing with children who need to be helped to grow up. We need to teach them pro-social behaviors.
As I see it, five hundred years of participating in a culture adapted to capturing and selling slaves have perverted most African peoples psyche; and for our present interest, slavery warped Igbo mentality so that most of them are not different from predatory persons who exist to prey on other people for what they think is their own good. These people are self centered beyond comprehension. If you think that an Igbo person would help you, if you are in distress, you had better think again. Like the anti social personality, he would probably exploit your situation and actually laugh behind your back that he took advantage of you. This people behave in criminal behaviors without feeling that it is wrong to do so. Many of them engage in 419 criminal activities, steal from Americans and go build mansions in their villages and their people would confer on them phony chieftaincy titles. Thus, they gratify their desire to seem very important persons. It does not matter how their wealth is obtained, just having wealth is all that now matters to them. These people’s spiritual density is amazing. At a point, I was tempted not to see them as human beings but as animals!
These people need to be re-socialized and made to approximate humanity. They need to be taught loving and caring behaviors. They need to learn that the only kind of life that is worth living is life dedicated to serving social interests working for public good. An Ozo title, these days symbolized by the silly title, chief, does not make a person important; what makes a human being’s life worthy of admiration is to the extent he dedicates it to serving all human beings. Love is what makes us divine, not social appearances of worth.

CONCLUSION

We know that each human being has a personality. We know that most people have normal personalities. We know that about ten percent of the population has abnormal personalities. Abnormal personalities range from severe to mild. In severe forms we have the various psychoses; in mild forms we have the various neuroses, aka personality disorders, anxiety disorders etc.
Whereas we know that individuals have personalities, functional or dysfunctional, we do not know if there is such a think as group personality.
Many observers suspect that there are group characters traits but prefer not to talk about them. We prefer to talk about individual personalities, perhaps, we do so because we do not want to categorize people and expose them to danger. We saw what Adolf Hitler did to those he categorized as unintelligent and unproductive: he killed them. To avoid killing members of groups that seem to exhibit negative traits we would rather not talk as if they have those traits.

In observing the Igbos of South East Nigeria, I noted that many of them tend to behave in a certain pattern, a pattern that inevitably irritates other people and compel them to attack, hurt and even kill them. Igbos are an insulting people; they routinely put other Nigerians down and other Nigerians resent and often kill them.


I am not so foolish as to believe that only Igbos are at fault. Many social forces are at work in the Nigerian situation. For one thing, other Nigerian groups have their own character issues, issues I choose not to concern myself with. (Let their own people talk about their problems; I am an Igbo and am interested in talking about Igbo issues.)
There are complex political and economic forces at work in every society. Politics is war by other peoples. In this context, other Nigerian groups are at war with Igbos for the domination of Nigeria. As in all wars some people are killed. In this light, Igbos are killed for political reasons.
Economic resources are scarce. Human beings struggle for access to their scarce resources and in the process conflict ensues. People do fight for economic resources. Thus Igbos are killed for economic reasons.

The point is that I am aware that we can explain the Igbo predicament from many angles. Nevertheless, in this essay, I chose to look at it from only one angle, personality and behavior.
In my relationship with Igbos, I see folks who generally are unrealistic and behave as if they are children who are not aware that human beings are motivated by pride. People are proud and if you insult them they could attack and or kill you. This fact makes most people tactful and diplomatic in relating to other human beings. Despite this realism, Igbos insult other people. Those they insulted feel angry at them and some attack and kill them. When they are attacked, they turn around and present themselves as the innocent victims of other people’s evil behavior; they ignore the role they played in bringing about their persecution.

I am not justifying attack on Igbos. I am merely trying to understand it. I am motivated to help Igbos understand and change their personalities and behaviors. I believe that their obnoxious personalities and behaviors play a role in their fate and that if they change them that their fate would change.

I am fully awake that this essay is very reductive; it reduced complex issues to a very simplistic explanation.
I called it an essay, not a social science study. If it were a social science study, I would have had to explain how I reached my conclusions. First, I would convince us whether the sample that I studied is representative of the population I am studying. For a population of about 20 million, one would have had to randomly select about one thousand Igbos to study before one can make conclusions about them. Even then those conclusions could hardly be generalized to all Igbos.
I am aware of several draw backs to my assertions. Nevertheless, I am motivated to write this essay and draw attention to the apparent reality that many Igbos have problematic personalities, personalities that are correlated with their fate as a group. You can make what you like my assertion. I stand to be corrected. If I get us to talk about the problem and hopefully focus attention on it and some Igbo begin to develop insight into their warped personalities and unacceptable behaviors and change them, I am satisfied. I do not pretend to have a magic wand with which I can change Igbos; my intention is to call attention to a problem that, to me, seems self evident and something needs to be done about it.
Finally, if it makes you feel that I am the enemy of Igbos, I am sorry to hear you say that. Please remember the adage that your true friend is a person who tells you what he sees in you, without trying to please you by telling you what you want to hear. Given human vanity, we all want to hear other people tell us how great we are. I have said it as I see it. My goal is to prevent the cycle of pogroms against Igbos. I have always wanted to understand why other Nigerians kill Igbos, why genocide. Like most Igbos, I tended to think that it is other peoples fault and blamed them. But recently, my dealings with Igbos showed me that whereas other people are responsible for their behaviors that we do something to contribute to how they see and treat us. What is within our control is to change us, not change other people. I am not interested in blaming the victim, as some would say that I am doing. I am trying to save the victim from been victimized by those who could victimize him.



FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred (2003) Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler. Ed. Henry Stein. San Francisco, CA..: Alfred Adler Institute.

Allport, Gordon (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: John Holt, Rinehart.

Beck, Aaron (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press.

Diagnostic and Statistical manual of the American psychiatric Association, Washington, DC. American Psychiatric Press, 2000

Ellis, Albert (2004) Rational Emotive-Behavior Therapy. New York: Prometheus Book Publishers.

Erickson, Erik (1993) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Freud, Sigmund (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Hammer (2003)

Hitler, Adolf (2002) Mein Kampf. New York: CPA Books.

Horney, Karen (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W. W. Norton

Jung, Carl (2000) Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kelly, George (1955) Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W. Norton.

Laing, R.D (1960) The Divided Self. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.

Meissner, William (1980) The Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson.
(1994) Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson, Jason Publishers.

Rogers, Carl (1951) Client Centered Therapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co.

Skinner, B.F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Hackett Publishing.

Shapiro, David (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.
(1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York: Basic Books

Sullivan, Harry Stack (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton.

Swanson, David (1970) The Paranoid. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Tzas, Thomas (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. Amazon. Com.

Vaihinger, H (1935) The Philosophy of “As If”. London: Kegan Paul Publishers.

Zimbardo, Phillip (1969) Shyness. New York: Jove Publications.

---

posted                      

quote:

---

RIVISITING CHINUA ACHEBE’S OKONKWO CHARACTER

Ozodi Thomas Osuji


When, as a boy, I read Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, something in it troubled me. The Okonkwo character troubled me. Been a thirteen year old, I did not quite understand how to express what troubled me.

The novel dealt with the clash of civilizations: African and European, and suggested that the European prevailed over the African and that the African world has fallen apart and is no longer able to provide Africans with the cultural compass with which to navigate the exigencies of living on planet earth. As it were, contemporary Africans are operating with poorly understood European cultural parameters, not their culture, hence are a confused people?

Let us, briefly, summarize the Okonkwo character. Okonkwo was the son of a social never do well father. Apparently, he did not like the fact that he was a social nobody and resolved to “wash his hands well” so that he could eat with the do wells of his Igbo society. He was driven to succeed by all means necessary. As a young man, he excelled at wrestling (sports) and that brought him fame. He then threw himself into the work of his people, farming, and excelled at that, too.

The Igbos say: when a man says yes, his Chi says yes. At a relatively young age, Okonkwo had made it by his society’s standard of success. He had several wives and several children and by Igbo universal acclaim had made it into the decision makers' circle of his society. The born nobody is now a social somebody, a very important person, a VIP (the craving of human egos).



As a result of a dispute between Okonkwo’s village and another village, a lad, Ikemefuna, was given to Okonkwo’s village in restitution. The Village gave the lad to Okonkwo for safekeeping. For all practical purposes, the lad became a member of Okonkwo’s family and grew up with his children. The lad, in fact, called Okonkwo father.

Ikemefuna got to be one of the loveliest characters in Achebe’s novels. He was pleasant and music loving (like Okonkwo’s father). He was every person’s idea of a wholesome, loveable kid.

Apparently, the lad was destined to be killed and one day the village elders requested that he be brought to be killed, to avenge the killing of their fellow villager for whom he was given. Okonkwo not only brought the boy forward but volunteered to be the one who killed him. Okonkwo killed the boy, Ikemefuna.



Okonkwo’s killing of his step son, Ikemefuna, was what troubled me. I could not quite understand why he killed the boy.

There were other aspects of Okonkwo’s character that troubled me, such as his volcanic temper and impatience. His younger wife once made the mistake of disrespecting Okonkwo, and Okonkwo gave her the beating of her life. Okonkwo was a proud man and any one who dared make him lose social face was vigorously punished. Indeed, Okonkwo would kill to safe his social face. Okonkwo had no soft side to him; the man had no feeling of compassion and sympathy for any one; what mattered to him was to succeed, as defined by his society.

The Okonkwo character played itself out when white men came to his world. Like most true Africans, Okonkwo sensed the end of the world he knew and resented it. He wanted to maintain his world and to keep out the new world knocking at its doors.

First, the missionaries came knocking. The missionaries preached a strange religion, Christianity. This new religion talked about all people being the same and equal. This view, apparently, was unacceptable to Okonkwo. Okonkwo, apparently, preferred his Igbo society where some were deemed more important than others. After all, he, Okonkwo, had worked very had to make it into the ruling circle of his society and he was not about to accept that all men were created equal. He had grown up having no respect for his feminine, music loving and indolent father and now the new Christian dispensation tells him that all he had worked for was for nothing.

Okonkwo particularly resented the fact that the Osus (slaves) of his village were given the audacity by the Christians to believe that they were like everyone else. How dared Christians teach that all people are the same?

Things came to a head when the British authorities tried to establish their administrative and legal control over Okonkwo’s village and sent in their police (court messengers, Kotima) to enforce their law. Never mind the content of the law, the salient point is that an alien force, white men, had descended on Okonkwo’s village and are now the bosses of his world.

If Okonkwo acquiesced to the white man’s rule it meant that he had become a defeated man and is now like the slaves that he despised. Okonkwo could not accept this reality and chose to die. He died rather than accept the ruler ship of the white man.

Okonkwo’s death symbolized the defiant African who refused to embrace the white man’s culture; he remained a true African. Those that survived him became mixed breed, phony Africans like us.

(As an aside, my history is somewhat akin to Okonkwo’s. The White man came to my town, Umuohiagu, near Owerri, in 1902. My great grandfather, Njoku, led his people in fighting the white man’s army that was passing through his town, after subjugating the long juju of Arochukwu, “pacifying the lower Niger for British rule”. He was killed in that war. His son, Osuji, who was then ten years old, survived him. Osuji’s character is exactly like Okonkwo’s character; he was one continuous headache for the local NwaDC of his area. He was in and out of NwaDC’s court for defying their rule. Osuji never accepted the white man as his boss. But he was a smart defiant man; he recognized that hating the white man was one thing, not coping with extant political reality, is another. Thus, he sent his children to the white man’s school. Indeed, he donated the land on which the Holy Ghost Missionaries built their school and Church in his village. Osuji’s children, my father included, unabashedly embraced the new world order. Unlike Okonkwo, grandfather did not fight the leveling of society brought by Christians. The Osus of our town were accepted by us, Dialas.)



When I read about Okonkwo killing Ikemefuna I was so offended that the only thing that I could do was agree with the Christians that Okonkwo and the world he represented were primitive and deserved to be defeated and civilized. To me, it seemed that only a savage could have killed his own step son.

I do not believe that I ever forgave Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna. In fact, that singular act, though fictional, made me ashamed to be Igbo. For a long time, I associated Igbos with primitivity.

I must add that my childhood home, Lagos, was not particularly kind to Igbos. I hate to say this but truth must be said: we, children, in the 1960s Lagos, actually called Igbos primitive folks (kobokobo). When a child came from the East we would go look at him to appreciate his alleged primitive qualities; he was not one of us and, generally, it took some time before we accepted him as one of us.



I used to wonder why Chinua Achebe wrote a book whose chief character exhibited primitive and, in street language, crazy qualities? I wished that he had made his chief character a civilized and sane person!

It took me the longest time to recognize that Achebe is a great artist and, as such, is beholden to the truth, only the truth and may God help him. He did not write his book to please his readers, to present a character that would universally be appreciated as a decent human being but was, apparently, motivated to portray a real Igbo character.

Achebe had to portray a man who struggled very hard to meet the criteria for his society’s expectations for acceptance. For him to have struggled to be accepted by his society, he had to admire his society. Because he valued his society, he struggled to maintain it and resented its demise, as was initiated by the dawn of the white man.

Okonkwo had to be who he was to make Achebe’s book poignant and realistic. If he was different he would not have made the case of a man representing his dying culture and struggling to preserve it in the face of unrelenting attack by a conquering foreign culture.



Okonkwo was an Igbo man per excellence. His problematic behavior was representative of problematic Igbo behavior patterns. (As noted, his personality and behavior reminds me of my grandfather’s indomitable character and behavior. I say this because I asked myself whether I am projecting, that is, seeing something in me that I do not like, dissociate from it, deny it and attribute it to other persons. I do not believe that I am externalizing anything in me. I understand the nature of the various ego defense mechanisms and how they work in people, and am mindful of employing any of them.)





I think that Achebe meant for Okonkwo to represent the Igbo character. (Since Achebe is still alive, I stand to be corrected by him.)





In as much as Okonkwo represents the Igbo character, what does he tell us about Igbos?

First, let us try to approach Okonkwo’s character from a psychological perspective. On the face of it, any mental health professional would diagnose Okonkwo as a rigid paranoid personality. (See David Shapiro, Autonomy and the Rigid Character, also his Neurotic Styles; David Swanson et al, The Paranoid; William Meissner, Paranoid Process and other books on paranoia, including the purely descriptive American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, sections on paranoia.)

Okonkwo exhibited all the classic symptoms of paranoid personality disorder. He felt inadequate and compensated with a desire to seem adequate, exaggerated adequacy. He felt inordinately inferior and restituted with pursuit of what Alfred Adler called fictional sense of superiority. He wanted to be a very important person. Of course, he was not a very important person; nevertheless, he acted as if he was a very important person.

Since Okonkwo’s sense of specialness was false, it had to be defended at all times. Defense of false superiority makes it seem real to the defender. A neurotic wants to seem important, acts important, defends importance and comes to think that he is, in fact, important. In clinical language, he has delusion of importance.

The person who wants to be important, generally, wants every person in his world to treat him as if he is important. If you treat him as if he is important he gets along with you, but if he suspects that you treat him as a social nobody, he feels angry at you. In this light, when Okonkwo’s wife treated him as if he was a nobody, by disobeying his orders, he beat her senselessly; in fact, he nearly killed the poor woman. He had to show her who was the boss, who had power, who was important, who was superior to whom, who must be obeyed.

The paranoid character fears being demeaned and will physically and or verbally (depending on whether he is the active or passive type) attacks you if you dare make him seem unimportant. He will quarrel with you if he felt that you publicly disgraced him, degraded him, belittled him, criticized him, humiliated him etc. His whole life is motivated by effort to seem important and you are asked to collude with him and validate that neurosis, and if not, you are seen as his enemy and attacked.

Okonkwo liked those who affirmed his social importance and resented those who made him remember what he fears in him, his sense of littleness. He sought grandeur, for he felt little.

In existential light, all human beings separated from their creator and, as a result, feel incomplete, imperfect and little; they then strive to seem complete, perfect and big; but they do so without reference to their creator hence must fail. Human beings seek importance and specialness on their own terms, ego terms, and must not obtain it until they return to their source. It is only in God, or whatever you choose to call your maker, that human beings have worth, value, meaning and purpose. Human beings did not create themselves and cannot give themselves value; they can only obtain real sense of value when they are rooted in God, not in seeking social praise. Nigerians, a godless people, feel like they are nothing and seek each others praise as a means of seeming existential importance, hence their ridiculous vanity and pursuit of prestige, but they can only obtain worth when they turn to God.

(If you are interested in clinical issues, paranoid personality is different from paranoia proper, aka delusional disorder and or schizophrenia, paranoid type. Paranoid personality is within the normal personality continuum, or, if you like, is neurosis…every human being, even the most normal person, has some neurosis, whereas delusional disorder and schizophrenia are psychoses. In delusional disorder the person believes what is not true as true. Some delusions are: grandiosity, belief in ones superiority to other people; persecutory, belief that other people are out to kill or harm one, feeling that other people are talking behind ones back, laughing at one etc; jealousy, belief that ones spouse is cheating on one and a tendency to beat her on account of that false suspicion; erotomanic, belief that very important persons are in love with one; somatic, belief that one has sickness that one does not have; in schizophrenia, in addition to delusions are hallucinations: hearing voices, seeing what is not there, feeling that things are crawling underneath ones skin, smelling what other people do not smell and other sensory disorder and, of course, thought disorder.)

Okonkwo did not exhibit delusions and hallucinations and, therefore, did not have psychoses; he was a neurotic, paranoid cum narcissistic type. The man was inordinately afraid…paranoia is intense fearfulness…but denied his fear and masked it with false courage, his bravadoes. His killing Ikemefuna exhibited his false courage for, obviously, he loved the boy, unless he was a total inhumane monster, but feared that if he shrunk from killing him that he would be perceived by members of his society as a wimp, a weakling; he wanted to be seen as a strong man and acted tough by killing the lovely boy.



I am sorry to say this but truth must be said. Many Igbos exhibit Okonkwo’s paranoid character traits. I have pointed these out in several writings and have probably encored the eternal hatred of Igbos. But harbingers of the truth cannot afford to shrink from articulating the truth, as they see it, even if it means encoring the hatred of other human beings.

Only the truth shall save us. The Igbos I see around me act boisterously in an apparent effort to seem courageous (false courage); they act as if they are tough and powerful, in an apparent effort to mask their weakness. Generally, they lack what are called the finer qualities of humanity: compassion, kindness, sympathy, caring, loving, forgiving etc. They are Okonkwo, pure and simple, character disordered persons.

Chinua Achebe, as a great artist, helped us understand our character structures. But he is not a mental health professional (psychiatrist, psychologist, clinical social worker) and, as such, cannot help us heal our problematic characters.



This writing is not interested in psychotherapy, in changing people, but merely observes how people are. I think that Achebe did all of us a great service in describing the Igbo character and Igbos ought to be grateful to him and seek ways to change it. Instead of denying the obvious, they ought to take the time to understand why they have their character traits and accentuate their positive aspects, while working to improve their negative aspects.

I am not in denial. As already noted, my grandfather was exactly like Okonkwo. All you had to do was disrespect the man, even slightly, and he punished you. I recall a poor man in the village who insulted grandmother and grandfather made sure that he was sent to jail, to teach him a lesson. What lesson was he taught? He was made to know the difference between important and unimportant persons.

I spent a couple of years with my grandparents in the village, in the 1960s, my parents sent me home to go learn Igbo language. Once my teacher flogged me and I went home and told grandfather about it and he insisted that he be removed from the school and he was. You did not mess with the man. His pride was humongous and his temper was volcanic. Anything that made him lose social face was intolerable. (I am the exact opposite of grandfather; I was a shy, introspect, philosophic, avoidant boy, that is, I desired acceptance from all persons, feared social rejection and pleased folks to get their acceptance and withdrew from those I felt would reject me; of course, I have worked on these traits and, today, could care less whether other folks accepted me or not; hence could say these unpalatable things about Igbos, aware that many of them would like to strangle me for revealing the skeletons in their closets.)



I think that it is about time we, Igbos, stopped being resentful of those who tell us the truth of who we are. Achebe is one of our greatest truth tellers. Unfortunately, he cast his truth telling in a fictional mode, made his prototypal Igbo a fictional character. But he was trying to tell us something about ourselves. We ought to stop and learn from the man.

I see Igbos everywhere motivated by fear of social rejection, of trying to attain the social indices of importance (if they have some brains they strive after PhD, they think that the doctorate makes them seem important…when I first got out of graduate school, if you did not address me as Dr Osuji, I felt slighted by you, but now, I actually feel insulted if you did for I do not take pride in having gone to white man’s schools; at any rate, what matters to me is the truth, not social honor). Some Igbos satisfy their vanity and pride through wealth and political power.

Look, these behaviors are not healthy. A healthy person is actuated by love and social service. Whatever you do in the spirit of love, to serve other people is healthy; but whatever you do to make you seem important, to enhance your prestige is unhealthy. I am telling you the truth; we ought to stop and think about it and stop making fools of ourselves via pursuit of infantile narcissism.





CONCLUSION





It has taken me many years to understand the difference between a great artist like Chinua Achebe and ordinary folks like me. Artists capture the human condition in a few words, perhaps, without even consciously knowing how they did it.

Achebe wrote Things fall apart when he was still in his twenties. It took me many more years than twenty eight to understand what the man was trying to tell us. And, I suspect that many folks out there have not understood what the man is telling us.

In portraying Okonkwo as a sick character, Achebe is probably telling us that we are sick characters.

My own humble contribution to this discourse is reminding us that sickness can be understood and healed.

To heal is to change; we can change our characters, from self centered to sociocentric, to loving and caring for all people.

Instead of Okonkwo killing Ikemefuna, the sensitive boy, a real human being, (killing his real self, in pursuit of his false ideal self) he could have defied his society’s insistence that he be killed and taught them to love and care for him, even if he came from another village and is given in restitution for an injury done to them. He could have practiced what Jesus Christ is trying to teach us: to love and forgive one another our sins (to be our real self, as symbolized by Ikemufuna, rather than reject and kill him).

We are all sinners and must forgive each other to have our own sins forgiven us. Love and care for all human beings. Do everything you do from the perspective of love and you cannot be (too) wrong. However, to love and care for all people you must have a healthy personality. A healthy personality works for the good of all society, what Alfred Adler called social interest, whereas a neurotic personality works for his self interests only, for what enhances his ego, his pride and vanity (and pays a heavy price, live in fear and unhappiness).

Peace and happiness lies in working for the public good. Try it; you would be pleasantly surprised to learn that real joy lies in serving our fellow human beings, not in seeking their praise and social acceptance, as Okonkwo did.


Ozodi Thomas Osuji

July 30, 2006

---

posted                         

quote:

---

August 01, 2006
Re: Thomas Osuji's "Revisiting Chinua Achebe's Okonkwo Character"
by Odo Akaji (United Kingdom)

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way. ~~~ Bertrand Russell

On reading Thomas Osuji’s version of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, one could not help but laugh out very loud at the gentleman’s attempt to present the Classics in a light that justifies his imagined totem of his archetypical Igbo. Thomas would have been excused if Achebe himself had not addressed some of the issues raised in his essay but it smacks of intellectual laziness for Thomas to be writing about “standing corrected by Achebe” when Achebe’s view can very easily be googled.

According to Achebe Things fall Apart was inspired by his indignation at books on Africa by non Africans such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, which portrays an African who slavishly worships his white colonist boss, to the point of gladly being shot to death by him. In Things Fall Apart published in 1958, Achebe with a masterful stroke of his pen debunked the stereotype of Africa as an unseamed "primitive" land, i.e. Conrad’s "heart of darkness". He was able to show that African cultures varied among themselves and were capable of changing with time. Achebe not only succeeded in taking the Igbo cultural tradition to the outside world but also reminded the Igbo and indeed the other nations of Africa of their past and the values it contained. Isn’t it therefore an absurdity that an educated Igbo with PhD to boot is drawing the exact opposite conclusion from Achebe’s work almost half a century later!

Writes Thomas:

Okonkwo was an Igbo man per excellence. His problematic behavior was representative of problematic Igbo behavior patterns. (As noted, his personality and behavior reminds me of my grandfather’s indomitable character and behavior. I say this because I asked myself whether I am projecting, that is, seeing something in me that I do not like, dissociate from it, deny it and attribute it to other persons. I do not believe that I am externalizing anything in me. I understand the nature of the various ego defense mechanisms and how they work in people, and am mindful of employing any of them.) I think that Achebe meant for Okonkwo to represent the Igbo character. (Since Achebe is still alive, I stand to be corrected by him.) In as much as Okonkwo represents the Igbo character, what does he tell us about Igbos (sic)?

It is not difficult to see that Thomas is blinded in his fixation with his Igbo par excellence and truly has no regard to Achebe’s correction. Thomas is probably the only social scientist in the world who will base his qualitative research of forty million people on a sample of two: one a fictional Okonkwo and the second his late grandfather whom he never bothered to interview. In his presumptuous fashion he successfully excises Okonkwo from the overall setting and theme of the book. In the Things Fall Apart according to Thomas, Okonkwo is the only villager and there were no other titled men. Thomas doesn’t believe that same village could accommodate Okonkwo’s father and others who gave him various wise counsels at the right moments in his life. The young Achebe appreciated the controversy of the Ikemefune saga and tried to cushion the impact of his tragic ending by introducing him as “the ill-fated lad.” The titled elderly gentleman that admonished Okonkwo against having a hand in Ikemefune’s murder was not Thomas’ favourite Lagosians but also an Igbo from Okonkwo’s Umuofia. That Thomas chose to discard the rest of the clan, choosing rather to highlight Okonkwo’s indiscretions (for which he was severally sanctioned) is simply disingenuous.

I guess it was not convenient to consider all the checks and balances in the Umuofia traditional system. Thomas totally failed to mention the fact that Okonkwo’s so-called title did not confer any special immunity from the laws of the land. He was sanctioned for wife beating, banished for manslaughter and buried by foreigners for taking his own life.

Thomas, it is disappointing that you would use your own grandfather who sired your father to try and create the impression of sincerity. Unfortunately, there is no reason to think your grandfather was the stuff of fiction. I do not know any granny that would not report the physical abuse of his grandson by people who happen to be his teachers. Truth be told, it may well be the pain and trauma of these spankings in Igbo land that has put you off the Igbo. It could also be argued that the person allegedly jailed by your grandfather went through a trial unless you want to claim that your father was the king, judge and warder in Umuohiagu of the sixties. There was no account in the Things Fall Apart I read where Okonkwo jailed any fellow Umuofia citizen for any reason. True, he may have insulted an untitled man, but the fact that he was not applauded shows what his people thought of his poor choice of word. So Thomas may wish to find another fictional character for his late grandfather.

In the Things Fall Apart I read, Achebe demonstrated in Okonkwo that whilst the Igbo society would encourage and recognise individual achievement, it was not at the expense of law and order. There was no record of Okonkwo ever perverting the course of Umuofia justice. He fully submitted to the norms and ethos and was ready to bear the consequence of breaking the law. Even as a war commander there was always consensus. The only day Okonkwo went to war without a follower was the day he hanged himself. In the concluding part of the book the joke was on the white man pronouncing Igbo word badly and not the other way round. Read Achebe’s presentation at Odenigbo Owerri near Umuohiagu in 1999!

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/igbo/achebe/speech1.html

It is safe to conclude that Thomas and NOT the Igbos (sic) need healing. As a first step I suggest that Umunna in his neck of the wood get together and fund his trip to Umuohiagu. It will have a therapeutic effect as he encounters the new Owerri with concorde hotels, Control post and Ama JK far removed from his Lagos imagery of a primitive jungle. An Igbo that confesses to feeling like killing Igbo is crying for help and feeling suicidal. A stitch in time may save Thomas!

---