On a sunny morning in November, 2018, twelve men and two women gathered in a lavishly furnished living room in Oguta, a town in southeastern Nigeria, with the air-conditioning at full blast. They had come to discuss the caste system that persists among the Igbo people in the region. The group’s host, Ignatius Uchechukwu Okororie, a short, sixty-two-year-old retired civil servant, split open a kola nut with his fingernails and ate its flesh; he then passed a metal tray of nuts around the room, for the others to taste. “He who brings kola nut brings life,” he said. The breaking of kola nut, known as iwa oji, is an important Igbo ritual traditionally performed to welcome guests to a gathering. The group in Okororie’s living room were members of a caste called ohu: descendants of slaves who, almost a century ago, were owned by townspeople. They are typically restricted from presiding over such ceremonies. In Okororie’s house, the iwa oji was a small rebellion.



Dispatch
The Descendants of Slaves in Nigeria Fight for Equality
Adaobi Tricia NwaubaniJuly 11, 2019
Descendants of slaves in Nigeria
Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, and accelerated with the transatlantic trade. Today, slave descendants still retain the stigma of their ancestors.
Illustration by Ojima Abalaka
On a sunny morning in November, 2018, twelve men and two women gathered in a lavishly furnished living room in Oguta, a town in southeastern Nigeria, with the air-conditioning at full blast. They had come to discuss the caste system that persists among the Igbo people in the region. The group’s host, Ignatius Uchechukwu Okororie, a short, sixty-two-year-old retired civil servant, split open a kola nut with his fingernails and ate its flesh; he then passed a metal tray of nuts around the room, for the others to taste. “He who brings kola nut brings life,” he said. The breaking of kola nut, known as iwa oji, is an important Igbo ritual traditionally performed to welcome guests to a gathering. The group in Okororie’s living room were members of a caste called ohu: descendants of slaves who, almost a century ago, were owned by townspeople. They are typically restricted from presiding over such ceremonies. In Okororie’s house, the iwa oji was a small rebellion.


Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, but it accelerated in the sixteenth century, when the transatlantic trade began and demand for slaves increased. Under slavery, Igbo society was divided into three main categories: diala, ohu, and osu. The diala were the freeborn, and enjoyed full status as members of the human race. The ohu were taken as captives from distant communities or else enslaved in payment of debts or as punishment for crimes; the diala kept them as domestic servants, sold them to white merchants, and occasionally sacrificed them in religious ceremonies or buried them alive at their masters’ funerals. (A popular Igbo proverb goes, “A slave who looks on while a fellow-slave is tied up and thrown into the grave should realize that it could also be his turn someday.”) The osu were slaves owned by traditional deities. A diala who wanted a blessing, such as a male child, or who was trying to avoid tribulation, such as a poor harvest or an epidemic, could give a slave or a family member to a shrine as an offering; a criminal could also seek refuge from punishment by offering himself to a deity. This person then became osu, and lived near the shrine, tending to its grounds and rarely mingling with the larger community. “He was a person dedicated to a god, a thing set apart—a taboo forever, and his children after him,” Chinua Achebe wrote of the osu, in “Things Fall Apart.” (The ume, a fourth caste, was comprised of the slaves who were dedicated to the most vicious deities.)

In the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery in the West inadvertently led to a glut of slaves in the Igbo markets, causing the number of ohu and osu to skyrocket. “Those families which were really rich competed with one another in the number of slaves each killed for its dead or used to placate the gods,” Adiele Afigbo, an Igbo historian, wrote in “The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950.” The British formally abolished slavery in Nigeria in the early twentieth century, and finally eradicated it in the late nineteen-forties, but the descendants of slaves—who are also called ohu and osu—retained the stigma of their ancestors. They are often forbidden from speaking during community meetings and are not allowed to intermarry with the freeborn. In Oguta, they can’t take traditional titles, such as Ogbuagu, which is conferred upon the most accomplished men, and they can’t join the Oriri Nzere, an important social organization.

Westerners trying to understand the Igbo system often reach for its similarities with the oppression of black Americans. This analogy is helpful but imperfect. Igbo discrimination is not based on race, and there are no visual markers to differentiate slave descendants from freeborn. Instead, it trades on cultural beliefs about lineage and spirituality. The ohu were originally brought to their towns from distant villages. Community ties are very important in Igbo culture, and so, while the descendants of, say, American immigrants are encouraged to assimilate, the ohu have never lost their outsider status. With the osu, the diala originally believed that mixing with a deity’s slaves would earn them divine punishment. (In its spiritual aspect, the plight of the osu is similar to that of dalits in India or of burakumin in Japan, whose ancestors are believed to have done “polluting” work as butchers or tanners, and who are therefore thought to be impure.) With Christianization, the conscious aspect of this belief dissipated, but not without leaving traces. “The fear people have is: before long, our children and children’s children will be bastardized,” Okoro Ijoma, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, told me. “It is about keeping their lineage pure.”

Perhaps the most important difference is that, though abolition in the West was preceded by centuries of activism that slowly (and imperfectly) changed popular attitudes, abolition in southeastern Nigeria was accomplished by colonial fiat—and only after the British no longer had an economic stake in the trade. It therefore seemed to many diala to be as arbitrary and self-serving as when the British pushed the Igbo, in the nineteenth century, to abandon subsistence farming in favor of cultivating cash crops, such as palm oil. The institution of slavery ended, but the underlying prejudices remained. In 1956, the legislature in southeastern Nigeria passed a statute outlawing the caste system, which then simply went underground. “Legal proscriptions are not enough to abolish certain primordial customs,” Anthony Obinna, a Catholic archbishop who advocates for the end of the system, told me. “You need more grassroots engagement.”

No data exist on the number of slave descendants in southeastern Nigeria today; it is rarely studied, and the stigma often compels people to keep silent about their status. (Ugo Nwokeji, a professor at Berkeley who studies the issue, estimates that five to ten per cent of Igbos, which would mean millions of people in Nigeria, are osu, and likely an equivalent number are ohu.) Recently, slave descendants have begun agitating for equality, staging protests and pressuring politicians. In 2017, the governor of Enugu State spoke out against the discrimination, saying that it violated the country’s constitution. In Oguta, ohu have distributed pamphlets and sued diala family members who tried to block them from receiving what they considered to be their inheritances, including access to communal farm land. Two years ago, when an elderly ohu man was snubbed for a seat on the village council, the ohu held a parallel ceremony to install him in the position. The ceremony was invaded by diala, who caused a brawl that the police had to break up. “Their population is much higher than ours,” Okororie said. “That is our only handicap.”


Its a long read but worth the time....

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-descendants-of-slaves-in-nigeria-fight-for-equality/amp

Adaobi Nwaubani looks like one of those children giving birth through Anus.
Afonjas are now changing their names to speak against Ndi Igbo

Donald95:
Adaobi Nwaubani looks like one of those children giving birth through Anus.

Afonjas are now changing their names to speak against Ndi Igbo

The article is over a 1000 words.

Two sentences, and hate was all you had to offer.

This is an interesting read.

Sometimes , I think about the journey our ancestors have gone through to reach here.

Their thinkers were out of this world.
How do you designate a fellow man like you a property and treat him as such?

How do you explain away burying a dead oba with tens of slaves - some beheaded, and some alive. How?

I understand Conquest and the consequent capture of prisoners but I don't understand butchering them.

As if all that is not gross enough, we in the 21st century are still fighting to keep that caste toga alive? Come on! Don't reinforce hatred.

These people should please wake up.

We're all dialas.
Only the hate makes us different.

She only writes trash articles about Nigeria and other African topics through a colonized scope. A true efulefu in the flesh.

Donald95:
Adaobi Nwaubani looks like one of those children giving birth through Anus.

Afonjas are now changing their names to speak against Ndi Igbo

Shut up! Bloody Onitsha Breidge head tout!

Did you read the article. Is it about Afonja?

What an insightful read.
The oppression is real even if it is silent. These people did nothing wrong except being born to a parent who was designated a slave by greedy and self-serving ancestors. Even some who claim to be educated still hold on to this archaic believe to stigmatize against their fellow tribesmen.
We have a long way to go.

Let dem keep writing about things dat are nonexistence.


Thunder will surely ravage all of them soonest.



Feminism is a disease.

ivolt:
What an insightful read.
The oppression is real even if it is silent. These people did nothing wrong except being born to a parent who was designated a slave by greedy and self-serving ancestors. Even some who claim to be educated still hold on to this archaic believe to stigmatize against their fellow tribesmen.
We have a long way to go.

Im telling you!

An interesting read. I read the full article here. The mere fact that people don't want to talk about the caste system in Igbo land and the resulting stigmatisation, discrimination and hate are the more reason to believe there will never be a reconciliation. Our people wrongly believe this is culture. No it's not, it's evil.

Cc: Immohotep, LZAA

This was a nice read. Check it out

[s]

MetaPhysical:
On a sunny morning in November, 2018, twelve men and two women gathered in a lavishly furnished living room in Oguta, a town in southeastern Nigeria, with the air-conditioning at full blast. They had come to discuss the caste system that persists among the Igbo people in the region. The group’s host, Ignatius Uchechukwu Okororie, a short, sixty-two-year-old retired civil servant, split open a kola nut with his fingernails and ate its flesh; he then passed a metal tray of nuts around the room, for the others to taste. “He who brings kola nut brings life,” he said. The breaking of kola nut, known as iwa oji, is an important Igbo ritual traditionally performed to welcome guests to a gathering. The group in Okororie’s living room were members of a caste called ohu: descendants of slaves who, almost a century ago, were owned by townspeople. They are typically restricted from presiding over such ceremonies. In Okororie’s house, the iwa oji was a small rebellion.



Dispatch
The Descendants of Slaves in Nigeria Fight for Equality
Adaobi Tricia NwaubaniJuly 11, 2019
Descendants of slaves in Nigeria
Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, and accelerated with the transatlantic trade. Today, slave descendants still retain the stigma of their ancestors.
Illustration by Ojima Abalaka
On a sunny morning in November, 2018, twelve men and two women gathered in a lavishly furnished living room in Oguta, a town in southeastern Nigeria, with the air-conditioning at full blast. They had come to discuss the caste system that persists among the Igbo people in the region. The group’s host, Ignatius Uchechukwu Okororie, a short, sixty-two-year-old retired civil servant, split open a kola nut with his fingernails and ate its flesh; he then passed a metal tray of nuts around the room, for the others to taste. “He who brings kola nut brings life,” he said. The breaking of kola nut, known as iwa oji, is an important Igbo ritual traditionally performed to welcome guests to a gathering. The group in Okororie’s living room were members of a caste called ohu: descendants of slaves who, almost a century ago, were owned by townspeople. They are typically restricted from presiding over such ceremonies. In Okororie’s house, the iwa oji was a small rebellion.


Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, but it accelerated in the sixteenth century, when the transatlantic trade began and demand for slaves increased. Under slavery, Igbo society was divided into three main categories: diala, ohu, and osu. The diala were the freeborn, and enjoyed full status as members of the human race. The ohu were taken as captives from distant communities or else enslaved in payment of debts or as punishment for crimes; the diala kept them as domestic servants, sold them to white merchants, and occasionally sacrificed them in religious ceremonies or buried them alive at their masters’ funerals. (A popular Igbo proverb goes, “A slave who looks on while a fellow-slave is tied up and thrown into the grave should realize that it could also be his turn someday.”) The osu were slaves owned by traditional deities. A diala who wanted a blessing, such as a male child, or who was trying to avoid tribulation, such as a poor harvest or an epidemic, could give a slave or a family member to a shrine as an offering; a criminal could also seek refuge from punishment by offering himself to a deity. This person then became osu, and lived near the shrine, tending to its grounds and rarely mingling with the larger community. “He was a person dedicated to a god, a thing set apart—a taboo forever, and his children after him,” Chinua Achebe wrote of the osu, in “Things Fall Apart.” (The ume, a fourth caste, was comprised of the slaves who were dedicated to the most vicious deities.)

In the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery in the West inadvertently led to a glut of slaves in the Igbo markets, causing the number of ohu and osu to skyrocket. “Those families which were really rich competed with one another in the number of slaves each killed for its dead or used to placate the gods,” Adiele Afigbo, an Igbo historian, wrote in “The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950.” The British formally abolished slavery in Nigeria in the early twentieth century, and finally eradicated it in the late nineteen-forties, but the descendants of slaves—who are also called ohu and osu—retained the stigma of their ancestors. They are often forbidden from speaking during community meetings and are not allowed to intermarry with the freeborn. In Oguta, they can’t take traditional titles, such as Ogbuagu, which is conferred upon the most accomplished men, and they can’t join the Oriri Nzere, an important social organization.

Westerners trying to understand the Igbo system often reach for its similarities with the oppression of black Americans. This analogy is helpful but imperfect. Igbo discrimination is not based on race, and there are no visual markers to differentiate slave descendants from freeborn. Instead, it trades on cultural beliefs about lineage and spirituality. The ohu were originally brought to their towns from distant villages. Community ties are very important in Igbo culture, and so, while the descendants of, say, American immigrants are encouraged to assimilate, the ohu have never lost their outsider status. With the osu, the diala originally believed that mixing with a deity’s slaves would earn them divine punishment. (In its spiritual aspect, the plight of the osu is similar to that of dalits in India or of burakumin in Japan, whose ancestors are believed to have done “polluting” work as butchers or tanners, and who are therefore thought to be impure.) With Christianization, the conscious aspect of this belief dissipated, but not without leaving traces. “The fear people have is: before long, our children and children’s children will be bastardized,” Okoro Ijoma, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, told me. “It is about keeping their lineage pure.”

Perhaps the most important difference is that, though abolition in the West was preceded by centuries of activism that slowly (and imperfectly) changed popular attitudes, abolition in southeastern Nigeria was accomplished by colonial fiat—and only after the British no longer had an economic stake in the trade. It therefore seemed to many diala to be as arbitrary and self-serving as when the British pushed the Igbo, in the nineteenth century, to abandon subsistence farming in favor of cultivating cash crops, such as palm oil. The institution of slavery ended, but the underlying prejudices remained. In 1956, the legislature in southeastern Nigeria passed a statute outlawing the caste system, which then simply went underground. “Legal proscriptions are not enough to abolish certain primordial customs,” Anthony Obinna, a Catholic archbishop who advocates for the end of the system, told me. “You need more grassroots engagement.”

No data exist on the number of slave descendants in southeastern Nigeria today; it is rarely studied, and the stigma often compels people to keep silent about their status. (Ugo Nwokeji, a professor at Berkeley who studies the issue, estimates that five to ten per cent of Igbos, which would mean millions of people in Nigeria, are osu, and likely an equivalent number are ohu.) Recently, slave descendants have begun agitating for equality, staging protests and pressuring politicians. In 2017, the governor of Enugu State spoke out against the discrimination, saying that it violated the country’s constitution. In Oguta, ohu have distributed pamphlets and sued diala family members who tried to block them from receiving what they considered to be their inheritances, including access to communal farm land. Two years ago, when an elderly ohu man was snubbed for a seat on the village council, the ohu held a parallel ceremony to install him in the position. The ceremony was invaded by diala, who caused a brawl that the police had to break up. “Their population is much higher than ours,” Okororie said. “That is our only handicap.”


Its a long read but worth the time....

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-descendants-of-slaves-in-nigeria-fight-for-equality/amp

[/s] rubbish

Long but interesting and insightful. Unfortunately, the practice is still very much active and around despite the public show of 'abolishment' last year.

Culture is forever an identity and valuable to us as Africans, but this right here, is demonic. How is the next door neighbour better than me or how am I in any way better than the next man who has no control over the type of family he is born in?

The earlier it is discovered that this one aspect of culture is too dangerous, the better it is for the sake of cohesion.

MetaPhysical:


Shut up! Bloody Onitsha Breidge head tout!

Did you read the article. Is it about Afonja?

shut up, the article said the slaves were captured from distant abobaku afonjaistic land probably raids in ife. how can afonjaistic abobakus be claiming diala.

czarina:
Cc: Immohotep, LZAA

This was a nice read. Check it out

livebyday:


Inciting comment, off topic and derailing thread

Mynd44 Seun lalasticlala OAM4J

Did you even care to read the article? That's a direct quote from there I think. If you feel so irritated by that fact then do something about it. Don't act like an ostrich who buries his head in sand when in danger thinking the problem will just disappear.

234ng44uk:


Did you even care to read the article? That's a direct quote from there I think. If you feel so irritated by that fact then do something about it. Don't act like an ostrich who buries his head in sand when in danger thinking the problem will just disappear.

Done?

Another noun for the tribalist on nairalànd OHU..