Openness as a Means of Survival

Ojemba: Openness as a Means of Survival

by Chielozona Eze

I was five years old when the Nigerian civil war broke out in 1967. When it came to an end after close to thirty months, we were happy to be alive and to return to our ancestral homes. Despite incalculable losses in lives and property, we brimmed with the joy of life—and an unparalleled desire to rebuild our lives and catch up with the rest of the country’s residents whose lives weren’t interrupted by the war. That was at least as much as my eight-year-old self could observe. I thought that every person I met was happy; the village always had a reason to come together to make music and to celebrate with whatever people could bring. Our desire to rebuild our lives was reflected in most of the popular music of the time, from Eddy Okwedy’s Happy Survival to village songs. I used to go watch a women’s dance troupe practice their art before they presented it to the village. I was fascinated by the voice of the lead singer, and in particular one of the songs called Ojemba Enwe Ilo— “A wayfarer has no enemy.”

Ojemba enwe ilo is an expression I heard from most adults I knew, and it found its way into some of the popular songs, especially Nelly Uchendu’s Love Nwantiti and Morocco Maduka’s Ojemba enwe ilo. This is largely because after the war, during the rebuilding period, Igbo people had to travel to other parts of the country in search of opportunities that did not exist in Igboland. I never bothered to think about the importance of the expression until very recently — until I read about the life of Ifeanyi Menkiti, an Igboman who left Nigeria at the age of twenty-one. Ifeanyi Menkiti came to the United States and established himself as a philosopher, businessman, poet, and philanthropist. He identified himself as American and Igbo, rooting himself in the American reality even while he remained as connected to his Igbo culture as any Igbo could. Thinking about him, I couldn’t help but think about myself as well. I also left Nigeria at twenty-four, in 1986. I have spent more than half of my adult life outside the country in which I was born—first in Austria as a student of Catholic theology, then in Germany as a student of comparative literature, and now in the United States as a professor. Menkiti is one of the better-known African philosophers; his thought leadership has had a profound impact on the development of African philosophy. He and his wife, Carol Menkiti, established the Emengini Institute, the first of any such Institute of Advanced Studies established by an African immigrant in the West.

Menkiti is a quintessential Ojemba.

I do not intend to insinuate a comparison between our life trajectories, for there is no ground for it. I am, however, struck by the similarity between my life, his own, and those of a few people I know who hail from the same culture. I believe they are also influenced by the philosophy of ojemba enwe ilo. It is the philosophy that compels the Igbo to plant roots wherever they go, but also to never cut the umbilical cord to their natal home. To be sure, the expression does not imply that some wayfarers do not make enemies. It is rather that wayfarers cannot afford to have enemies, precisely because their survival depends on the generosity of strangers. Wayfarers must adopt friendship as a political principle of survival and thriving.

The Igbo people take pride in being referred to as world travelers. It is speculated that there are more Igbos in other parts of Nigeria and overseas than there are in their ancestral homelands. There’s a joke among my peers: if there are up to three black people in The Galápagos Islands, there’s the likelihood that one of them is Igbo. I don’t know how true it is. It might after all be just an anecdote, embellished by the Igbo’s propensity for hyperbole. What is true, though, is the average Igbo person’s belief to be able to survive wherever humans do. Again, this is not to say that the Igbo have genes that other Africans lack; it has to be understood within the context of Ojemba, a philosophy that the Igbo have woven into the fabric of their culture. At least this is what my father told me the night before my journey to Austria on June 20, 1986. “You are a true Igbo,” he said. “Igbo people survive wherever humans survive.” There was a wrinkle in that advice, and every member of my family knew it. His elder brother, who had lived in Sapale and claimed to have worked at the rubber plantation there, returned home a failure. He never married, and he died poor. It was proof that not all Igbo people survived where other humans did. Yet, people are what they believe in.

I embraced my father’s words about surviving in Europe as a guiding motif. It wasn’t much different from what my grandmother, his mother and the oracle of the family, said to me when I was venturing out of Igboland five years earlier for the first time to study in Ikot Ekpene, a city located among the Efik. There didn’t seem to be any alternative to finding ways to live among Austrians, who were as different from me as one could imagine. To be sure, I knew I was going to meet some Igbo there. Chika Uzor, a student from the same town, was waiting to receive me at the airport. That was comforting. Beyond that, though, I knew I had to eventually find my way among strangers.

I cannot fully recall how I steeled my mind and heart to survive. Thinking back now, I believe it couldn’t have been less than total openness to new experiences. There were basically three options open to me: one, discover how Austrians lived, befriend them, and find ways to thrive; two, live among them as a complete stranger, tightly clinging to my Igboness with everything it implies, and three, reject the people and travel back to Igboland. The last two alternatives were out of the question. I was an Igbo. An Ojemba. A survivor. And since I could not go back to my mother’s womb, as the popular saying goes, I had to be ready to encounter others. I had to see the disquiet and the chaos of the new world as a great opportunity. There is, after all, no life without encounters with the other.

I thus return to the words my grandmother spoke to me the very first time I ventured outside Igboland. That was in 1980, when I began my undergraduate studies of philosophy in Ikot Ekpene. My family feared for my life. Who knows, the Efik might be cannibals and human ritualists, and I was surely going to be their next victim. Moreover, it was said that at least three students had drowned in the infamous Inyang River close to the school’s premises. My father had practical advice to avoid drowning: rivers consume only those who come close to them. As for the supposed ritualists, he had no advice other than to be where other students were. My grandmother had a different solution. I should not fear the Efik, she said. “There are people like you there,” she said. “Look for them.”

I wasn’t sure whether she understood that the Efik didn’t speak our language because she, too, had never met any people other than the Igbo.

“There must be good people there,” she added. “People like you.”

The lesson reflected her moral vision of the world. She believed that if one carried no malice toward people in one’s heart, then even the evil spirits would clear out of that person’s way. That is a common belief of Animism, her religion. So, I believed then that the evil spirits had no power over her because she was a good human and bore no malice toward any person or thing. But what of evil people? What of strangers? What of the Efik? I recalled Grandma’s words with an affectionate glow when I made friends with students from Ikot Ekpene. Some took me to meet their families. And so, I learned that the Efik were like my people; they just had a different language and different customs. I kept Grandma’s words close to my heart when I traveled to Austria. Considering both my grandmother’s and my father’s words, and my considerable experience thus far, I know that openness and friendship are virtues that must be cultivated. They are essential not just for the survival of every wayfarer, but for his flourishing. We need strangers. We must reach out to them in a gesture of peace and love with the hope that strangers are those who have not yet become friends.

Stepping out of one’s comfort zone, leaving one’s own people in order to establish one’s life elsewhere, is always full of risks. It can also be rewarding, as one encounters hitherto unknown possibilities. It is like reaching out your hand for a shake. Open palms are vulnerable, but they can be enriched by the warmth of another open palm. The truth of every encounter, though, is that one gets out of every encounter only as much as one is willing to give. This is as true with God and humans as it is with nature, or even literary texts.

This seems to suggest that one encounters oneself in strangers, a claim I might not be able to fully defend here. But it suffices, I think, to hold on to the simpler version that in order to discover the new world and befriend it, the wayfarer must render himself to be discovered and befriended. He must first give what he hopes to receive, and treat the world the way he expects to be treated. This is a non-negotiable starting point of every rewarding encounter, and this is particularly true for the wayfarer, given his position as a mendicant. The wayfarer must be an open text to be read by strangers as much as he reads them. He is by nature incomplete; he is the typical Romantic figure who knows that nature has what he needs to be happy; he must go into it, and allow it to invade his senses. Indeed, openness is a confession of vulnerability, of incompleteness and the cry to be completed by the unknown. It is the readiness to learn.

Being open to strangers does not mean laying oneself bare to be exploited by scammers and swindlers, which are found in every society. An open book can never fully give up all it has to offer; something new is to be discovered at each reading. So must the wayfarer remain open, but also deep, and always ready to offer something new from his heart—that simple organ, as limited as the owner's fist, but infinitely rich and always in some motion day and night. The heart is what it is to the rest of the body precisely because it is open, and gives as much as it receives.

In concrete terms, though, the wayfarer must learn how the citizens of a place of his sojourn live. This is the first rule of survival. Know the people’s stories, their language, what they worship, what makes them happy or afraid. The first act of survival lies in literally asking the people: “tell me your story.” Humans are their stories, and to listen to those stories is to take them seriously; it is to immerse oneself into their horizons of meaning.

To be able and ready to listen to people’s stories is a conscious gesture of friendship. By the time you have heard a people’s stories at least three times, they will surely ask you about yours. They will be more disposed to hear yours because you have already shown them respect and affirmation. That is the true moment of intercultural communication, which is essential for the thriving of immigrants. This communication is usually blocked if you are more interested in telling your stories than you are in hearing other people’s stories, if you are more interested in the world understanding you than you are in understanding the world. But this is self-evident. The citizens of your land of sojourn are not there waiting to spread the red carpet for you. You have to earn their friendship. You earn other people’s friendship by being friendly.

The germ of what I’ve been seeking to say is the incalculable value of cultivating a cosmopolitan vision of the world. If you step out of your village with the goal of settling—even if for a day—in another person’s village, you must also accept the fact that a total stranger from even the furthest part of the world has the right to settle in the village of your birth. This seems to be the description—if not the definition—of the cosmopolitan worldview.

I have also taken a shortcut route to Menkiti’s core philosophy of personhood, which is that community allows us to become persons, and this community is not necessarily defined by blood. Its constitutive element is the interaction between humans—interaction defined by openness. Community is where an individual feels accepted and finds a conducive atmosphere to flourish. The individual must also actively contribute to that. And this brings me to the next important expression associated with ojemba: Ebe onye bi, ka ọ na-awachi—you protect where you live. Your home is where you have settled. Contribute to the development of the place of your sojourn. Your community is where you are.

Among the Igbo of my generation, whenever a child’s umbilical cord is cut, it is usually buried either under a tree, or a tree is planted wherever it is buried. From that point, the tree belongs to the child. Among the things that provided me immense joy right after the war was taking care of my tree and watching it grow. Even now, every time I visit my village of birth, I take joy in walking by it, knowing that my umbilical cord is under it. There might be some environmental wisdom behind attaching each child to a tree, but I think that the immediate consequence is simply tying the child’s spirit to the village of its birth, making the child care about the place where it came into the world. This could be one of the things that pull many Igbo back to their village regardless of how long they have been away. It could be one of the things that make them believe a part of their soul still hovers somewhere in the village. Most Igbo grow up hearing that even though they ought to make home wherever they are, they still belong to the place of their birth. Menkiti never forgot where his umbilical cord was buried even as he established a home in Somerville, MA. And this is to the benefit of America and Nigeria.

Dr. Chielozona Eze is a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, where he is Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor.