Alexander Byrd (2006) pointed out that Equiano’s words “Eboe”, “country” and “nation” shift in meaning from page to page. Ukaegbu’s chapter in Korieh (2009) argues that this is exactly what we should expect. In eighteenth-century Igboland the clan was the “country”; Igbo has no separate words for country and town (obodo), land (ala) or nation (mba), and “nation” in the diaspora came to mean the Igbo-speaking community of a ship or a plantation.
<em>Ala</em>
The land is also the earth goddess, guardian of morality and fertility. To lose the land is to lose a moral order, a point Ukaegbu links to Equiano’s distress on the coast.
<em>Ikwu</em>, <em>umunna</em>, <em>Oha</em>
Concentric circles of belonging: homestead kin, the patrilineal group (children of one father) and the assembly of all umunna, the clan. “An Igbo without umunna lacks citizenship in both worlds,” writes Victor Uchendu, as cited by Ukaegbu.
<em>Chi</em>
The personal spirit-self, the source of destiny. The proverb Onye kwe, chi ya ekwe (“if a person agrees, his chi agrees”) is cited to explain Equiano’s mix of fatalism and initiative.
<em>Amadioha</em>
The deity of thunder and justice, invoked in a passage in which Equiano wishes forked lightning on his white oppressors.
Ukaegbu concludes that Igbo identity in the Narrative is not a single thing but a set of layers: a constant memory of home, statuses acquired in exile and a new role as spokesperson for the enslaved.
Sources for this article
- Korieh (ed.) 2009, ch. 3 (Ukaegbu), pp. 67–92
- Byrd 2006, pp. 123–148
- Uchendu 1965, cited in Ukaegbu