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By: Emmanuel Kanayo
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\u200eOur Igbo forefathers were gardeners of destiny. They understood one law older than politics: _a leaf that forgets the tree becomes firewood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eThey taught it with the smallest thing \u2014 _Eriri nwa_, the umbilical cord.
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\u200eThe hospital calls it waste. Our people called it a rope. The rope that pulled you from the other world into this one.
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\u200eSo we did not throw it away. We buried it with intention.
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\u200eA boy\u2019s under the kola tree: \u201cGrow deep like this tree. Be fruitful. Remember home, wherever you go.\u201d
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\u200eA girl\u2019s by the hearth: \u201cBuild a good home. Nurture your people. Bring prosperity.\u201d
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\u200eWith the cord went prayers. With the burial went an address \u2014 in the soil and in the spirit.
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\u200e
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\u200eThat was the first lesson, taught in silence: _Know your root, or the wind will name you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eTo our ancients, root was not sentiment. It was survival.
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\u200eA man with no place for his cord was \u201ca leaf on election day\u201d \u2014 blown from one camp to another, belonging everywhere and nowhere. No anchor. No history. No ancestors to call when trouble comes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eLanguage, names, taboos, how we settle _ikpe_, how we bury our dead \u2014 these are buried cords. Invisible ropes tying us to the ground that first drank us.
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\u200eDeny your root and you don\u2019t become modern. You become homeless. You may wear agbada in Abuja, but you\u2019ll spend your life holding press conferences to explain who you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eAnd here is where irony puts on agbada \u2014 our Etche brothers and sisters in Rivers State.
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\u200eListen to Etche and you hear Igbo singing in a different key.
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\u200eWatch Etche masquerades and you see Igbo spirits wearing a new cap.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eCheck Etche names, food, proverbs, and you find Igbo fingerprints still wet on the clay pot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eLinguists have classified it. Oral history has traced it. The soil remembers it.
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\u200eYet today, some Etche voices stand on podiums to declare: \u201cWe are not Igbo.\u201d
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\u200eAs if you can rename rain and expect it to stop falling.
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\u200eThis is the modern way of cutting _eriri nwa_, burying it, and then suing the midwife for kidnapping.
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\u200eWhen a people deny their cord, three things happen. First, you discard ancestral medicine \u2014 proverbs, communal labor, conflict resolution \u2014 for imported solutions that wither in your soil. Second, you lose your address. If your cord is not in Igboland, is it in a political alliance? Alliances expire every 4 years. Blood does not. A people without a root become rented chairs \u2014 used for meetings, then stacked away. Third, you lose your children\u2019s inheritance. Fifty years from now, what will an Etche child answer to \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d If the answer is \u201cMy leaders were confused,\u201d then that child is already a ghost with a voter\u2019s card.
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\u200eBut knowing your root is not declaring war.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eThe man who buries his cord in Mbaise can build ten houses in Port Harcourt. The root doesn\u2019t tie his leg. It gives his wings a runway.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eThe prayer was never \u201cStay in the village.\u201d It was \u201cMay your heart remember home, wherever you go.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eEtche can be Rivers by politics and Igbo by ancestry. Water and garri live in the same bowl. Cutting off your leg because the shoe is tight is not wisdom. It is self-sabotage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200e_Eriri nwa_ is not just Etche\u2019s problem. It is a mirror.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eBefore we throw stones, let us check our dustbin.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eWhat cords are we throwing away? The Igbo we refuse to teach our children because \u201cEnglish is faster\u201d? Our village meetings we now call \u201cbush\u201d? Our names we bleach to sound like WiFi passwords?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eOur ancestors watched that stump for ten days. No distraction. Just care.
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\u200e_Identity is like fire. If you don\u2019t feed it, it becomes cold ash._
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\u200eThe wisdom is stubborn:
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\u200eBefore the iroko kisses the sky, something must rot in the ground._
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\u200eFor a person, that \u201csomething\u201d is memory and values.
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\u200eFor a people like Etche, that \u201csomething\u201d is truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eYou can redraw maps. You can rebrand history. But you cannot rebrand blood. Blood has a memory longer than any government.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eA people that honors its cord will always have ground to stand on when the storm comes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200eA people that denies it will spend its life looking for land to rent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200e_\u201cHe who does not know the farm where his umbilical cord was buried will die a tenant in his own life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By: Emmanuel Kanayo \u200eOur Igbo forefathers were gardeners of destiny. They understood one law older than politics: _a leaf that forgets the tree becomes firewood. \u200eThey taught it with the smallest thing \u2014 _Eriri nwa_, the umbilical cord. \u200eThe hospital calls it waste. Our people called it a rope. The rope that pulled you from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinion-and-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepstrataenergy.com\/phmundial\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}