"This evocative study of a water Goddess among the Igbo of Lake Oguta in southeastern Nigeria, thoroughly explores the rituals, beliefs and social organization associated with rituals of women's power ... the analysis of this powerful Goddess, based on many years of research, is a notable contribution to African female ritual studies, long neglected by scholars."--Publisher's website.
A study of the Igbo people's belief in a water Goddess that resides in Lake Oguta in south- eastern Nigeria. Bahlsen looks at the rituals, beliefs and social organisation associated with it.
The Lake Goddess came to be Flora Nwapa's last novel, yet possibly her most important one, as it restores African culture and spirituality. "Nwapa's message is clear: she-Ona/Ogbuide/woman-may have many children, but she also independently succeeds in her own life, and she is a source of healing and inspiration to all human beings suffering from the ills and madness of modern society worldwide. The goddess whom Nwapa invoked finally reemerges in her original glory in The Lake Goddess to brighten women's path. Her powers and mysteries shine, once again, despite the onslaught of foreign powers and their religions, when Nwapa accounts for the destructive forces of globalization and for attempts to push Uhammiri's children into the abyss of derangement, to rob the deity of her benevolence, and to deny her people both children and wealth. Yet, when the lake goddess finally appears with her image fully restored in Nwapa's last novel, the messenger, who invoked her, has left the land, crossed the river, and joined her ancestors to live on.
African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
This book traces the visual cultures and histories of Mami Wata and other African water divinities. Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practics. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. Henry John Drewal is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other contributors include Marilyn Houlberg, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Amy L. Noell, John W. Nunley, and Jill Salmons.
God in manifestation is, like the Army, a Host of fashioning Powers or Gods. Prayer to a God yields immediate results, while prayer to God yields nothing.
Omenụkọ (real name: Igwegbe Odum) whose home in Okigwe, Eastern Nigeria, was a popular spot for field trips by students in schools and colleges, as well as a favourite attraction for tourists in the decades before and after the Nigerian Independence in 1960. Generations of Igbo children began their reading in Igbo with Omenụkọ, and those who did not have the opportunity to go to school still read Omenụkọ in their homes or at adult education centers. Omenụkọ was a legendary figure and his 'sayings' became part of the Igbo speech repertoire that young adults were expected to acquire. Omenụkọ, a classic in Igbo Literature, written by Pita Nwana and published in 1933 by Longman, Green & Co, Ltd, London, is in this translation made accessible to a global audience. Emenyonu utilizes his mastery of both languages (Igbo and English) to faithfully present to his audience a complete rendition of Omenụkọ as originally written. The timeless significance of this novel as a progenitor of the Igbo language novel is again underscored.
Haunting, alarming, transformative, and elusive, these poems bridge together the gaps between development stages: from girl, to woman, and then mother. With the complexities that intertwine them, can you be all three at once? Who shapes our identity, and who is in control here? How do we recognize, acknowledge, and honor the changing of who we are?
