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Emuerinvwin: an Urhobo belief that links serious illness to bad behavior. A constructive analysis

By David T. Okpako Formerly Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Delta State University, Abraka and onetime Professor & Head, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics,

University of Ibadan Summary

The Urhobo word emuerinvwin refers to an immoral act for which the ancestors may punish an offending descendant with serious illness. The idea is also more generally referred to in the African belief system as ancestor spirit anger theory of illness. Emuerinvwin belief is exposed in this analysis to be a composite of two strands of thought: (i) belief that dead ancestors control morality among their descendants by their ability to inflict illness as punishment for sin, (ii) experiential knowledge that an acculturated descendant who commits such a sin may endure emotional distress and become seriously ill as a result. Emuerinvwin belief is therefore best understood as metaphor - a theory of illness caused by bad behavior and sustained emotional distress. The belief predates psychosomatic theory in modern medicine.

Traditional African beliefs of this sort have usually been described as metaphysical superstition, in contrast to scientific theories that are grounded on empirical evidence; such view of African beliefs has been an obstacle to their acceptance by scientists as viable alternative theories, for example, in modern medicine. The emuerinvwin belief is shown here to be rooted in experience and understanding, of emotional distress, as a fundamental cause of serious illness. It would therefore be simplistic to classify it as an irrational metaphysical superstition. In traditional Urhobo society the belief functioned as a health theory as well as a behavior control mechanism.

Introduction From the beginning of human history, people in different places experienced life-threatening illnesses, and different societies evolved beliefs and practices in their respective environments which enabled them to cope with this calamity: the beliefs and practices resulted from the people’s cumulative experience and knowledge of the particular environment. But with huge advances in the science of disease in recent years, and consequent dramatic successes in illness management, there has emerged a medical profession with claims to monopoly of knowledge in health matters. At the same time, however, bewildering serious illnesses are appearing which seem to have socio-cultural dimensions that lie outside the confines of the

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germ theory of disease: thinkers from specialties other than medicine are contributing to the discussion thereby widening the context of illness issues. It is against this background that I advocate 1 that the health-related beliefs that evolved in prescience traditional societies, some of which are still evident in Africa today, should be revisited for clarity, relevance or even enlightenment, in our efforts to fully understand the complexity of the fundamental nature of bewildering chronic illnesses in society today.

The idea that what troubles the mind can affect the physical body has underpinned traditional medicine practices in many cultures, long before the idea made its appearance in modern medicine, as psychosomatic theory; but it is only in the last two decades that psychosomatic theory has received scientific authentication from new researches in psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) which now provides the proof that the brain controls a person’s immunity (the immune system is the first line of defense against illness), and that negative emotions of guilt, hate, envy, anxiety, fear, suppressed anger, etc., can lower a person’s immune responsiveness, and hence predispose the person to illness. Sustained emotional distress is therefore now recognized in modern medicine as a risk factor for the occurrence of chronic serious illnesses such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. Traditional pre-science thinkers had been aware of this idea since ancient times and exploited it in dealing with illness; that is why PNI is rightly described by anthropologists as a modern medical specialty with “roots in holistic practices of traditional medicine”2.

My credentials for this task are my traditional upbringing at Owahwa village in Ughelli South LGA of Urhoboland in Delta State and subsequent professional training in Pharmacy and Pharmacology. The work is my attempt at explaining the emuerinvwin concept as I understand it from my perspective, and sharing my insight with others who may not have given the subject much thought. Also my analysis should be of interest to scholars of traditional African thought in general, and traditional African medicine in particular. In the paper, I discuss the Urhobo

1 Okpako, D. T. (2015) “Science Interrogating Belief: Bridging the old and new traditions of medicine in Africa” Book Builders Ltd, Editions Africa, Ibadan, pg. 12 2Lyon, M. L. (1990). Order and healing: The concept of order and its importance in the conceptualization of healing. Medical Anthropology, 12, 249 – 268.

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belief in erinvwin, the abode of the dead ancestors and refer to other parts of the world where similar religious beliefs exist, so that we do not continue to think, as I did before I searched the literature in preparation for this work, that Urhobos are exceptional among human populations in holding the belief that dead ancestors can inflict potentially fatal illness on a morally deviant descendant as punishment.

Emuerininwin

Most adult Urhobos are familiar with the term emuerinvwin as referring to an immoral act for which erinvwin (the ancestors) may inflict serious illness on an offending descendant as punishment. Emuerinvwin literarily means a matter for erinvwin (the ancestors) to judge, i.e. an anti-social act, typically incest, that is so objectionable to Urhobo sense of morality that only erinvwin can be trusted to decide the fate of an offender: in serious life-threatening illness3 which commonly available treatments have failed to cure, Urhobos would consult a diviner (obo re epha) who may pronounce that the underlying threat to life may be emuerinvwin sin. The focus of this essay is not on Urhobo religion per se4, but on the belief that the ancestors control moral conduct among their descendants5; the instrument by which good conduct is enforced is fear that bad behavior may offend the ancestors who can inflict serious illness or death as punishment.

Emuerinvwin belief influences behavior in complex ways

As I point out below, incest abomination is the classic example of emuerinvwin, but the belief influences behavior of the acculturated Urhobo in ways that are not instantly predictable from the general interpretation I have given it here, as metaphor for sustained emotional distress (see Appendix). For example:

3 I make a distinction in this essay between serious life-threatening illness and minor ailments such as fever aches and pains; it is in the management of serious illness where the cause of imminent death cannot be ascertained, that esoteric consultations such as divination to uncover supernatural underpinnings are made. Minor ailments are treated with herbal or other remedies that are known to be effective from experience of previous use, without esoteric consultations. 4 For this, see the works of Urhobo-born Michael Nabofa, University of Ibadan Professor of Religious Studies, for example, his “A survey of Urhobo traditional religion” In The Urhobo People, ed. Onigu Otite (2003, 2nd edn), Shaneson C. I. Limited, pp. 419-443 5 The brilliant Professor Omafume Onoge of blessed memory, described erinvwin as ‘the Urhobo seat of morality’ (personal communication)

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(a). Child birth is not an illness. However, if a married woman experiences life-threatening difficulty at child birth and it turns out that the woman had had sexual intercourse with a man other than the husband prior to or during the pregnancy, the woman’s action is commonly interpreted as emuerinvwin; she must confess her sin for safe delivery to occur (see Okpako, 2015, opus cit. p88, for an example of an actual case).

(b). Emuerinvwin belief extends to the way an Urhobo may view antisocial behavior selectively: an antisocial conduct that is tolerable if the victim of the conduct is a stranger, may be considered a sin, if the behavior is perpetuated against a relative or even another Urhobo person (Professor Ekeh evokes this idea in his influential paper on “Two Publics”). This seems to be a reworking of emuerinvwin, in the mind of the acculturated Urhobo thus: incest is broadly understood as a sin in which one relative violates another; if this is forbidden by the ancestors, so must any anti-social act against a relative or kinsman. This may explain the exceptional empathy between Urhobos in the diaspora.

©. Concerning emuerinvwin and Urhobos in the diaspora, the famous Urhobo singer/song maker, “Professor” Johnson Aja, makes the following telling point in his song “Agha” (what we forbid): “Ne Erinvwin re township nyo oyibo o!, Je onyo yibo!” (They think Erinvwin in the township does not understand English, but he understands English!). A poetic warning: just because you are in the diaspora where you speak to one another in English, don’t think you can do what Urhobo forbids and Erinvwin wouldn’t know.

Emuerinvwin belief and its deployment in the management of serious illness

I have been aware virtually all my life that the traditional medicine practitioners in Ughievwen regularly deploy the emuerinvwin belief in the management of life-threatening illness. What made me to inquire more deeply into it was the observation that when serious illness has been divined as an affliction caused by an angered ancestor, those who consult the diviner must first approach the ill person (if at all possible) for confirmation and full disclosure of the misdemeanor; this confrontation of the ill person for confession of a hidden sin,

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must precede the mandatory libations or sacrifices that must be offered to propitiate the offended ancestors. Let me repeat this important point for clarity because it is, what I consider to be, the crux of the argument in this analysis: in serious life-threatening illness, those who consult divination do not proceed directly to appease the divined offended ancestors, which is what one would expect if the people thought that the ill person was a passive victim of ancestor anger. Rather, they go from the diviner to the ill person to ascertain the facts of the sin i.e., to obtain a confession, which suggests that, in Urhobo thought, the ill person is actively involved in the circumstances leading to the occurrence of the illness.

I infer from the above scenario that the people know, almost certainly from experience, that the root cause of serious illness is, at least, partly in the victim’s mind: that being someone brought up in Urhobo culture (acculturated), the sick person would know that his illness ‘might be due to something wrong that he did’, an emuerinvwin (emu agha). Indeed, whatever the emuerinvwin was, the victim’s consciousness of it would have gnawed at him/her from the moment the sin was committed. Thus, the emuerinvwin concept can be viewed as a composite of two strands of thought:

(a): belief that supernatural ancestors can chastise a deviant descendant with serious illness (the mystical side of the belief), and

(b): actual experience gained over time, that an immoral act committed by an acculturated individual can gnaw at the latter’s consciousness (ewen kpo kpo), and cause him to be ill (the empiricist side of the belief).

Analysis of these two strands of the emuerinvwin belief, and how they interact to give the belief its potency, is the focus of this work.

Back ground to the emuerinvwin belief

The belief that dead ancestors control moral behavior of their descendants is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa (for detailed references see my SIB). In Urhobo culture this belief has survived as a formal institution probably more so than in other Nigerian cultures: the Urhobo word erinvwin refers to the abode of the dead. Erinvwin is related to or derived from orinvwin, a word reserved for the dead body

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of a person: orinvwin is not used if the dead body is that of an animal – cow, elephant, dog, monkey, goat, etc. Orinvwin is an emotionally loaded term conveying the complexities surrounding the death of a person - sorrow at the loss of a loved one, anxiety about appropriate burial, what to do with assets and liabilities - in short a general bewilderment. And, the word orivwin embodies complex emotions associated with the universal fear of the dead 6 e.g., the imperative that the dead body must be treated with dignity, the need to satisfy family honor in accordance with the status of the dead person and of his descendants; above all, the belief that the person though dead to the living, is alive in erinvwin, observing how the descendants deal with what is left of him/her.

For the Urhobo, erinvwin is not the abode of the ‘ghosts’ or ‘spirits’ (erhi) of the dead, as may be inferred from expressions such as ancestor spirit anger, commonly used in the anthropology literature. For example, during libations at Ore, i.e., the Urhobo festival of the ancestors, each departed elder in a family lineage is addressed, not as a spirit (erhi) of the elder, but by the name the person was known by when he was alive. The person exists in erinvwin as he was before he died only disembodied. Professor Bruce Onobrakpeya, the renown Urhobo-born Nigerian visual artist and writer, depicts erinvwin as consisting of similar classes of people as we have among the living in Urhobo society: in his series on the subject of erinvwin, there are pictures of “ihwo rerinvwin” (the people of erinvwin), emete rerinvwin (maidens in erinvwin) and odede rerinvwin (chief priest of erinvwin), consistent with the Urhobo view of erinvwin as the abode of the living dead, the place where life continues after death. In the Urhobo view, the world of erinwin, though invisible, is a palpable reality (see also Lambo, 1969 7 ). The belief that the dead person is alive in another world, observing the goings-on among his living descendants, is the Urhobo equivalent of the universal belief in life after death, which Fraser (opus cit.) cynically describes as “a belief so flattering to human vanity and so comforting to human sorrow”. Some scholars have reason to believe that a

6 Fraser, J. G. (1933). The fear of the dead in primitive religion, MacMillan & Co. Ltd, London, p. vi 7Lambo, T. A. (1969), Traditional African cultures and western medicine, In Medicine and Culture, F. N. Poynter, ed. Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine

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similar belief as it is expressed in the Judeo-Christian and Muslim faiths had its origins in ancient Africa8.

Urhobo veneration of the departed elders is often referred to as ‘the worship of ancestor spirits’; for this reason the practice is considered to be incompatible with the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions. The Urhobo-born philosopher and Catholic priest, the late Monsignor Anthony. O. Erhueh teaches us in his book, Vatican II: Image of God in Man, that the libations that Urhobo make e.g., at Ore (the festival of the ancestors), are rituals of collective remembrance of the ancestors who have gone before us, not worship; the Urhobo reserve worship for Oghene (The Creator) 9 . Father Erhueh argues in his book that in fact, Urhobo believe in one all-powerful God (Oghene) as the supreme creator of heaven and earth. And, Kenyan-born Professor of Theology and Religion, John S. Mbiti, wrote that “prayers, more than any other aspect of religion, contain the most intense expression of African spirituality” and citing evidence for the supremacy of Almighty God in the Africans’ spiritual consciousness, Mbiti said “at least 90 percent of prayers are addressed to God. Therefore He emerges as the clearest and most concrete spiritual reality”10. At moments if serious crisis the instinctive cry from an Urhobo is: “Oghene biko!” i.e., “God Almighty please!” It is true that at Urhobo traditional religious ceremonies, such as Ore the supreme being (Oghene) is not the explicit focus of sacrifice, but His overarching supremacy is acknowledged in many different ways (see also Nabofa, opus cit); Urhobo seem to believe that The Supreme Being (Oghene), having done with the creation of everything, left the responsibility for the day to day fine-tuning of His creation to the lesser deities; in

8 Baldick, J. (1997). Black God: The Afro-asiatic Roots of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Religions, I. B. Tauris, London 9 Peter Enahoro in his autobiography, Then Spoke The Thunder (2014), p.24, tells an interesting early history of Idu, the progenitor of Edo speaking people: Idu founded a community of worshippers of a deity called Oghene (The creator) in a place called Uhe in the Niger/Benue confluence where the Nok culture flourished about 1,500 BCE). When floods drove the community south in search of farmlands, Idu’s descendants who thus migrated included the four clans we know today as Etsako (Kukuruku), Esan, Bini and Urhobo. During the migration “a group known as Ihobo ….had separated from the main party to continue their match southwards;…the descendants of that factional party are today’s Urhobo… They have retained the oldest form of Edo tongue that derive from the Ighan language, spoken in Uhe land, so that today, the Urhobos have the same name for God by which Idu’ followers worshipped The Creator, Oghene …..to this day, the Urhobo name for the Bini is “Aka” i.e., Akkak’s people – surely, a reference to Idu’s eldest son and leader of the migrants when the parties set out from Uhe. The Ihobo would not have known that Akkah did not make it to Ubini”. 10 Mbiti, J. S. (1975) The Prayers of African Religion, SPCK, London, p 1-4

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Urhobo belief, the ancestors in particular play a critical role in the control of moral behavior among close relatives.

Ancestor veneration: religion and governance in pre-colonial Urhobo society

In some Urhobo clan/kingdoms, the veneration of the ancestors is elevated to the status of an institution with formalized priesthood and annual festivals. In Ughievwen 11 , for example, the arrowhead of ancestor veneration is the clan goddess, Ogbaurhie 12 (literarily, the strong one of the river). The priesthood consists of men and women title holders in the four Ogbaurhie Orders: Ade, Igbun-eshovwin (higher Igbun) and Igbun-otor (lower Igbun), are male only Orders, whereas the Eboh Order is open to men and women. Before western education, Christian conversions and politics, less than 100 years ago, these titled men and women governed Ughievwen land: they played key ceremonial, religious, administrative, law enforcement and defense roles in Ughievwen governance, as well as the crucial roles in medicine, history and culture13. These titled men and women and the village elders (ekpako orere) governed Ughievwen, in benevolent theocracy and gerontocracy.

The main religious event in the Ughievwen callender was Ore, the festival of remembrance of the ancestors: one day for ese emo (fathers of the descendants) and another day for ini emo (mothers of the descendants), which took place in the month of August. At Ore individual families prepared feasts of libation to the ancestors, and for the entertainment of returning family members and guests, being probably the ancient African origins of the modern day festivals of the great world religions. As a youngster, what I remember most of Ore was the food - plenty of the best; new clothes, re-plastered mud walls, the bushes around the dwellings and foot paths were cleared by communal effort; and relatives in the diaspora returned home in droves for the festivities.

11 One of the 23 Clan/Kingdoms that make up the Urhobo nation of Delta State Nigeria 12 Our oral history of origin has it that Ughievwen and his entourage arrived at Otor-Ughievwen from a place called Ogobiri on the Atlantic, in present day Bayelsa State, bearing the logo of Ogbaurhie, disguised as a baby on a woman’s back. 13 For more details about the functions of these Orders and the rigorous traditional processes that Ughievwen men and women had to go through to gain the title {see G. G. Darah (2003) “Ughievwen” In The Urhobo People, Ed Onigu Otite, Second Edition, Shaneson C. I. Limited, Ibadan, pp 286 – 288}

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The Ore festival was the umbrella under which other activities of a festive nature took place: the elaborate ceremony of rites of passage for maidens which included emeteyanvwo (of which female circumcision is part), and the bare-breasted beauty pageant of the maidens. Ore was also the period of Udje song and dance performance, when e.g., Ughievwen and Udu poets, singers/song makers, unveiled new compositions in the inter- and intra-community competitions which characterized this genre that Professor Godini Darah has described as battles of songs14. Thus Ore was a major religious and social event in the calendars of these groups. It was a joyful time15. This is not the place to go into the details of Ore festival, but some features that are pertinent to the understanding of the emuerinvwin belief are described below:

Libations (iwe go) The core religious ceremony at Ore is iwe go, i.e., offering of libations and

sacrifices to the ancestors. The ritual items include cooked food, drinks, cola nuts, etc.; it is believed that the dead in erinvwin, like those alive in this world, need to be fed from time to time. From the performances at Ore we can deduce that the people think of erinvwin as consisting of, at least, two categories of persons in separate domains, which may be described as the Higher and Lower erinvwin: (i) the night before the start of Ore, a ritual ‘calling’ into the community of erinvwin took place and, (ii) after the Ore celebrations, a reverse ritual ‘driving out’ of erinvwin took place. This perplexing practice is not explained, but it prompted the Owahwa Udje poet, Kpeha Okpako (1902 – 1952), to say in his narrative poem, Kpolodje16, that erinvwin is complex:

“Erinvwin is mighty Erinvwin is unfathomable A person has died and you say bury him in the house After Ore you say drive erinvwin home

14 See for example, Darah, GG (2005), Battles of Songs, Udje Tradition of the Urhobo, Malthouse Press, Lagos 15 The closest equivalent that I have come across outside Nigeria is the centuries-old Welsh annual eistedford festival where individuals compete for laurels in the literary arts; the highest prizes go to poetry composed in the Welsh language. The Welsh invented the eistedford to encourage the writing of poetry in the Welsh language and thus save it from extinction. Unfortunately for us, by categorizing Ore as a ‘pagan’ festival unacceptable to people of modern religious faiths and increasingly abandoning the institution, Urhobo is depriving itself of the opportunity of annual renewal of its culture and language. 16 See Okpako, opus cit. p 106 - 117

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Where are you driving them to?”

In Urhobo culture, a dead person, who merits it, is buried in the house: a grave is dug in the floor of, usually, the bedroom of the dead person, and the body is interred therein; after an appropriate lapse of time, the floor is reconstituted and people will continue to live there17. There are several speculated reasons why this practice existed among different human populations, e.g., the descendants of the dead person believed that he should be nearby to protect them, to continue their relationship with them and burial in the house was believed to favor a successful rebirth of the dead person into the same lineage. Consequently, in a typical traditional Urhobo household, virtually no day passes when the ancestors are not called upon in prayer and libation, e. g., at the birth of a child, safe return from a sojourn by a descendant, a son/daughter coming home from the diaspora, at a betrothal, marriage, funerals, etc. The question posed by the poet is therefore this: if the ancestor was buried in the house as mandated by tradition, and the descendants do call on him/her frequently in prayers, then what does ‘drive erinvwin home’ after the Ore festival, really mean? The question is rhetorical because every Urhobo adult knows the answer, which is that, not every orinvwin is buried in or near the people’s dwelling in Urhobo society; those buried outside the homestead would include those who died of dangerous diseases, e.g., small pox and in the old days, leprosy or those who died by suicide, those who were criminals or insane, etc. In other words those people who had no home when they died or left no one to mourn them, and would not be remembered subsequently, were buried in the bush. Such people are erinvwin, but they belong to a different category from those who are buried in their homes and are called upon often in libation.

Those not buried in their homes we may refer to as the Lower Erinvwin, for the purpose of this analysis; they are allowed to come into the community only at Ore, to partake of the festivities and be fed; but they must depart from the midst of the descendants after Ore. Having not exercised moral authority when they were

17 According to Fraser (opus cit), the practice of people continuing to live in the house where someone has been buried existed in earlier times in many parts of the world including Greece, Italy and most sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, Solomon Islands, many parts of India, etc.

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alive, and therefore not having established that they were people of moral integrity while alive, the lower erinvwin cannot be trusted to intercede with Oghene in defense of the lineage. They are not allowed in the vicinity of the descendants’ dwellings. This is the meaning that the poet compels us to take from his rhetoric in the lines quoted above: The Higher Erinvwin who are buried in their homes are not going anywhere, they are not the ones being driven out.

The Higher Erinvwin has divine status Thus, implicit in Urhobo traditional thought is the idea that erinvwin consists of two spatial domains: the dwelling of the Lower Erinvwin is normally outside the homestead whereas that of the Higher Erinvwin is in, or, close to the homestead of the descendants. Anthropologists have observed this separation of dead ancestors many times before: Fraser in his book The Fear of the Dead (opus cit) drew attention to several examples of tribes where this separation exists; the Melanesians believe that:

“Among living men there are some who stand out distinguished for capacity in affairs, success in life, valor in fighting and influence over others; these are so….because of the supernatural mysterious powers which they have…… on the death of the distinguished man his ghost retains the powers that belonged to him in life in greater activity and stronger force. His ghost is therefore powerful and as long as he is remembered, the aid of his powers is sought and worship is offered him …. in every society ….. the multitude is composed of insignificant persons of no particular account for valor, skill or prosperity. The ghosts of such persons continue their insignificance and are nobodies after their death as before”

The Solomon Islanders of the South Pacific also believe in two classes of ancestors as:

“Ghosts of power and ghosts of no account; between those whose help is sought …and those from whom nothing is expected and no observance is due”

Among the Junkun tribe of Northern Nigeria where the predominant religious influence was the veneration of the ancestors, and the tribal god was generally a deified ancestor, the belief was that:

“A man who lives to a good old age, has a vigorous soul and when he goes to the next world he takes his spiritual power with him. Hence in his disembodied state, he can assist and protect the

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tribe. He is the intermediary between his family and the unknown powers that control the universe”

Higher Erinvwin, Right Hand: Lower Erinvwin, Left Hand The belief that dead ancestors are of different statuses is also reflected in the way libations and sacrifices are offered to them in Ughievwen: at Ore, the head of the lineage, usually the oldest male, with drink or food in his right hand, would call on the ancestors of the lineage each by name, as far back in time as the gathered descendants could collectively recall; after offering prayers, he placed the drink and food at the lineage’s ancestral shrine. In this collective offering, other descendants in the gathering added their particular concern for the good of the lineage. Then the ritual was repeated, this time for the benefit of the Lower Erinvwin: the drink or food was now held in the left hand, and then thrown out, away from where the descendants are gathered, for the Lower Erinvwin to partake of, outside the lineage’s ancestral shrine, accompanied by calls from the assembled descendants that the Lower Erinvwin, having been fed, must return to wherever they came from, and not linger at the homesteads of the living to cause trouble18. I observed this ritual many times as my father was for long, head of the Chere lineage before he died in 1960.

It is interesting to compare this Ughievwen practice with what obtained among the far away Karen tribe of Burma where according to an 1888 account cited by Fraser (op cit):

“In fear of the ghosts of the dead, the people go to the forest and there deposit a little basket of colored rice saying ‘ghosts of those who died by falling from a tree, ghosts of those who died of hunger or thirst, ghosts of those who died of a tiger’s tooth or a serpent’s fang, ghosts of those who perished of cholera or small pox, ghosts of those who died of leprosy, do not molest us, do not catch us, do not do us any harm. Stay here in the woods. We will take care of you; we will bring you red, yellow and white rice for your subsistence”

18 In everyday life, to give to or receive something from a person with the left hand is considered infra dignitatem in Urhobo culture; in sharing food with others, it would be unthinkable that you would dip your left hand into the communal pot!

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The belief that dead ancestors have supernatural powers is universal

The belief that dead ancestors possess supernatural powers has been observed in virtually every human culture since studies began. The belief appears to be autochthonous: there is no direct evidence that the belief in one human group was due to diffusion from another group. Human beings everywhere seem to have instinctively felt the need for an all-seeing, all-powerful and incorruptible supernatural ancestor to enforce good behavior among them, to curb their potentially destructive antisocial tendencies. Such dependence on a supernatural being may have been an innate human urge which some scholars consider to be the foundation of all religious beliefs.

In Urhobo moral lore, incest is emuerinvwin, an offence so objectionable that only the ancestors can be relied upon to decide on appropriate sanction: the ancestors who hold this power are those who are perceived to have attained perfection, incorruptibility and moral integrity beyond what any living human can attain. These are the inhabitants of the Higher Erinvwin. Such ancestors have divine status and can be trusted to deliver unbiased judgment in a matter of such critical moral importance. Now, the human tendency to project perfection onto the supernatural is universal. The relationship of this tendency to the origin of religious thought has for long been the subject of discourse among philosophers. University of London philosopher Professor Brian Morris19 concluded that Ludwig Feuerbach’s study The Essence of Christianity (1841, trans.1957)20 is “the most enduring study to emerge from that period” concluding that those attributes of perfection which human beings project unto the supernatural are the attributes they most value, and which they would possess, if they were freed from the constraints and realities imposed on them by life’s struggles in this world. Thus, a person who lived a life of high achievements, of near perfection in this imperfect world is the one who becomes deified after death as the Higher Erinvwin. According to Ludwig Feuerbach 19 Morris, B (1995) Anthropological Studies of Religion, An Introductory Text, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 18-23 20 Feuerbach, L. (1841) The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (1957) Harper, New York. Feuerbach wrote: “Religion is man’s earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge. Hence, religion everywhere precedes philosophy…Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself… his own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being …. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective – i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being …..God is the self -consciousness of man freed from all discordant elements” (from Morris, 1995, opus cit. p. 21)

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“the divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified” (see footnote 21 below). From a personal experience, my own father, Kokpako Chere (circ. 1865-1960) who was something of a skeptic in matters of Urhobo traditional religious beliefs, used to utter the profane saying: “ihwo ra kpo ye erinvwin”, i.e., “Erinvwin is human beings”, implying that emuerinvwin, for example, is the peoples’ moral norms entrusted to the Higher Erinvwin for enforcement.

Emuerinvwin and serious illness in traditional Urhobo thought

What I have referred to in this essay as ‘serious illness’ is chronic life-threatening illness whose material cause (as we know it in modern medicine) could not be ascertained in traditional medicine practice and where all known remedies have failed to produce cure. Such illness, especially in a relatively young and productive member of the community, who might have been in good health up to the onset of such illness, was of grave concern to family members, who would invariably consult a diviner (ke kpe epha) in order to discover a possible supernatural underpinning. In similar circumstances doctors in modern medicine would conduct a scientific diagnosis to uncover a physical cause. Both divination and scientific diagnosis are driven by the same impulse, namely, to probe beyond experience, to go from a common sense platform to a deeper realm of arcane theory in search of a clue: scientific diagnosis searches for material causes of disease such as cancers, dysfunctional organ, pathogenic infection etc., consistent with the germ theory of disease. On the other hand, divination is a search for spiritual underpinnings of serious illness, consistent with the belief/theory that serious illness can be triggered by ancestor spirit anger.

Emuerinvwin: a concept combining metaphysics and empiricism.

I have shown above that the emuerinvwin belief consists of two strands of thought: (a) belief in the supernatural power of ancestors to punish sin with illness, and (b) experiential knowledge that an acculturated individual living with the consciousness of emuerinvwin guilt, would endure emotional turmoil and become ill as a result. The two aspects of the belief (metaphysics and empiricism) play

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important roles in the way the belief functions: as cause and effect explanation of illness and as a mechanism for the control of moral conduct in Urhobo society.

(a) Prescience society knew from experience that emotional distress can lead to serious illness

The scientific evidence that a troubled mind can cause illness comes from psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) research (see below). But if my interpretation of the emuerinvwin belief is correct, i.e. that the belief is partly a statement of experience gained over time, that a troubled mind can cause the physical body to become ill, it would mean that the idea predated modern medicine’s relatively recent psychosomatic theory. What is more it is only in the last few decades that the pathways linking the nervous, endocrine and immune systems to emotional response have been described to prove that negative emotional experiences can depress the immune system. Therefore, the intriguing question is: how could prescience humans have known that sustained emotional distress can affect the physical body leading to illness? How could so-called primitive minds have made the critical association between anti-social behavior and serious illness without the sophisticated technology that enabled psychosomatic theory to be validated only in the last couple of decades?

There can be no definitive answer to this question, but we can speculate that human beings could have made this crucial connection from millennia of observing that the human body’s response to emotional experience can be felt. Take the fear emotion for an example: when I was attacked by armed robbers at my residence at the University of Ibadan campus in December 1998, I was very frightened and my heart beat so strongly that I could feel it thumping in my chest! The fear response is an evolutionary survival adaptation “to prepare for flight or fight” and like the response to other primitive human drives, e.g., hunger, sex, thirst, etc., it is mediated by the autonomic nervous system (ANS21). Hate is another example of a

21 As the term implies, the ANS, though responsive to brain signals, can function independently of brain control: the body’s response to emotion is triggered by the brain, but the mechanisms and response processes set in motion are outside brain control and the conscious influence of the person experiencing the emotion. Pharmacologists have developed laboratory in vitro models

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negative emotion: if you suddenly came across someone you really disliked and wouldn’t want to see at all, in the corridor of your faculty, you may recall your experience of the encounter - feeling of revulsion at the sight of that person, and your body’s recoil from the encounter! Love or lust also triggers bodily reactions that can be felt by the person experiencing the emotion: an unexpected encounter with a lover would produce a bodily response very unlike the violent perturbation of the ANS that results from encounter with an armed robber; this time it is not a fearful preparation for flight or fight, but a joyful anticipation of different possibilities! Let it be noted also that negative emotions, e.g., fear, hate, envy, suppressed anger, bereavement from loss of a loved one, generate very unpleasant bodily sensations, whereas love, generosity, giving and compassion evoke pleasurable good feelings. My sense is that it was the experience of bodily reaction to emotions that, over time, led prescience humans to grasp the critical association between emotional distress and serious illness. As Richard Dawkins points out, the human mind is an inveterate analogizer compulsively drawn to see meaning in slight similarities between very different processes. This is my ground for assigning empiricism as a component of the emuerinvwin belief.

But, the observation which convinced me that the people must know that a troubled mind is at the heart of serious illness, comes from the way Ughievvwen interpret the emuerinvwin belief in actual situations of serious illness: they go to the ill person for a confession of sin after a diviner’s pronouncement; this must happen before libations or other sacrifices are offered to the ancestors. As I pointed out earlier in this essay, if the people thought that the seriously ill person was a passive victim of ancestor spirit anger, they would go from divination to direct appeasement of the offended ancestor: the people must know that attack of conscience (ewen kpo hwo) due to a hidden emuerinvwin sin is a critical factor in the occurrence of the illness.

which permit a close study of the ANS in isolated organs, i.e., organs that are disconnected from the brain but have intact autonomic nerve structures; from such studies the fact of the autonomy of the system is well established. The principle that the ANS can function independently of brain control is utilized in electronic devices called lie detectors: if an adequately socialized (acculturated) person connected to the device consciously lies about an incident in order to hide the truth which he knows, the ANS reacts quite dramatically, e. g. with increased heart rate, and the device displays appropriate signals. In this sense, the ANS is the mediator of conscience, the so-called small inner voice competing with an individual’s conscious tendency to commit what he knows to be an anti-social or criminal act.

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Conscience is described as a capacity “lodged in the central nervous system… (that) enables men (and women) to inhibit their own drives and to be conditioned to accept learned rules”22. Conscience is what enables society to inculcate its core moral values in its members. The late University College London psychologist, Professor Hans Eysenck23, considered that conscience is what makes the majority of human beings to be law-abiding members of their respective societies (not law enforcement agents!), and that manifestation of criminal tendencies in an individual is at least partly a result of inadequate socialization (acculturation) from childhood. In this sense, what we are saying here is that when Urhobo evoke the emuerinvwin concept, they do so against the background of experience that the cause of serious illness in an acculturated descendant comes from his conscience gnawing at him (ewen kpo kpo) from awareness of the sin. That is why the people’s first step after divination is to go and seek confirmation of the sin from the ill person.

Confession serves two purposes: first, it should relieve the ill person of his burden of guilt resulting in a surge in immune responsiveness and a nudge towards recovery; negative emotions (e.g., fear of ancestor spirit anger) lower a sinner’s immune responsiveness, and that is why he would be more susceptible to illness than someone not burdened by guilt. Secondly, a confession (the news of which quickly spreads in the community) enables everyone to hear from the horse’s mouth, as it were, the precise nature of the sin against the ancestors that gave rise to the illness. In this way, the moral law and the consequences of its breach are repeatedly made known, in a process of continuous group acculturation. That is to say, one function of the belief in emuerinvwin is control of moral conduct by ensuring that the consequences of its breach are widely made known.

(b) The people believe that the ancestors can inflict serious illness on an offending descendant

If we now turn to the other prong of the emuerinvwin belief, which is that

the ancestors, when provoked by bad behavior, can inflict serious illness on the

22 Fox, R. (1981) Kinship and Marriage, An anthropological perspective, Penguin Books, pp. 69 23 Eysenck, H. J. (1970) Crime and Personality, Paladin, Frogmore, St. Albans, Herts, pg 80

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deviant descendant: this is regarded by many scientists as a metaphysical/mystical statement involving speculations about the action of spirits whose existence cannot be proven. The fact that, as shown here, the emuerinvwin belief is a complex mix of metaphysical and empirical thought processes, is an important rebuttal of the old view that traditional African beliefs are pure metaphysical non-science. The empirical (experiential knowledge) side of the belief could easily have been missed by ancient ethnographers since this aspect of the belief is not generally articulated by indigenous medicine practitioners (even though they demonstrate their knowledge of it in practice as noted above), nor is it apparent to social scientists and western trained medical scientists who thus classed the belief, like other traditional African religious beliefs, as a mystical/metaphysics/non-scientific proposition24; or as a characteristic irrational superstition held by people who were ignorant of the science of disease. But as we have seen above the ancestor spirit anger (emuerinvwin in Urhobo) belief is a complex theory encoding fundamental ideas concerning the relationship between immorality, emotional distress and serious illness, and is rooted in experience.

The significance of the religious configuration of emuerinvwin belief

The question is, if the people knew from experience that a troubled mind (ewen kpokpo hwo) can give rise to serious illness in an acculturated sinner, why did the belief evolve as a religious construct? Why did the ancients not say simply that the illness is caused by a troubled mind, from a sustained attack of conscience, and thereby take the ancestors spirits (the metaphysics) out of the equation? In which case, following divination, confession of the sin to relieve the ill person of his burden of guilt, would be the terminal aim of therapy. Instead the people go beyond confessions to propitiate the ancestors with libation and sacrifices. The idea that a troubled mind may cause illness can be tested for verification or falsification, which would satisfy the scientist with Popperian empiricist insistence. However, the aspect of emuerinvwin to which Urhobo give verbal expression is that

24 One writer who has greatly influenced this idea is Sir Karl Popper, discoverer of the important principle that scientific propositions can be differentiated from metaphysical propositions that involve nothing more than speculations about supernatural beings whose existence cannot be ascertained experimentally {K. R. Popper (1975) The logic of Scientific Discovery. 8th impression, London, Hutchinson}. It is on the basis of this sort of theory that modern doctors and empirical scientists in general turn away from traditional African beliefs as serious subjects for scholarly research.

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aspect which explains the illness as punishment by the ancestors for bad behavior. Thus, to the casual observer such as the passing ethnographer, the emuerinvwin belief falls simply under the rubric of a metaphysical rather than a scientific proposition (many uncritical scientists take Karl Popper’s discovery that scientific propositions and metaphysics can be differentiated to mean that the latter is non-science and nonsense). Such misunderstanding was characteristic of the way colonial literature portrayed African beliefs in general. Unfortunately this misunderstanding of traditional African theoretical thinking has been largely internalized by elite Africans educated in science. This explains why, among other things, traditional African healing methods and beliefs have been ignored in Africa’s medical curricula, and not engaged as serious alternative medical theories or models of health care. This analysis reveals that emuerinvwin belief is a construct of both mystical and experiential thoughts and should be engaged as a distinct theory of illness that recognizes bad behavior as a critically important factor in the occurrence of serious illness.

Turning now to the question as to why the emuerinvwin concept was framed as a religious metaphysical construct, rather than as a simple statement that, in the acculturated individual, a troubled mind is the explanation for the occurrence of serious illness. The answer to this seems to be that the two-sided construct of the belief contributed to its survival and potency; each of its two component parts served an important functions, i.e., moral law enforcement, and therapeutic, functions:

(a) Confession is therapeutic and had the effect of reinforcing the emuerinvwin belief in Urhobo society.

As pointed out already, confession of a hidden immoral act must bring relief from emotional turmoil and increased immune responsiveness, which should thus have a therapeutic effect. But there is in addition a beneficial effect of confession for the lineage community: let us take for an example a typical emuerinvwin in which a man has had or is having sexual relationship with his brother’s wife. In a close knit community, this situation is potentially harmful to interpersonal relationships. The sin may remain hidden between the sinners, but the guilt felt by

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each would manifest in ways that can adversely affect their harmonious relationships with other members of the kinship group; for example, the persons sinned against. So, confession by the ill person, together with the propitiatory ritual sacrifices in which all members of the group can participate, must also bring release from incipient or actual interpersonal stresses in the family lineage. Thus deployment of the emuerinvwin concept in the management of serious illness is holistic therapy that is beneficial to patient and community. Moreover, the confession gives out the details of the sin that led to the life-threatening illness; these details, in my experience, quickly become public knowledge in the community, thereby reinforcing the emuerinvwin belief as a potent enforcer of good behavior, and as Victor Turner famously observes in his book, Drums of Affliction, “moral lore is most vividly made known through its breach”. My sense is that the people understood that the confession of a hidden sin can have these effects, and therefore wove this experiential component into the emuerinvwin concept.

(b) The religious alignment of emuerinvwin belief enabled it to be used as a moral conditioning instrument in the upbringing of individuals.

What traditional Urhobo found to be a most reprehensible immoral behavior and hence most representative of emuerinvwin, is incest, i.e., sexual intercourse between relatives. In Urhobo culture, incest is very broadly understood to include sexual intercourse between a man and a woman with a familial relationship to him. Sexual intercourse between the following is forbidden (agha): brothers and sisters, father and daughter, son and mother; sex between cousins of any remove, sex with a brother’s wife, a cousin’s wife, a nephew’s wife, an uncles’ wife, in a class by itself, extra-marital sex by a married woman. What constituted incest and behavior that could be construed as vicarious sexual intercourse, punishable by Erinvwin, were so bewildering in traditional Urhobo society, that men and women in the kinship group had to be careful how close they got to the opposite sex! (See Afterthought)

Let me stress here that incest taboo is a universal phenomenon; it has been known and enforced in one form or the other at different times, among different

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human populations from the beginning of human history. Anthropologist Professor Robin Fox considers that it is the view of many scholars that:

“If man had not at some time or other instituted the ban on intra-familial sex, there would have been no culture, no society; man would have remained in an incestuous animal-like state…. the incest taboo (is) at the heart of our humanity”25

The concept of emuerinvwin, at the core of which is ‘restriction on intra-familial sex’ is essentially, incest taboo, a phenomenon that was most probably driven by evolutionary instinct for the survival of the human species; it is not unique to Urhobo culture. Modern scientific evidence confirms that incest taboo has had important genetic advantages for the survival of the human species. In addition to that, it is most likely that in small scale kinship societies, inter-personal harmony was crucial for group survival, so that its members could work together in defense of the group, hunt together, build together, celebrate together, etc. Any behavior such as incest would have represented a particularly serious break down of law and order and a threat to the survival of the group. Serious illness, which was believed to be an affliction caused by offended ancestors, was therefore a threat, not only to the life of the ill person, but also the survival of the group as a harmonious unit. Hence, emuerinvwin belief ensured that the management of serious illness was holistic in a very broad sense, i.e., to restore both the sick person, and the kinship group to emotional equilibrium and health. Management of serious illness was thus a collective group concern, not viewed narrowly as whether the sick person recovers from the illness. As Kleinman26 says with regard to traditional healing practices in general:

“…healing is evaluated as successful when sickness and its treatment have received meaningful explanations…..and related social tensions and threatened cultural principles have been dealt with appropriately” Elsewhere 27 I present evidence from my own field observations which

support this view: whether the ill person regains health or not, is not the only 25 Fox, R. (1981) Kinship and Marriage - An Anthropological perspective, Penguin Books, p 56 26Kleinman, A. (1993) “Concepts and a model for the comparison of medical systems” In: Concepts of Health, Illness and Disease, Caroline Currer and Margaret Stacey, editors, Bergamon Press, Oxford 27 See Okpako, D. T. (2015) opus cit, p.105, for a study of this point where the community’s response to the death of their member who had confessed to the sin of emuerinvwin, was not so much grief for his death, but shame that the man had committed an abomination. They blamed him for his death!

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measure of success in Urhobo traditional medicine: consolidation of group morality seems also to be an important objective. In fact, death may be viewed positively in certain circumstances, as evidence that emuerinvwin is effective as a moral lore control mechanism; for example, if the victim had confessed to grievous abomination before his demise: rather than the death of such a person being viewed as evidence of the futility of the emuerinvwin belief, it is viewed as a warning against the type of behavior that led to his illness and death. Thus serious illness in traditional Urhobo was understood to be a medical, social and moral issue demanding collective involvement of the community. Contrast this with modern medicine where, because the germ theory is the overarching paradigm, the cure of the individual patient is the ultimate aim of therapy.

Concluding comments

Students of traditional African thought have tended to treat African beliefs as mythical, mystical and metaphysical superstitions, and the cultural practices based on them as magic, that cannot be accommodated under the rubric of scientific hypotheses. Because reference is frequently made to different kinds of spirits in these beliefs and there is no empirical proof of the existence of such spirits, the beliefs are portrayed as primitive irrationalities (mumbo jumbo). Moreover, western scholars, among them, our own Robin Horton, have given the impression that African thinking is dominated by these beliefs, so that traditional African cultures are described as closed predicaments, implying that Africans in their primitive state could not think outside their beliefs, whereas western science-oriented cultures are open; the people there can critically evaluate alternative hypotheses28. The notion that African thought patterns can be differentiated from those of the west comes from a fundamental misinterpretation of traditional African beliefs such as emuerinvwin dealt with in this analysis. Unfortunately, the view that traditional African beliefs are meaningless non-science and therefore nonsense persists, even among the educated African elite. This is a major factor

28 Horton, R. (1993) Patters of Thought in Africa and the West, Essays on magic, religion and science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.222

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migrating against deployment of potentially useful ideas embedded in those beliefs in our search for solutions to modern African problems.

For the educated African elite, the characterization of traditional African beliefs as superstition and meaningless non-science is something of a dilemma: many suspect that the western view is simplistic, but because we are unable to refute the western view with empirical evidence, we acquiesce. We think {‘surely, if the beliefs formed the theoretical basis of conduct that sustained African life for millennia, the beliefs cannot be meaningless nonsense; it is western science that has so far failed to come up with the appropriate methodology for the study of “African science”}, the type of science that must underlie, for example, witchcraft and magic narratives, etc. However, the finding from this study that the very wide-spread ancestor spirit anger theory (emuerinvwin in Urhobo) encloses metaphysics and empiricist components means that the belief cannot be dismissed simply as mystical non-science. The emuerinvwin belief can be understood as a distilled expression of accumulated experience of illness, a metaphorical mnemonic, encoding important ideas that helped ancient man in prescience Urhobo society, to explain the occurrence of bewildering illnesses. And, as a religious construct, it was deployed as a conditioning instrument in the moral upbringing of individuals.

Ancient Urhobo/Africans observed their environment with their God-given five senses, like humans everywhere and with the help of the brain (the on-board computer), they drew analogies, contrasts and similarities from accumulated experiences of what they sensed; observations, experiences and practical knowledge that were crucial for survival in their environment, were distilled and worked into beliefs and myths. This is, most probably, what happened in every prescience, preliterate human society. It is the summation of experiential knowledge and beliefs and accompanying practices that constitute a peoples’ culture. So, it was a monumental human tragedy that African people were forced by western contact to abandon their own cultures and beliefs as inferior and to accept the western view of them as irrational superstitions. The tragedy is not so much that western imperialist thinkers, out of ignorance or impatience, denigrated traditional African beliefs as irrational superstitions; the real tragedy is that we the African elite have accepted the western view of African beliefs and rejected them

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too. In so doing the African elite have committed the cultural suicide of self-rejection and even more tragically, committed future generations of Africans to the same fate.

What we need to do urgently is to recognize traditional African beliefs for what they are: as mnemonic metaphors encoding important ideas relevant to the fundamental nature of life in this environment, and to use the analytical tools now available to us to critically analyze the beliefs in our search for solutions to the myriad of problems facing Africa and the world. We do not need to invent a different “African science”.

David T. Okpako, FAS