By Henry Akubuiro
before now, most Nigerian children growing up in the village were educated and entertained with the folktales of the people before mixing with the outside world. Recalling the charms of his formative years, iconic Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, who was born in 1930, in present day Anambra State, Nigeria, wrote in his seminal book, There Was a Country:
“My initiation into the complicated world of Ndi Igbo was at the hands of my mother and my elder sister, Zinobia, who furnished me with a number of wonderful stories from our ancient Igbo tradition. The tales were steeped in intrigue, spiced with oral acrobatics and songs, but always resolute in their moral message…” (p. 9).
Dr. Bukar Usman is another Nigerian culture activist whose promotion of Nigerian folklore is unprecedented. He doesn’t only harvest and document his native Biu folktales, northeast Nigeria, but also commissions other Nigerian scholars to dig into the past and document the country’s disappearing folkloric tradition, like what he did with the Pan-Nigerian Folktale Narrative Research Projects (2013 to 2016), which aims included, among others, “to collect and preserve, in writing, the folktales of various Nigerian ethnic groups as the age-old tradition of transmitting and preserving such tales from generation to generation through oral narration is fast disappearing.”
The fifteen projects, handled by experts from different parts of the country, yielded 3,000 tales, which Usman described as “only a tip of the iceberg”. One of the projects was Research in Igbo Folktale Narrative, which was handled by the late George Amadi.
At 238 pages and with 317 stories, Amadi’s Nchikota Akuko Ndi-Igbo (2020) remains one of the most elaborate and treasured collections of Igbo folktales ever. The collection, however, shares many things in common with folktales from other parts of the country in terms of their moral compass and form. The stories include human tales, animal tales, human-animal tales, human-spirit tales, animal-spirit tales, animal-object tales, and multiple character tales.
Aside from the moralities in these Igbo tales, some of them explain certain mysteries about life and existence, a kind of oral history. Just as the tortoise was the sauce with which Achebe enjoyed his moonlight outings as a child, it was so for many Igbo kids in those days. The tortoise tales, little wonder, feature prominently in Amadi’s Nchikota Akuko Ndi-Igbo, including “The Tortoise and the Pig”, The Tortoise and the Birds”, “The Tortoise and the Mother-in-law,” etcetera.
Expectedly, animal tales populate this collection. You will find “The Lion and the Young Goat”, “The Greedy Lion”, “The Lion and the Lioness”, and others. The human tales in Nchikota Akuko Ndi-Igbo often show the excesses of humans, their consequences, and what we can learn from them. Our forefather knew that the world was constantly a struggle between the good and the bad, and the child must be guided to make the right choices early in life. This is what tales such as “The Disobedient Child”, “The Cunning Man Dies”, “The Greedy Child”, “Old Woman Steals a Goat”, etcetera, tend to achieve.
For the creepy, Amadi’s collection chronicles “One Human Being and One Spirit”, “The Veined Spirit”, “The Spirit and Blacksmith”, “Nkemjika and the Spirit,” to mention a few. Besides, explanations are given to certain mysteries and phenomena, like how God came to live in heaven, how death came to be on earth, how burial started, why women don’t climb, why the sky is bigger than the earth, and others.
Amadi might have left us, sadly, but Nchikota Akuko Ndi-Igbo is one folkloric and scribal legacy he and the Bukar Usman Foundation have gifted the Igbo nation, global culture and contemporary folklore scholarship.