#DicoverEnuguCulture: How Evil is Ekwensu?
To the modern Igbo person, Ekwensu is the Igbo word for the Devil.
He is not the Igbo lookalike of Satan, but Satan himself, just called a local name; much like cup is iko.
For, Ekwensu is seen as the epitome of evil, the antithesis of Chukwu, God.
He is the one-stop-shop for every manner of wickedness you could imagine, from the trivial to the downright hideous.
In fact, it may be argued that, to the Igbo person, the word Ekwensu conveys more terror than its English counterpart.
It is interesting to realize that this is a recent development that continues to gain popularity in modern interpretations.
Ekwensu was not originally the chief of evil, the daring rival to Chukwu who would eventually be banished to hell to roast with the humans he possessed on earth.
In the book, The Ekwensu Semantics and the Igbo Christian Theolinguistics, by P-J Ezeh, the original Igbo usage of the word did not connote evil.
Ekwensu is a god, one of the numerous worshipped in Igboland. He stands in rank with the likes of Anị, Amadị ọha, Ikéngà, Agwụ, etc.
Ekwensu refers to a benevolent and powerful deity- the god of war.
He is regarded as the Igbo trickster god. Traders revered him for his craftiness and cunning at negotiations and trade. He was called upon to provide guidance in bargaining or other difficult mercantile situations.
As the god of war, he is equally seen as possessing a chaotic and violent nature. He incites people to violence and was invoked by warriors and head hunters during conflicts or wars.
Reckless acts during peacetime, therefore, were regarded as influenced by Ekwensu’s possession.
To further illustrate the status of Ekwensu in times past; There are communities named after the deity, such as Nru N’atọ Ezike Ekwensu in Nsukka, Enugu.
In Ezi, Delta, the festival right before the new yam’s is called Ekpensu, a dialectical variation of Ekwensu.
In Akpugo, Enugu, Ekwensu may be used as a praise name of someone who has made a great accomplishment.
The origin of the mistranslation of the term can be traced to the differences between Christianity and the traditional Igbo religion.
In the Igbo worldview, there is no concept of a dichotomous existence of the great good force as against the great evil force, as exists in Christianity.
Therefore, in Igbo, there is no God or Devil, no heaven or hell, no demons or angels.
There are just gods possessing varying degrees of powers; spirits whose nature was good or bad, as in the human case; and an afterlife that operated much in the same way as the physical world.
Then came the colonial missionaries, who in their erroneous belief that any religion strange to theirs was evil, and in the resultant quest for conversion, were faced with the task of introducing these alien concepts into the indigenous people’s philosophy.
To do this, they copied the methods of early Christianity in the Roman Empire who absorbed pagan festivals and rituals. By using existing indigenous concepts that had an infinitesimal likeness to theirs and distorted them to fit the mold of the concepts they were trying to get across.
In other words, they improvised.
So, chi, the personal guiding force, or Chukwu, the Aro deity, became the supreme God.
And Ekwensu came in as the Devil, to complete the spiritual binary of the Christian faith.
Thus began the journey of demonizing Ekwensu, seemingly beyond repair.
Today, the term is a leper avoided by all. Most communities and individuals that bore the name in the old days have undergone name changes, in order not to have any connections with something so evil.
To be called Ekwensu is to be painted an unimaginable black. It is very possible that the communities still bearing the name must have their Christian members fervently pushing for a name change, since in Igboland, one’s name is of utmost importance, as it is believed to influence one’s destiny.
The story of Ekwensu is another testament to the damage colonialism wrought on the cultures of the African continent.
Yet the damage is not entirely without salvageability.
Some intellectuals have sought to correct these Theo linguistic errors by publishing books giving accurate descriptions of these aspects of culture that have suffered mistranslation.
Suggested reading includes Ekwensu in the Igbo Imagination: a Heroic Deity or Christian Devil? by Damian U. Opata; The Supreme God as a Stranger in the Igbo Traditional Belief by Donatus Nwoga, etc.
It equally behooves us to seek accurate information about our culture as we gain a deeper understanding of our roots and to pass the baton unto others.
