Some manifestations of the spirit-child concept in Africa can be intensely prejudicial and even more bare-facedly violent.
By Chimezie Chika
No mistake can be made about the inspiration for the melancholy lyricism of J.P. Clark-Berkederemo’s poem, “Abiku”, which goes thus:
Coming and going these several seasons,
Do stay out on the baobab tree,
Follow where you please your kindred spirits
If indoors is not enough for you.
True, it leaks through the thatch
When floods brim the banks,
And the bats and the owls
Often tear in at night through the eaves,
And at harmattan, the bamboo walls
Are ready tinder for the fire
That dries the fresh fish up on the rack.
Still, it’s been the healthy stock
To several fingers, to many more will be
Who reach to the sun.
No longer then bestride the threshold
But step in and stay
For good. We know the knife scars
Serrating down your back and front
Like beak of the sword-fish,
And both your ears, notched
As a bondsman to this house,
Are all relics of your first comings.
Then step in, step in and stay
For her body is tired,
Tired, her milk going sour
Where many more mouths gladden the heart.
In these lines are images of evil intrusions, of the unknown, of great despair and loneliness, and yet, to read between those selfsame lines is to hear unmistakable notes of empathy and plea.
With such admirable economy in words, Clark-Berkederemo manages to capture the tenor and character of the spirit-child, often projected most prominently in Igbo and Yoruba cultures.
As many an investigation—scholarly and journalistic—as has been made into the phenomenon (an article centering specifically on the Ogbanje was published here in Afrocritik nearly four years ago), the one question that hasn’t been explored in depth is whether there are other correspondences in other cultures in Africa and elsewhere, what they represent for those cultures, and what its modern understanding entails. But first an explanation.
Anatomy of a Living Myth
Ogbanje or Abiku, the respective Igbo and Yoruba term for a malevolent spirit-child that torments its mother by getting born and dying shortly after only to repeat the same act over and over again, has held for the Igbo and Yoruba cultural imagination a kind of mythical, and even ethical, importance.
The description I have just given holds no light to the vast complex associations to which the term “Ogbanje” or “Abiku” is attached. The hasty need to always go back to where it emerged from is seen as a result of a contract it signed in the spirit world to never abandon its spirit companions for too long a time—if it reneges on this spiritual pact, it risks being banned from ever glimpsing the human world again.
In Yoruba and Igbo culture, the phenomenon is often dwelt upon as an example of the dark arts of the nether world beyond human reach.
It seems to be used, especially in Igbo cosmology and Odinani religion, to weigh the balance of good and evil: that there are benign and malevolent spirits (ndi Ogbanje na Akalogheli)—all of whom must be appeased to keep the world at an equilibrium—existing side by side, and that what is seen as good and beneficial could have a different evil side. It is the sort of foreboding ancestral wisdom one finds in all African cultures.
And such is the profound presence of evil visited upon humanity by spiritual entities that a lien of moral mythos must be put upon it. And so persistent is the vicious cycle of the Ogbanje/Abiku phenomenon, so terrible is the misery it visits upon parents who give birth to such babies that a series of traditional preventive measures have been developed.
In Igboland, this may involve intricate exorcisms carried out by a special Ogbanje dibia or a simple act of scarring. There is a particular story about a mother who ran mad after giving birth to a fifth child for a fifth consecutive year who did not live beyond a year.
It was judged that the babe was the same Ogbanje spirit returning again and again to torment its host family. Thus, on the sixth birth, it was suggested that the babe should be scarred permanently through a burn in the arm, to give it an identifying mark so that it would not disguise again and return.
This is a common belief. The scarring is often seen as an antidote to the ferocious malevolence of a spirit that punishes its mother with an incessant cycle of pregnancy, birth, and death—an attribute Clark describes in his poem as “coming and going these several seasons” or Wole Soyinka’s oratorical “calling for the first and repeated time”.
The logic behind the remedy is that the spirit operates through anonymity; by scarring it, one succeeds in identifying it and thus, having been outed so, it dies and refuses to come back, or when it does come back it is not able to return to the spirit world because it has now been born with the very same scar in the same location of the body which it had been given in its previous coming.
However, this is only one solution; according to belief, when a spirit-child decides that it is time to die and return to their spirit companions, there is almost no power on earth to prevent it from doing so, for it is bound to the pact it signed.
There is so much myth throbbing at the heart of the Ogbanje-Abiku phenomenon and its spiritual paradigms across African cultures. What we cannot miss is its melancholy significance to these cultures or the rich inspiration it has given to modern literature and culture.
There are other descriptions of the phenomenon that portray the spirit-child as a gifted, guileful, and devious being who has come into the world with a sense of briefness or prematurity. This definition places talented people who died young but yet achieved so much in their brief life in the realm of Ogbanje-Abiku phenomenon (John Keats, for example). Linked to the idea of talent and the brevity of time is also an intimation of mental illness.
In her book, The World of the Ogbanje, Chinwe Achebe describes Ogbanje as a “personality disorder” that describes someone who is not true to their natural attributes. Such people are often associated with exceptional physical beauty or are able to achieve great success within a short time—a sped-up life; fast life, fast death.
In Yoruba mythology, the sense of chipped time persists; Abiku is here framed as a kind of maniacal wanderer child or journeyman, a passerby, so to speak. The danger then is welcoming it wholeheartedly as a normal child, setting oneself up for heartbreak and grief.
In an essay, “The Concept of Abiku”, published in African Arts journal, scholar Timothy Mobolade explains a common pattern among Abiku:
The Yorubas believe that the Abikus form a species of spirits by themselves. As spirits, their places of abode are restricted to secluded and obscure corners of towns and villages, to the inside of jungles and to road-sides and foot paths in suburban areas.
It is believed that Abiku spirits are fairly common inside trees, especially large and deified trees like the iroko, baobab, and silk-cotton; they also congregate in ant-hills and are believed to loiter about in dung hills as well. If a pregnant woman is to avoid encounters with an Abiku spirit, she must not only know where they congregate, but when.
It is believed that the Abiku spirits love to make the rounds at odd times: shortly before down, on hot sunny afternoons, and on dark and gloomy nights. Any pregnant woman who knows this would bid her time and would be wary in her movements so as to avoid coming across an Abiku spirit.
If a pregnant woman is so luckless that she happens to come across an Abiku spirit, the spirit would follow her home, drive away the foetus in her womb, and replace the foetus with itself. (62)
And, as the belief implies, their sequestered dwelling places, and clandestine ways, has something to do with their fiendish, non-corporeal nature. All these spirits are known by their parasitic relationship to pregnant mothers, from whom they derive an insatiable feeling of schadenfreude.
This is why, within Yoruba culture, there is a practice of placing pins on clothes or garments worn by pregnant women, usually around bulging bellies, to ward off such negative energies and evil spirits.
Other Spiritual Correspondences
Though they more or less fit into the same concept, all notions of the spirit child have areas from which cultures around the world approach it. This makes for it being seen as either a malevolent fiend or a variation of a benign spirit.
This can come from the mythos of its cultural origins or even from the etymology of the names given to it. For example, while Abiku and Ogbanje represent the same concept, the etymology of the words create specific nuances around common attributes of the spirit child.
“Abiku”—which comes from the Yoruba words “abi” (that which was born) and “iku” (death)—translates literally to “born to die”. Hence, the Yoruba identify the spirit by its most prominent attribute: the ability to die at will. The same cannot be said of the Igbo who classify the spirit as so thoroughly evil that it brings bad luck upon whoever encounters it.
Therefore Ogbanje—which comes from “ị-gba/ọ-gba ” (to strike or to shoot) and “nje” (evil omen/germs)—translates as “That which strikes with evil omen”.
Other African cultures, in both Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, also have different names for the “coming-and-going” spirit child. The Efik and Hausa of Nigeria respectively have the names Eke Abasi and Danwabi for it. Among the Akan people of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire the spirit child, described in these same dimensions, is called Kosama or Motiah.
In the Northern part of Ghana, in the Kassena-Nankana district, the spirit child concept is called Chinchirigo. These names are, for the most part, given to children with wide-ranging physical or even mental disabilities. Such children are seen as bad luck for their parents, hence a baffling decision to kill them—an act usually performed in tandem with certain rituals.
There are several similarities between the Ghanaian spirit child concepts and the Nigerian ones. One interesting point of divergence is offered by Ghanaian researcher Rose Mary Amenga-Etego: “It is a belief that if such a spirit should feel trapped in the wrong environment, it has the potential to cause havoc for those among whom it is found. The basis for this line of thought comes from the belief that the ancestors are not responsible for bringing chinchirisi into their families”.
Some manifestations of the spirit-child concept in Africa can be intensely prejudicial and even more bare-facedly violent.
In East and Southern Africa, a different kind of spirit-child myth fuels peadicide and infanticide. This type, concerning albino children, serves as impetus for ritual killings and discrimination against albino children who are seen as “witch children”.
In the last two decades, the media has been peppered with macabre news reports of decapitations and a developing human parts market and religious enterprises around albino children in these places.
The incidence of spirit children around the world does not necessarily correspond to the broad—and habitually violent—African type. In European and Judeo-Christian mythology, spirit children can be benign or even messengers of good-luck.
Cherubs are child angels in Christian reckoning; in ancient Viking and Germanic traditions and Greco-Roman mythology, child-spirits are associated with changelings, sprites, fairies or elves which have the power to cure ailments, grant wishes or cause periodic strife. In oriental mythology, especially Hindu religion, the idea of spirit child mainly features as child deities.
The most prominent in the Bhagavad Gita is Lord Krishna, seen as an avatar of Vishnu, who functions as a god of love, compassion, and protection. These, however, vary widely from the more minion-like iterations of the spirit child in African cultures.
The Place of Reincarnation
Almost all spirit child concepts proceed from the idea of reincarnation, a widespread concept in African culture, which in itself comes from ancient tradition of ancestral worship around the world.
Thus, it only seems logical to try to understand where this link converges. The first thing to note is that the spirit child’s ability to die and return to the same family at will banks heavily on its reincarnation powers through what some general astrological commentators have broadly called “astral location”.
In the case of the Ogbanje, it has a peculiar resonance. In his book, Odinani: The Igbo Religion, Emmanuel Kaanenechukwu Anizoba explains reincarnation in interesting terms:
Each form is the tabernacle of a spirit to which is attached a self-reflective apparatus or mind. The spirit, being breath, is given a body for action and a mind to embrace the universe in which it dwells. Every form in the universe has a resident spirit and a mind. … A spirit builds typical forms, dwells in those forms, and uses those forms to achieve its principal objective in the general scheme of evolution: to unite mortal with immortal natures. … When a form is worn out, the spirit leaves it and moves on to build a new one.
This exit of the spirit is the ‘death’ of the form. Later, this same spirit builds another form in which it dwells, while pursuing its objective. Thus, over time, a spirit incarnates in many forms. A human spirit builds human forms, just as a given tree spirit builds the corresponding tree form. The same is true for all forms—from the speck of dust to suns. (120-21)
Anizoba is saying here that reincarnation is the natural state of all things in the world; that everything in the world has the power or ability to regenerate and renew itself, and humans are not an exception.
A 1985 essay by American medical scholar, Ian Stevenson, “The Belief in Reincarnation Among the Igbo of Nigeria”, notes a detail which bears down heavily upon the subject of spirit-children’s recycling ability: “The Igbo believe that persons who die young will reincarnate more quickly than those who die at older ages”.
Almost every religion on earth has affirmed reincarnation in some form, which is to say that the basis of God-worship in any form acknowledges cyclical movement of life between birth and death and vice versa. This will explain why the phenomenon of the spirit-child is purported to be entirely logical in the context in which it operates in these cultures.
It affirms the central argument of Oluwaseun Samuel Osadola’s research paper, “Reinacrnation in the Yoruba Ontology: Abiku”. Osadola especially contends that, given the belief in the malicious nature of Abiku’s reincarnation, it has resulted in the mutilation of the child’s body (other researches on child paedicides point accusing fingers at the belief in spirit children), dead or alive—an act which he declares comes out of ignorance about health and genotypic disorders.
Questions of Congenital Health Disabilities and Gender Identity
Science has made no equivocation of debunking the concept the spirit-child as mere mythological rhetoric whose relevance does not go beyond sociology and literature.
Scientists have also dismissed the idea of spirits and the paranormal realm, stating that it is either a sign of mental illness or an attempt by ancient people to explain what they neither knew well nor understood—not least children dying prematurely, which could result from any causes ranging from diseases, infections, plagues, poor health knowledge, and others. Researchers have subsequently offered empirical and incontrovertible physiological evidence as the way to go in explaining the premature spirit-child phenomenon.
The content of several researches in the last few decades are trying to reshape this discourse, their main argument being that what is often seen as spirit-children is nothing more than likely congenital health issues which, even today, are difficult to manage.
The illnesses often cited in these instances are sickle cell anaemia, hydrocephalus, skin disorders, Down syndrome, and poliomyelitis, illnesses which somewhat fit into the disfigurement and peculiarities of the spirit child myth, especially the incidence of early death due to poor healthcare.
Positive studies projected that the increase in healthcare will drop the incidence of child mortality and thus gradually put an end to such harmful superstitions, as they put it.
Modern iterations of gender identity, prompted by the combination of mental and bodily dysphoria and social alienation, have co-opted Ogbanje and Abiku into the broad gender spectrum.
The work (and self-professed identity) of writers like the Nigerian writer, Akwaeke Emezi, claims these peculiarities as projection of the weird self. The problem with many who frame this concept as their identity (a queer Ogbanje, that is, as a way of saying they they are neither here nor there in the nominal gender binary) is that—unlike, say, the Native Indian “Two Spirit” identity—there seems to be apparent ignorance about the spiritual basis of Ogbanje/Abiku on their part; what these people formulate out of the concept fails somewhat to correspond with many authentic definitions of the spirit-child.
For one thing, the spirit child is not supposed to be alive; if they are, they are supposed to bear physical evidence of that, including but not limited to physical birth scars, human trauma, exceptional abilities, and mental turbulence, and other negativities.
As it is, the act of en-gendering the spirit-child seems more like a trendy affair than a real understanding of African spirituality and its complex, even prejudicial, significations.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1