Friday, March 29, 2019

Demon Babies Begone!

In Things Fall Apart, we read about Ekwefi's misfortune in keeping her children alive. The medicine man essentially tells Ekwefi and Okonkow that they keeping having an ogbanje, "one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers' wombs to be born again" (1136).
I did a little research about these demon babies, and here's what I discovered:
  •  Ogbanje literally translates to "children who come and go." Hmm...well, that's definitely one way to put it.
  • This evil spirit/wicked child intentionally causes the family grief and continues to do so until...
    • Female circumcision was a common tactic employed to stop this horrid cycle.
    • Mutilating the dead child was another method of supposedly getting rid of the spirit. However, according to my source, sometimes these spirits were said to return with physical scarring (from the mutilation in their past life). Creepy! 
    • Much like what ultimately happens in Things Fall Apart, you can also find the spirit's iyi-uwa, which is what happens in Ezinma's case. To understand the iyi-uwa, you should think of it as a touchstone, or a way for the spirit to keep finding the family. If you uncover it from its hiding place, the evil spirit should stop tormenting you.
  • Origin?
    • Well, some people argue that the concept of ogbanje was used to explain/understand hereditary diseases, like sickle cell anemia for example. Since this disease could be passed down to many children borne from the same mother and father, many or all of them could've died due to ignorance of and lack of treatment for the disease. In turn, people could've speculated that the deaths were all linked to a common evil spirit.
  • Sometimes, Igbo people would use the word ogbanje when talking about a rude or stubborn children. (So it might not always be meant literally.)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogbanje

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This kind of reminds me of "changelings" in Irish mythology. According to legend, faeries would steal away a new born child and replace it with a faerie child in disguise, the changeling. They were said to either die at a young age or if they did grow up, they were to be difficult, evil children. If a parent suspected their child to be a changeling, they would abandon them in the forest to be taken back by the faeries, almost a similar concept to the Evil Forest.