Are my Igbo #360NobsFans in the house? I need yall to confirm this. I came across it on the net. It was compiled by Director/Founder Imoonline Youth Program, Owerri, Nigeria, Mr. Godwin C. Nwaogwugwu. I took excerpts from it. 8 INTERESTING ANCIENT IGBO TRADITIONS THAT WOULD SHOCK YOU True or False? 1. A grandma who wants to match-make her grown grand-daughter with a man would send her on errand to the man’s family with a pot of water on her head filled to the brim so that water would pour on her body revealing her body figure/ shape to the intended man. This among others, was a dubious practice secretly perfected between two old women (childhood friends) who wanted to be in-laws. 2. Wearing a mini skirt was nothing new to the Igbo community as young ladies in the olden days usually dressed in one piece cloth tied on the chest level and usually was only able to cover the thighs of a young lady. Mini dresses were never considered indecent dressing in the olden Igbo culture. 3. A barren women could marry a ‘wife’ , Woman-to-woman Marriage (Nwunye-Nwanyi). The usually younger woman lived in the older woman’s house as a maid and not as a second wife to her husband. The woman could then permit her ‘wife’, to sleep with her husband and have children on her behalf. This was a very complicated arrangement as the woman’s wife actually had no title, and all the children she had belonged to her madam and not hers. She practically had no rights in the family. 4. In some olden Igbo communities a woman without a male child could arrange to have one of her daughters have an out-of-wedlock child hoping it could be a male child (this was not very popular) but actually happened. Outsiders might think the said daughter had an unwanted pregnancy while behind the scene her parents (usually her mother) encouraged her to have a son in the family before getting married. However, this usually resulted in problems when the boy became a man and called names by peers. 5. The society kept their young girls pure before marriage by keeping young men away from the girls. They did that in a more realistic way by allowing young men who could not wait till marriage to have intimacy to keep young widows as mistresses called ‘Iko’. They could father children for the widows. However, any child born by a widow in her dead husband’s house still belonged to her husband’s family. ‘Iko’ (the boyfriend) had no claim or right to a child he fathered. This way young men were kept away from young unmarried maidens. 6. Igbo society was a very male-dominated society. Unlike in Yoruba land, In Igbo land daughters actually had no inheritance in their fathers house since they were expected to marry and assume their husband’s name and wealth. 7. In Igbo land, first daughter ‘Ada’ holds a very special respected position in the family and community. Families, for some reasons, protected and respected their first daughter more than any other child in the family. In fact, in most communities first daughters operated like a cult called‘Umu Ada’. The fear of ‘umua ada’ was the beginning of wisdom. Apart from wars over boundaries, kidnap, forcefully defiling, or sudden death of an Igbo first daughter (Ada) in another community were other major causes of community/ tribal wars. First daughter, Ada was the prestige of the family such that a father could actually pack to her married first daughter’s house in protest of bad behaviors or neglect by his sons. 8. In sharing inheritance the first son inherits his father’s main house, ‘Obi’. It doesn’t matter how big the ‘obi’ is. It unequivocally belongs to him. In a polygamous society the first son is not the son of the first wife, rather the first male child born to the man irrespective of the position of his mother in the marriage.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 14:24:01 +0000
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