By Obi Nwakanma
The great masquerade begins his final journey homeward towards  the now open door of the rising sun. This is what it looks like from this past week, as Nigerians – particularly the Igbo commence the final funeral ceremonies across the globe, wherever they are to be found, in honour of their great war leader, General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu.

Those who know the Igbo understand that they hardly make permanent heroes. It has something to do with their fear of monuments – that ancient Igbo spiritual and ethical fear about making powerful or permanent idols.

To understand this, we have only to look behind the ideas to the Igbo Mbari; the museum of memory and commemoration, which must nonetheless be created with mud, and allowed to decay and return to the ordinariness of earth.

This is the Igbo gesture against the physical representation of the divine – or the infusion of divinity or stirring of life into objects by invocation, to the point of idolatry. The Igbo thus create no monuments out of stone. They have a philosophy of art that makes every created object organic to nature, and therefore subject to decay and regeneration.

I have a theory that the Igbo fear of permanence and transcendence began with the heresy of Kamalu-Ozuzu, who took the rather impious title of “Amadi-Oha,” appropriated and installed himself in the shrine of the Sun-god at his maternal home in Umunneoha, and created a great shrine for himself at Ozuzu, where established his permanent military headquarters, lying between Igweocha and Alanso (“Alansaw” in the early colonial maps) in the escarpment of Igbo land that today stretches from Etche in Rivers State through Ahoada, beyond to Mbaise, Ngwa, Amaigbo, and to all the spread of lands that today constitute the heartland of Igbo culture.

Amadioha’s great heresy is that he appropriated the collective will and established himself as a living deity to be worshipped, revered and feared as a living god or monarch. As a great military engineer and tactician, his attempts to conquer the known world may have led to the first experiments in the bronze age, with missile craft and fissile chemistry –(“Nsi-egbe”) and rocketry (“Egbe-elu-Igwe”).

The first human catastrophe probably occurred with his attempts to experiment and domesticate nuclear energy. No wonder the Igbo speak of Amadioha as the archetype on retribution: if you break the sacred laws of the Earth-goddess, you might end up like Amadioha – who was never buried, but remains vital, angry, edgy, roaming, alive and war mongering, trapped between “Elu” (the sky) and “Ala” (the earth) – a certain kind of restless and haunting liminality – because in his experiments with energy, he blew himself up, skywards, in ungatherable shards and thus disappeared into timeless orbit.

This is Igbo mythology, behind which is a covenant made against the coronation of an individual as King, or the creation or erection of a permanent image representing the divine. It is also the source of the Igbo fear of monumentalism, dominion, loss of freedom, and of extreme power concentrated in one organic will or individual.

The Igbo even have a saying about showing a deity that begins to grow out of its breeches the tree from which it was carved. Such a people do not permit eternal heroes. They in fact make legend of their unwillingness to live in the shadow of any one universal idol or hero.

However, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu is the closest, in the recent era, to a global Igbo culture hero. Indeed, there are only two men in the modern era who have captured the Igbo imagination in a powerful and resounding way – Nnamdi Azikiwe and Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu.

Both were very ironically born under the same sign, nearly thirty years apart almost to the day, in the same month, and in the small town of Zungeru.

There are not a few Igbo mythmakers today who are beginning to ascribe to that little town in Niger state, something of a modern Igbo equivalent of “Beth Elohim” (Bethlehem). But I was speaking about Ojukwu’s global status among the Igbo and his now global funeral train.

Last week, the Igbo across the world commenced that final ritual, starting from the funeral mass overseen by the Arch Bishop of London at the Westminster Cathedral, to ceremonies in New York, Maryland/Washington DC, Canada, and Atlanta in the week.

Two men I respect very much – Nze Joe Eto and Dr. Innocent Ukabam- literally “summoned” me to Atlanta this past weekend, to be the keynote speaker at the Odumegwu-Ojukwu Memorial Symposium, organized as part of the Atlanta Igbo community’s celebration of Ojukwu’s life.

The symposium had panelists of distinguished and thoughtful Igbo: Dr. Mike Okeke, an Atlanta based Attorney who spoke on “Ojukwu the man,” Dr. Chima Ekeke, a theologian, and Rector of the All Saints Anglican Church, Atlanta, whose talk on, “Moses, Ojukwu and the Quest for Joshua” locates Ojukwu’s central role in the evolving history of the Igbo world, Dr. Obiagbosogu Ignatius Ebbe, Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga; a Biafran veteran and former platoon commander in Biafra’s C company under the late Tim Onwuateugwu took his audience down the harsh memory of combat life in the Biafran Army, Dr. Innocent Ukabam, himself also a veteran of the Biafran Airforce, paid tribute to Ojukwu’s heroic convictions in his talk, “Stand for something or Fall for Anything;” Joe Eto, another veteran combatant discussed the lessons learned from the war, as did Mrs. Unuaku Ekwegbalu, journalist and lawyer, a former broadcaster with the Voice of Biafra speak of the innovative pulsion of life in Biafra under the General.

The Ojukwu symposium was followed by a non-denominational service, and the veterans parade and last salute to their commander-in-Chief, in which over eighty former Biafran officers took the salute with the accompaniment of the old Biafran anthem – “Land of the Rising Sun.”

It was a touching moment, and was followed by evening obsequiesably piloted by Dr. Martin Okafor, Dr. Paul Oranika and  Attorney Charles Onyirimba, with various Igbo cultural groups paying tribute – the Ohafia warrior dancers, the Nnewi and Aro-Ndizuogu masquerades, the Opuruiche, various Igbo women groups, particularly the “Otu Umunne” led by Mrs. Pat Eto, who led the traditional elegiac parade of Igbo women chanting threnodies.

As General Ojukwu, Ikemba Nnewi, begins his final journey home, and as I did say in my keynote statement, one unfinished business of the Igbo is to muster the collective will to erect a bold and fitting memorial to the General in his capital city, and for the Igbo to endow the “Odumegwu-Ojukwu Memorial Fund” to among other things, propagate the values of a humane and egalitarian society for which Ojukwu fought all his life. It would be the greatest tribute to his memory –as we all rise everywhere for the General.