Elechi Amadi is a Nigerian educator, novelist and dramatist, writing in English. Amadi has interpreted in such novels as The Concubine (1966), The Great Ponds (1969), and The Slave (1978), the life and values of the traditional village society. His stories often deal with people who try to change their course of life but fail in it. Amadi's early novels, like Chinua Achebe's, are set in his traditional African world, but they deal with timeless societies which are not poisoned by the effects of colonialism, rationalism, or modern change. Amadi's first novel, The Concubine, was published in 1966, six years after Nigerian independence.
The story was set in the area near Port Harcourt. It starts out as a depiction of village life, its conflicts, ancient customs, and gods, but then it proceeds into mythological level. Ihuoma is the most desirable woman in Omigwe village and the tragic heroine, whose well-fed look does a great credit to her husband. He dies, but she has won the heart of the hunter Ekwueme. They deny their love so that Ekwueme can marry another woman, to whom he has been betrothed since birth. At the end Amadi reveals that Ihuoma is actually the wife of the Sea-King, the ruling spirit of the sea, but she had assumed the human form.
The first half of the book pays particular attention to the religious institutions of Omokachi village and demonstrates by aid of apposite narrative incidents the central place these institutions occupy in the daily life of the Omokachi villagers. The opening action focuses on the fight between Emenike and Madume over a piece of land. This conflict sets the realistic tone, and maintains it over the new elements that result from and amplify the dispute. Having defined a realistic frame of reference at the social level, Amadi then injects the religious element into it:
Madume was relieved when he heard that Emenike was back home. It was true he was in very bad shape himself, but the possibility of killing a man filled him with fear. The cost of the rites of purification was prohibitive and even after that he would still be a branded man (3).
Here is revealed in a nutshell the religious basis of Omokachi’s social organization: it is not the possibility of a court trial that fills Madume with fear but the looming threat of divine chastisement. A man who kills his kinsman has wronged the gods primarily and must seek absolution in purification sacrifices commensurate with his crime.
Emenike’s illness after the fight with Madume provides the occasion for ritual intervention, in the course of which the religious fabric is given sharper scrutiny and exposition. Anyika, the central religious personage comes into view, and so too do the attributes of his office: “Anyika the medicine man was sent for… to the villagers he was just a medicine man and a mediator between them and the spirit world” (5–6). This presentation is then substantiated by the practical exercise of his office, in which he is seen pouring libation and hanging amulets on doors to keep away evil spirits. The exposition is progressive and judicious. The reader is being introduced to the main corners of the stage, and concurrently to the principal actors. Anyika’s libation shows man, the gods and the ancestors communing in a spirit of sacred and secular harmony. The gods are not far; they are near. Invisible physically, they fill man and object with their spiritual presence, and partake of human action in ways that are essentially concrete. Amadioha is king of the skies; Ojukwu is the fair, and the other gods have dominion over the Night, the Earth, and the Rivers, elements through which man comes into permanent experience of the divine presence and influence.
The ritual act performed by Anyika is part of a complex structure of religious observation defined by rules and ordinances. When Ihuoma proposes a sacrifice to Amadioha on her sick husband’s behalf, the god’spriest Nwokekoro answers: “My daughter, that will be on Eke, the usual day for sacrifices” (9). Details of this kind demonstrate a religious order with a solid internal logic and organization. The priests too are men chosen for their integrity:
The next caller was Nwokekoro, the priest of Amadioha
the god of thunder and of the skies. He was a short fat
man, old but well preserved and had an easy-going
disposition. He never seemed to be bothered about
anything. He had no wife and no compound of his own.
His small house was in his junior brother’s compound. He
was getting too old for active farming, so his yams were
few and he owned very little property. He was friendly
with everyone and was highly respected. His office as high
priest of the most powerful god lent him great dignity (8).
The gods are brought down from their abode and presented at work among the villagers. Mini Wekwu, for instance, curbs evil both within and between the adjoining villages, thereby promoting good neighbourliness. The gods of Omokachi are deployed in a hierarchic order that points ultimately to the superstructure of Omokachi’s religious belief, culminating as it does in Chineke, “the creator of spirits and men.” (59).
The review of the village pantheon ends with Amadioha, Omokachi’s principal deity, first among “God’s associates.” (The Concubine, 75) Ruler over the skies and purveyor of rain and sunshine, Amadioha is the most feared and the most venerated of all the gods, a deity whose name no man can invoke when guilty. He holds his worshippers in chaste fear through which they acknowledge the god’s supreme authority and their own inferior humanity. But the villagers’ relationship with Amadioha, as indeed with all the other deities of the local pantheon, is one of concrete communion. Worship athis shrine therefore takes on the nature of a close personal dialogue between god and man, through which complaints are resolved, wishes met, and during which the god reveals himself to men so that they can better testify to his existence:
After the main rites Nwokekoro built a fire from a glowing
orepe brand which one old man had brought along. The
cocks were killed according to ancient rites and boiled
with the yams. Before any part of the meal was touched,
the priest cut off one wing of the chicken and threw it
casually to the right side of the temple. The old men were
evidently used to this and did not watch his movement …
in a matter of seconds a huge grey serpent crawled out
from behind the shrine and began to swallow its share of
the feast. It showed no fear and the old men bowed their
heads in reverence. The god having been fed, the men fell
on the remains of the feast. (17– 18).
This worship scene closes the first half of the novel’s action, but no mention has as yet been made of the sea-king, the principal actor in the collective drama of the village. The reader has been made familiar with the sea-king’s other divine peers, their powers, and method of retribution: perjury exposes its perpetrator to Amadioha’s thunderbolt; anti-social behaviour to Ojukwu’s smallpox; and witchcraft to extermination by Mini Wekwu.
This religious activity comes against the background of Emenike’s illness, and more especially against that of his marriage with Ihuoma. Emenike dies unexpectedly shortly hereafter, and veers the dialectical significance of structuring unto its main course. A solid religious foundation has already been laid, so that when the sea-king finally appears, he is accepted for the same reasons that the other deities were accepted; that is to say as a living force within the specific socio- religious context of Omokachi.