Author Archives: Chiamaka Offokansi

Kola Nut Offering

Age: 20

The Story:

So this story is about the kola nut. It’s not really about the nut itself, it’s an offering. The kola nut is the center of the prayer, and the prayer revolves around the core of Igbo tradition.

We believe in three chis. There’s Chukwu, which is God. And then there’s chi, which is like your guardian angel. My great-grandfather would break the kola nut in his house before he left the house. The prayer invokes your chi, invokes Chukwu to guide your steps. It also invokes an internal ethics, don’t do to someone what you wouldn’t want done to you. That’s the traditional religious version.

When someone comes to visit you, you don’t do anything until the kola nut is broken by the owner of the house. By breaking it, you’re signifying that whatever you do in the house will not harm the others. Usually the oldest male present breaks it. At events, the kola nut is broken as a symbol of peaceful coexistence. But in some Igbo traditions, only women with titles can break it.

At weddings, the nut is divided into two. The father of the bride or the bride’s kinsmen offer the kola nut to the guests. There’s a prayer for the couple to have children. If it breaks into four segments, that’s a good omen, it means the couple will have luck, lots of babies. The kola nut affirms the union of families.

Reflection:

The informant’s story reminds me of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) framework. The kola nut ceremony has Turner’s “two poles of the symbolic”: a sensory pole (the nut, the breaking) and an ideological pole (prayer to Chukwu, peaceful coexistence). When the nut breaks into four segments, the ritual is complete and there is a superstition grants peace and mutual existence between the two parties. The “three chis” reveal how ritual encodes worldview.

Additonally, I believe this ritual combats the Western framework of ownership. The kola nut ceremony cannot be copyrighted, as it belongs to the Igbo community; however, ICH designation risks “fossilization” or freezing a practice that was never frozen. The informant’s great-grandfather did it. And the informant plans to do so in the near future, so the chain of the tradition won’t be broken.

Spooky School Tale

Context:

Age: 19

Occupation: College Student

Location: Los Angeles, CA

The Story:

One of my friends lives  right next to this  old, like, middle school, it’s called Hogs Hollow, But because  one of my friends lived right next to there, and we would hanging out there, and one day after school was over we would sometimes like pop the fence and run around in there because they would leave all the doors open, so you could kind of just wander around in there. 

There were all these kinds of maze-like passages and stuff. I hadn’t been into the school but some of my friends had and so we decided to go in there and we were kind of wandering around it was dark and we decided to split up just because we thought it would make it more scary, you know, like, because we knew it was a bad idea. Then somebody heard a voice. And everybody started freaking out and running, and one of my friends  tripped over something and fell into a bunch of equipment, and there was all these loud noises and stuff, and everybody got freaked out.

Everybody went back to school and was talking about it, so it’s become a little bit more of a known thing at my school. I was kind of happy to be in sort of like the founding group of this our own little legend of this unknown myth. There were also some embellishments, I remember some stories saying we heard the voice at exactly 3 a.m. which I don’t think was true, but started going around, and that somebody saw like a little  middle schooler running around. It was kind of fun to see it like in real time develop into this sort of legend. 

Reflection:

When originally hearing this story from the informant, I thought it was interesting that the that the school operated as a contemporary legend that is set in the real world. The informant’s clarity of no one else being present but the friend group, but the rumor still spreading around the school is an example of metafolklore. Therefore, the location of this story, the school, starts ordinarily, but through the metafolklore and different versions created and spread, becomes saturated with fear and inauthenticity. Further, I think the real aspects of the story, such as the group splitting up and it being late at night also pave the way for embellishments of the story to amp it up in metafolklore. Although no time of the arrival was given and it was never shared which voice was heard, speculators assumed it was at 3AM and the voice of an old middle schooler was heard to fit the narrative of other folk stories they may have heard before. The informants proximity to the story allows for a social bonding factor for those within the folk group, but also ritualized performance that enacts group identity and belonging.