What does Chineke mean? Chukwu, chi and the Igbo name of God

In 1975, Chinua Achebe accused the early missionaries of a small mistake with lasting effects. When they took the Igbo word Chineke as the name of the Christian Creator, he wrote, they "acted a little hastily, unaware that the Igbo language was capable of treachery to hasty users." The trap was one tone on one tiny word. If you searched for the meaning of Chineke, or wondered whether Chukwu is the same God, that tiny word is where the answer starts.

What does Chineke mean?

Chineke is one of the Igbo names of God the creator, in south-eastern Nigeria. It belongs to odinani, the Igbo traditional religion, and it is also the name Igbo Christians use when they pray. The usual translation is the spirit, or the God, that creates: the Catholic theologian Francis Arinze glosses it "the Spirit that creates", the Anglican scholar Edmund Ilogu "the Creator God".

The name is made of three words: chi, na and eke. Chi is a spirit, the personal double every person has (more on that below). Eke carries the idea of creating. The small word in the middle, na, is where it gets interesting. Igbo is a tonal language, and in his essay "Chi in Igbo Cosmology" Achebe shows three ways to hear it:

• ◆Na with a high tone means who or which. Chineke is then the chi which creates.
• ◆Na with a low tone can be the auxiliary does. Chineke is then the chi does create.
• ◆Na with a low tone can also mean and. Eke stops being a verb and becomes a noun, and Chineke means chi and eke.

Achebe does not hesitate:

« Chineke then becomes chi and eke. And that, in my opinion, is the correct version. Chinua Achebe, Chi in Igbo Cosmology, 1975 »

For him, the god the missionaries took to mean "the one who creates" was in fact "a dual deity, chi and eke", two powers so close that Igbo names and sayings yoke them together. The missionaries, he says, put "the wrong tone on that little word". Not every scholar follows him: Arinze and Ilogu keep the reading the spirit, or God, that creates. Both are Igbo, and both were churchmen, so theirs is also a theologian's reading. Here, the sources have not settled it.

What does Chukwu mean?

Chukwu is chi plus ukwu, great. Achebe puts it plainly: Chi Ukwu, or simply Chukwu, "means literally Great Chi". Arinze translates it as the Great Spirit, Ilogu as the Great God. You will also meet Chuku and Chi-ukwu, and in older English books Tshuku and Cuku, the spellings of nineteenth-century missionaries and of the colonial anthropologist Northcote Thomas.

Igbo has more than two names for God. Arinze lists three main ones: Chukwu, Chineke, and Osebuluwa, the Lord who upholds the world, along with titles such as Obasi di n'enu, God above, and Olise bi n'enu, the Lord who lives above. Ilogu adds a regional key. Around Onitsha people say Chineke, and the stress falls on creation; where Chukwu is used, they sometimes add Okike, creation, and speak of Chukwu Okike.

And what is chi?

Chi is the hardest of the three words, and the most beautiful. Achebe finds two meanings. One is a spirit being, a kind of double or other self that each person has. The other is day, or daylight. "A man lives here and his chi there," he writes. Your chi shapes your destiny, but not on its own, as the well-known proverb says: Onye kwe chie ekwe, if a man agrees, his chi agrees.

That is why the two names of God fit together so well. Every person has a chi, and Chukwu is the Great Chi. Our Codex has an entry on chi, and one on Ikenga, the horned figure that holds a man's strength and achievement.

Your chi lives "there" while you live "here". The world of the ROHO saga has two sides as well: the NZA, the physical world, and the NZI, the spiritual world. They are not spirits, they are worlds. When we talked with Loudvic Salcède about chi and this proverb, he made the link himself.

« It ties in with the NZI and the NZA, so in a way we're aligned. Loudvic Salcède, translated from French »

Are Chineke and Chukwu the same God?

For most of the writers we read, yes: two names for one Supreme Being, one stressing creation, the other greatness. Ilogu says it in a sentence: "The principal God of the Ibo is called Chineke or Chukwu." Achebe's reading of Chineke as chi and eke makes the picture less tidy. And a deeper argument asks whether Chukwu was always the Supreme God of every Igbo community.

Did the missionaries invent Chukwu?

The name is older than the missions. In 1841 a British expedition went up the Niger, and its missionary, J. F. Schön of the Church Missionary Society, kept a journal:

« The Ibos are, in their way, a religious people. The word "Tshuku," God, is continually heard. Tshuku is supposed to do every thing. J. F. Schön, Missionary Register, 1842 »

"God made every thing: He made both White and Black," he heard them say. That was sixteen years before the first Christian mission in Igboland opened at Onitsha, in 1857. Read Schön for what he was, a missionary pleased to find what he called correct notions of God. But the word was already in Igbo mouths before any church.

The doubt comes from elsewhere. In 1913 Northcote Thomas, a government anthropologist working around Awka, put a supreme god he spelled Cuku at the head of the pantheon. Yet he noted that "the old men frequently say that they knew nothing of Cuku before the coming of the white man", except at Aguku, in Nri, where Chukwu was tied to the origin of kingship and of yams. He found no sacrifice to him anywhere.

In 1984 the Igbo scholar Donatus Nwoga built a book on that doubt, The Supreme God as Stranger in Igbo Religious Thought. As the anthropologist Robin Horton sums it up, Nwoga argued that the name Chukwu had spread fairly recently from Arochukwu, where neither the Aro nor the groups under their influence saw Chukwu as more than "the most powerful of a number of powerful spirits". Only after the missionaries "had taken this name, transformed its meaning and fed the result back to the Igbo" did it come to name a Supreme God everywhere. Horton felt Nwoga still had more to do before his case could be called conclusive. Many Igbo scholars, the theologian Emefie Ikenga Metuh among them, hold the opposite view: Chukwu as the all-powerful creator, the high God of an essentially monotheistic tradition. The question is open, and we leave it open.

The Chukwu of Arochukwu

Part of the story runs through one town whose name contains God's. The Aro, traders based at Arochukwu, ran the most famous oracle of the region, Ibini Ukpabi. Ilogu calls it "the Chukwu Oracle", "popularly known as the long juju". According to the historian Axel Harneit-Sievers, the Aro were also called Umuchukwu, the children of Chukwu, and claimed a direct relationship to him rather than to a local deity. The historian G. Ugo Nwokeji describes a universal deity, Chukwu, whose only children were the Aro. The British destroyed the oracle during the Aro expedition of 1901-1902.

Nri gives another thread. The anthropologist M. A. Onwuejeogwu, quoted by Harneit-Sievers, places at Nri the development of "an elaborate 'mythology' of Chukwu", which fits Thomas's exception at Aguku. So the debate is not Chukwu or nothing. It is about how widely, and since when, Chukwu was the name of one Supreme God across all of Igboland.

Did the Igbo pray and sacrifice to Chukwu?

You will often read that Chukwu had no shrines and received no sacrifices. Thomas found none. Arinze, writing in 1970, takes on what he calls the commonplace generalization that the Igbo offer no sacrifice to Chukwu: he describes sacrifice to Chukwu made through Anyanwu, the sun, while granting that the average person may know nothing of direct sacrifice to him. Thomas had already called Anyanwu, the eye of the sun, the messenger of Chukwu. Ilogu mentions household shrines to Chukwu at Ihiala, called Ihu Chukwu, where, he writes, sacrifices are offered.

Even earlier, in 1789, Olaudah Equiano, who said he was born among the Igbo (some historians doubt it), wrote that his people believed in "one Creator of all things" who "lives in the sun". He gave him no name.

Chineke today

Today Chineke is the word for God in Igbo prayers and churches, and you will meet it as an exclamation too. "Chineke!" a character cries in Aiwanose Odafen's novel Tomorrow I Become a Woman (2022), the way someone else might say "Oh my God!". Literature carried the older question as well. In Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), the elder Akunna tells the missionary Mr Brown: "We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods."

Odinani is a living religion, and so is the Christianity that took up its names. Both still speak to God in the same words, and Igbo families, villages and scholars do not all tell the story the same way.

Neither Chineke nor Chukwu appears in Ebandeli, the first volume of the fantasy saga La Légende de ROHO. We asked Loudvic Salcède, who is writing the saga, whether they will ever have a place in it.

« They're not in the first volume, but they will be in the saga, so we'll see them later. Loudvic Salcède, translated from French »

Go further

Until then, they live in the Kunda Codex, among 389 spirits of Africa and its diasporas: read the entries for Chineke, Chukwu and chi, then Ala, the earth, and Amadioha, the thunder, on the Igbo and Nigerian spirits page. For another West African sky god, see our guide to Akan gods and goddesses.

The book is in French for now, and its premise fits in two lines: "The last Guardian is an old man at the end of his watch." A curse returns the spirits to infancy, and "He has to return each mask to a spirit who is now a child." Find it on the book page.

Sources

• ◆Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789.
• ◆J. F. Schön, journal of the 1841 Niger expedition, in the Missionary Register, Church Missionary Society, March 1842, pp. 168-169.
• ◆Northcote W. Thomas, Anthropological Report on the Ibo-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria, part I, London, 1913, pp. 26-27.
• ◆Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Heinemann, 1958.
• ◆Francis A. Arinze, Sacrifice in Ibo Religion, Ibadan University Press, 1970.
• ◆Edmund Ilogu, Christianity and Ibo Culture, Brill, 1974.
• ◆Chinua Achebe, "Chi in Igbo Cosmology", in Morning Yet on Creation Day, Heinemann, 1975.
• ◆Donatus Ibe Nwoga, The Supreme God as Stranger in Igbo Religious Thought, Hawk Press, 1984 (read through Robin Horton's summary).
• ◆Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• ◆John R. Hinnells (ed.), The Penguin Dictionary of Religions, 1997, entry on Igbo religion.
• ◆Axel Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century, University of Rochester Press, 2006.
• ◆G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• ◆Aiwanose Odafen, Tomorrow I Become a Woman, 2022.