ABIKU

The Child Who Returns

Abiku — literally, one who is born to die — designates in Yoruba thought a category of child spirits. According to the belief, these spirits belong to a brotherhood of the invisible world, egbe orun, the society of comrades of heaven, to which they are bound by pact to return. The abiku incarnates, dies in childhood, then returns to the womb of the same mother, chaining together cycles of birth and death. Successive infant deaths within one family are traditionally read as the repeated passage of a single abiku. Families then turn to the protective rites described by ethnographers: consulting the babalawo and making the offerings prescribed by Ifa; wearing amulets and small chains; marking or incising the body of the dead child so as to recognise the spirit should it return; and giving the newborn propitiatory names such as Malomo, do not go again, or Banjoko, sit down and stay. The phenomenon has its counterpart among the neighbouring Igbo under the name ogbanje. Pierre Fatumbi Verger documented the egbe orun society in Yorubaland, and Timothy Mobolade described its practices in the journal African Arts. The figure of the abiku also runs through Nigerian literature: the poems entitled Abiku by Wole Soyinka and J. P. Clark, and Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road, bear witness to it.