OGBANJE

Spirit child, embodiment of fate

In traditional Igbo religion, odinani, the ogbanje is a spirit reputed to incarnate again and again in the children of a single family in order to torment it. The term means literally, in the Igbo language, the children who come and go. The ogbanje, born into a household, was believed to die deliberately before puberty, then be reborn in the next child, imposing on its parents a cycle of repeated mourning. Igbo cosmology distinguishes the world of the living, ala mmadu, from that of the spirits, ala mmuo, which the ogbanje endlessly crosses. It is credited with a secret object, the iyi uwa — a small stone or a buried bond — which secures its return to the human world and to its target family. Finding and destroying the iyi uwa, a task entrusted to a priest, was believed to break the cycle and free the family. The figure shows strong affinities with the abiku of the neighbouring Yoruba world, to the point of being sometimes compared to the changelings of European folklore. Scholars see in it a way of explaining repeated infant deaths, today linked to hereditary diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia. Belief in the ogbanje, once vivid in Igboland, has weakened without disappearing.