THEORY, HISTORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

The Signification of African Spirituality in

Selected Short Stories of Tanure Ojaide
Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega

Abstract:
African writers’ cultural settings are often reflected in their artistic
creations. In his writings, Tanure Ojaide constantly re-affirms his identification
with, and indebtedness to, his Urhobo traditional heritage. The short story seems
to afford him the opportunity to interrogate the visible (physical) and invisible
(spiritual) in the lives of his people which he reflects through his fictional
characters. This paper therefore, adopts a pragmatic approach as it examines
Ojaide’s preoccupation with the place, representation, and implications of
spirituality through some stories selected from his four collections of short
fiction. The writer projects ideas around African spirituality mainly through the
relationship between the living and the dead, the importance of the final resting
place for the dead, the existence and operations of supernatural forces capable of
oppressive and sexual attacks, and the efficacy of bewitchment on the living.
This study will assist in exploring the continued spirituality of Africans as
expressed through Christian beliefs and traditional mysticism.
Keywords: African spirituality, Mysticism, Signification, Tanure
Ojaide

Introduction
Modern African literature generally reflects the realities of the
African condition and existence. That reality includes the norms, values,
superstitions, philosophies, traditions and other belief systems peculiar to
the African by virtue of lived experiences. For African writers, art is a
mirror of reality; hence one can say that African literature incorporates
and interrogates the historical and cultural worldviews of the people.
Since literature is a cultural production, African writers consciously or
unconsciously, in their literary representations, often reflect the lived
experiences of their people. This is why some beliefs and practices that
are not necessarily grounded on empirical evidence, but which are
specific to some groups or make meaning to them as integral parts of
their indigenous knowledge systems, form the backdrop of a writer’s


Associate Professor PhD, Department of English and Literary Studies, Delta
State University, Abraka, Nigeria, [email protected],
[email protected]

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work. Hence, cultural theory explores the signification of material and
non-material things such as belief systems as well as how they are
represented physically through nature. These factors are important in
discussing the works of a writer grounded in the culture, myths, legends,
and belief systems of his or her people.
Much as Ojaide is best known as a poet, he is also a fiction
writer and has through the decades published several novels and
collections of short stories. His short stories collections include: God’s
Medicine-Men and Other Stories (2004), The Debt-Collector and Other
Stories (2009), The Old Man in a State House and Other Stories (2012)
and God’s Naked Children: Selected and New Stories (2018). His stories
are marked by cultural reflections that situate his characters, narration,
and thematic preoccupations as he has himself admitted that the writer is
not an “air-plant” but one rooted in a specific place which has its
geography and culture.

Conceptualising Spirituality in African Literature and Society

African spirituality has to do with the understanding that beliefs
and practices affect every facet of the life of an African. Njoki Nathani
Wane describes spirituality as “not affiliated with a particular religion
but was an everyday ritual. It was a way of being, of connecting with the
land, the universe and creation” (Wane, 2002: 136). The renowned
African scholar of religion and philosophy, John Mbiti avers the African
life is filled with spirituality (1990). Specifically, an important aspect of
the African belief system is the concept of the existence of two parallel
worlds. Commenting on this, Wole Soyinka argues that the African
reality can be best understood as a simultaneous inhabitation of the
world of the living and the dead as well as the present and the past
(1976). He says further that it is the tension between all these coordinates
that forms the primary object of mimesis for African art and by extension
its literature.
According to Ojaide people who share the same birthplace,
culture, and society are connected in their group values and interests
(Ojaide, 1999: 236). This assertion is underscored in literary studies by
Abiola Irele’s observation that the concern with historical and
sociological realities makes African literature a more accurate and
comprehensible account of contemporary African reality than
sociological or political documents (Irele, 1981). It is for this reason that
I intend to use African culture in general and Urhobo/Pan Edo culture in
particular to study the signification of spirituality in selected short stories
of Ojaide. Culture is used here in its broadest implication and this
research strives to foster a better appreciation of a minority’s belief
systems as well as affirm its contribution to global cultures.

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THEORY, HISTORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

In trying to explain the peculiarities of spirituality in the Urhobo

culture, Ochuko Tonukari writes:

Traditional Urhobo basically view the universe as comprising

basically of two realms: the visible and the invisible realms. They
grasp the cosmos as a three-tiered structure, consisting of the heaven
above, the physical world and the world underneath. Each of these is
inhabited by different categories of beings. The Creator and a host of
spirit beings, including arch-divinities, inhabit the heaven above; other
divinities, ancestors, and myriads of unnamed spirits dwell in the
world beneath; while human beings occupy the physical earth. Human
beings may be less powerful, but their world is the centre and focus of
attention. It belongs to human beings as sensible beings to maintain the
delicate balance in the universe. This is what assures the happiness and
prosperity of individuals and the community.
http://www.waado.org/UrhoboCulture/Religion/tonukari/Urhobo_com
munity_two_worlds.htm

To the African, spirituality involves beliefs and practices that

relate to human life. Sickness, for example, is not only a state of being
physically unhealthy but could also connote an imbalance in one’s
psychological and spiritual life. Although many Africans today have
abandoned their various forms of traditional worship or veneration, and
embraced non-indigenous religions, the average African is still highly
spiritual and still believes in the existence and influence of forces beyond
the ordinary in human life. These forces could be benevolent or
malevolent. They could be responsible for turns in one’s fortune for
better or for worse. In cases where benevolent forces are perceived to be
at work, humans experience a state of well-being in life’s endeavors,
while, malevolent forces cause sickness or bad fortune and so require a
search for solution or methods of amelioration through supernatural
interventions.
Ojaide’s stories set in his Agbon and other places reflect the life
lived around him. Agbon is a clan in Urhobo land in Delta Central
Senatorial District of Delta State, Nigeria into which the writer was born.
What happens in real life is replicated through fiction. It is only that
fiction sometimes imagines and stretches the humanly possible into
fantasy. That is why many aspects of the spiritual fall into the realm of
fantasy and myth. The realism that the fiction writer thus aims at is to
express the humanly possible even in the imaginary. As far as the
invisible and spiritual are concerned in these stories, they are the
indigenous beliefs and myths that permeate the characters and ideas of
many Africans, including many educated Christianized and Islamized
among them.

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 In Ojaide’s short stories, he pries into beliefs of the characters
and, often using the omnipresent narrator’s viewpoint, shines a
searchlight into the complexities of life as lived in the respective
environments representing the settings in the stories. Hence, some of his
short stories treat the theme of the metaphysical relationship between the
living and the dead. What comes out of these stories is that there are
alternative realities in the physical mundane life and the spiritual esoteric
life. The visible and invisible, which though are contrastive, are expected
to merge into one to define a human existence. In other words, the
physical and visible must be in agreement with the spiritual and invisible
for human life to have harmony and peace.
Elsewhere, Ojaide has written of the “Urhoro” of the Urhobo
people which indicates a pre-human existence, which some describe as
life in the womb, where people choose their respective destinies before
being born to live them out (Ojaide, 1999: 235). This again shows that in
his understanding of the Urhobo culture, the spiritual precedes the
physical which it collaborates with in life before going back to a spiritual
state upon death. In this conception, life is cyclical, moving from the
spiritual to the physical and back to the spiritual in an unending cycle.
This spiritual or rather supernatural state affects the Urhobo and other
Africans who believe in them and many people spend their time and
resources to protect themselves from malefactors in the forms of witches,
wizards, and other evil forces.
Generally, Ojaide’s works are suffused with substances and
symbolisms that underscore his unapologetic identification with his
Urhobo cultural heritage. Many scholars, including this writer, have
written extensively on the influence of Urhobo orature to include
folkloric elements in Ojaide’s poetry. His novels, especially The Activist,
have also received critical exegeses in the areas of environmental
activism and female agency. But, not much scholarly attention has been
accorded his short fiction collections even as I acknowledge here,
Stephen Kekeghe’s chapter contribution where he lauds Ojaide’s use of
“his short stories to express mental health situations and challenges, a
relevant area of human endeavor not commonly expressed by Nigerian
writers” (Kekeghe, 2020: 326) However, my study will not dwell on
Ojaide’s clinical representation of the theme of madness in literature as
his did. Henry Oripeloye (2014) applies a postmodernist reading to
Ojaide’s God’s Medicine Men through which he affirms a dismantling
and fragmentation of traditional cultural values by post-colonial
tendencies. Again, I choose to adopt a cultural examination of Ojaide’s
interest in the invisible and intangible forces – spirituality – at play in the
lives of characters in his short stories.
I will use some of his short stories to interrogate the nature and
importance of spirituality which appear to reflect aspects of the author’s
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people’s worldviews. The writer projects this mainly through their

beliefs in, for example, the relationship between the living and the dead,
the importance of the final resting place for the dead, the existence and
operations of supernatural forces capable of oppressive and sexual
attacks, as well as the efficacy of bewitchment on the living. Ojaide’s
preoccupation with these subjects are consistently expressed and
reflected in the characters, setting, and thematic concerns in his short
stories, yet has not received commensurate critical attention.

The Signification of Spirituality in Selected Short Stories of

Tanure Ojaide
In Ojaide’s short stories, the reader encounters two worlds – the
visible and the invisible, both real in man’s physical and
emotional/psychological life. The binaries of myth and reality are
collapsed into the traditional belief system under which many of the
fictional characters in the writer’s stories operate. Though one is visible
and the other invisible, there is no boundary between the spiritual and
physical in the lives of the characters. This could also be described in the
sense of reality and fantasy, a blend of which is an important aspect of
the spirituality exercised by the characters. These two aspects of life,
though one is perceptible and the other unseen, are realities or put in
another way, alternative realities of life.
“The Benevolence of the Dead” from The Old Man in a State
House is one of the short stories Ojaide uses to represent the visible and
the invisible, the living and the dead, and their connectedness. The story
also underscores Tonukari’s assertion that “Ancestors are essentially
benevolent spirits –they know and have their families’ interest at heart”
(Tonukari, n.p.). The narrator is a young girl who loses her father at an
early age and has to live with an uncle who mistreats her. He starves her,
engages her in arduous tasks, and refuses to cater for her educational
needs. One particular night, after having prayed fervently to God for
succor from her sufferings, her father visits her in her sleep. Apparently,
he is able to see her pitiable plight from his abode of the dead in the
invisible world. The little girl’s earnest plea for help brings the dead
father back to the land of the living as a spirit being. He interacts with
her, reassures her that all will be well for her henceforth. Her fortunes
soon change for the better as her dead father had promised her in her
sleep. He is a benevolent spirit and a guardian who somehow manages
from his spirit-world to give her emotional and psychological support as
well as ensure that others still alive give his daughter the material and
financial support that she needs to develop herself as a young girl.

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 The foregoing projection is in consonance with an Urhobo belief,
replicated in the excerpt below, that the death of a relative does not end
the affinity between the living and the dead:

The dead pass through the gates to the spiritual realm when all
necessary rituals have been performed. As the departed are never
regarded as being really dead in the grave, their offspring and other
relations still refer to them as their fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters,
which they were before their transition. They are believed to be
capable of exercising their parental roles or so, though now in a more
powerful and unrestricted way, over their survivors. (Ottuh 2017: 212)

Ojaide portrays a mystical relationship between the living and

the dead in the aforementioned story. It is only the narrator who sees and
interacts freely with her father whenever he appears to her. It is
significant that the man wears the same clothes he was used to wearing
when he was alive as another form of identification. However, the writer
describes his eyes as if they were stars. So, in appearing to his daughter,
the dead father carries both human and non-human qualities. After their
encounter in the girl’s sleep, the dead father leaves walking backwards.
The Urhobo generally attribute to ghosts a weird behavior such as
walking backwards.
In any case, on his part, the late father keeps a close watch over
his daughter and is sensitive to her travails. He always appears to
encourage and support her at crucial moments when she is facing some
difficulties. These interventions provide her with the material and
psychological stability she requires to thrive as a young woman. For her
father, he is at peace in the spirit realm knowing that he is able to
perform his parental responsibilities towards her even though he is not
physically with her. All he asks of her is to “Always remain a good girl!”
(The Old Man in a State House…: 6). However, towards the end of the
story, he seems to abandon her after she sleeps with her boyfriend when
she had not graduated from school. One possible interpretation for this is
that as a spirit being, his duty was to guide and guard her through a
period when she was relatively innocent, vulnerable, and helpless. That
she now has another male companion, a lover, could mean the late father
feels his assignment regarding her welfare has been completed and he
can quietly retire back to his abode in the invisible world. The young
woman will henceforth learn how to cope with life’s challenges relying
on her abilities and newfound partner.
On the converse side, Ojaide might be implying also that there
are physical consequences for disobeying the injunctions or expectations
of the dead or spiritual forces. In “The Benevolence of the Dead”, we can
infer that the spirit of the late father distances itself from the daughter the

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THEORY, HISTORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

moment she has sexual intercourse with her boyfriend. His only
expectation of her as he helped her navigate through life’s difficulties
was that she should “always remains a good girl” which she promised to.
When she violates this pact, he separates himself from her physically and
spiritually. However, a factor worthy of note in all of all of the narrative
is that Ojaide’s inadvertently reveals the mutually beneficial relationship
which exists between the living and the dead. In the above story, the
father is roused from his resting place in the spirit world to come to his
daughter’s aid in her moments of great need in the human world. He is at
peace knowing he is able to ameliorate his daughter’s sufferings while
the daughter, on her part, experiences a measure of progress and
emotional balance from her father’s spiritual presence in her life.
This concept of filial responsibility and obligation between the
living and the dead is depicted via a reversed perspective in the title story
of Ojaide’s second short story collection. In “The Debt-Collector”, it
becomes the duty of the relatives to redeem the image and ensure the
well-being of the dead. The body of a dead person is referred to as
“orinvwin” in Urhobo. David Okpako further elucidates that:

the word orinvwin embodies complex emotions associated with the

universal fear of the dead e.g. the imperative that the dead body must
be treated with dignity, the need to satisfy the family honor in
accordance with the status of the dead person and of his descendants;
above all, the belief that the person though dead to the living, is alive in
erinvwin, observing how the descendants deal with what is left of
him/her (Okpako, 2014: 6).

Peter Ekeh also corroborates this important cultural rite of

passage among the Urhobo when he states:

Living people inhabit Akpọ and control its affairs; Erivwin is peopled
by the spirits of the dead. Those among the departed who have been
properly buried, and for whom prescribed rituals of passage have been
performed by their living relations, will live in peace therein. Until the
dead achieve such status, their spirits wander in strange places awaiting
admission into their final resting places (Ekeh, 2004: 30).

In this story, the corpse of Ituru, a debtor who has been unable to
pay back the money he owes his creditor, Shegbe, is forcibly seized by
the rich man. This throws the family of the bereaved into double grief for
a number of reasons that have deep-seated cultural implications. First,
this act amounts to a violation of the spirit of the dead man as the
Urhobo, and by extension African, concept of death recognizes the need
to accord the body of the dead a final resting place within his family

51
stead into which he returns in his next life. The traditional thought is that
if Ituru’s corpse is not reclaimed from his creditor, then “their family
would be depleted by one adult: dead or alive” (The Debt Collector…:
26) and his “spirit will continue to haunt us” (28). Michael Nabofa also
suggests that the spirit in this condition would be restless and suffer
serious agony (Nabofa, 2011: 367). In his article, Anthony Agbegbedia
describes this relationship within the context of Urhobo culture thus:

… the Urhobo worldview embraces the belief that what we referred to

as extended family (orua) in this mundane community of people has
been pre-existent in the spiritual world (erivwin). For them therefore,
beings are released from there to populate this earth and at death, one
returns to it….Therefore among the Urhobo, there is a belief in what is
called erivwinr’uwevwin (the spiritual abode of the household),
erivwinr’orua (spiritual abode of the extended family)….This explains
among other purposes, patri-linear family system inclusive, why the
Urhobo like Biblical ancient Israelites bury their dead ones in the
homestead of their fathers to make sure that when he or she would re-
incarnate, he or she would come back to life through the same family
(Anthony Agbegbedia, 2015: 59).

Yet another reason why the family of the deceased is anxious is

that the family’s honor is at stake. They can become the butt of cruel
jokes, negative references and social stigmatization for generations to
come because of Ituru’s “shame of indebtedness” (27). A third factor is
the fear that the captor might tamper with some vital body parts of the
dead for ritual purposes and if the dead reincarnates, these body parts
will ostensibly be missing. The family thus resolves that “We cannot
shelve our responsibilities. He was ours and still ours. Let us save our
man from disgrace – he cannot be a worthy ancestor buried in the bush
belonging to the chief” (28). By the evening of the same day, the family
lives up to this collective charge and raise the remaining forty pounds
which their dead member owed. They return the money to Shegbe who
also releases the corpse to them for the final burial. The timely
intervention by the living members of Ituru’s family affords the dead
man respect and a peaceful place of rest in the realm of the spirits and
among the pantheon of ancestors.
The above textual examples depict the mutually beneficial
relationship that exists between characters in the visible and invisible
worlds as portrayed in some of Ojaide’s short stories. The dead is seen
going out of its way to come back to life to guide and guard the interests
and good fortunes of the living as in “The Benevolence of the Dead”,
while the living do not shirk their duty of restoring the honor of the dead
and ensuring their smooth transition or passage to the world of the spirits
as in “The Debt-Collector”.
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THEORY, HISTORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

The theme of separation as a result of disregarding a spiritual pact

is found in “Sharing Love” in Ojaide’s The Old Man in a State House and
Other Short Stories. The narrator and beautiful Kena are very much in love
but are eventually forced to part ways because Kena is a “Mami Wata
pickin” (62). This last expression means, although human, Kena has some
form of spirit possession and belongs to a female water spirit or deity
popularly believed to bestow beauty and wealth to associates. Kena is also
projected as being already married to a spirit husband who inhabits the
marine world but comes only at night to possess her. Despite several
warnings from Kena’s parents that they are not allowed to be together
because Kena is already committed to a spirit spouse, both lovers decide to
elope to the United States of America. After Kena and her boyfriend enjoy
only three days of uninterrupted bliss, Kena falls sick and various medical
tests in different hospitals are incapable of diagnosing the cause of the
severe headaches she is experiencing. Unable to find a bio-medical
solution to her condition abroad, Kena returns to her home country to look
for a cure. Once back in Nigeria, she resumes her relationship with the
spirit lover who heals her because she spiritually belongs to him and has
returned to continue their affair.
Ojaide underscores the idea that the forces that inhabit and
operate from the spirit realm are very powerful and disobeying them or
going against their wishes will only cause more problems for the living
especially those with whom they share a metaphysical relationship. Kena
is a person of two worlds as she appears comfortable with each partner in
both disparate love relationships. She has a consensual relationship with
her spirit husband who does not mind sharing her love with the human
lover in so far as all the parties respect boundaries and maintain a tacit
understanding. The spirit lover “owns” her at night but the boyfriend can
have her during the day. The spiritual husband only demonstrates his
hold over her when Kena and her boyfriend try to outsmart him by
relocating out of the country. Eloping to the United States of America
from Nigeria does not stop Kena’s spiritual experience. By implication,
the African belief is that nobody can hide or escape from spiritual forces
that affect them by leaving one setting for a distant one.
While it is possible to have mutually satisfying contacts between
human and spirit beings, Ojaide also presents a non-consensual association
in “God’s Medicine-Men”, the title story of God’s Medicine-Men and
Other Stories. Endurance, the protagonist, contends with some strange
experiences. In school, she is often attacked by an invisible and oppressive
weight called an incubus or succubus. She goes home to look for a
solution to this problem and is confronted with another dilemma: she gets
sexually violated by an invisible presence. In spite of her efforts she could
“…not stop the intruder from entering into her at will. She wore rousers to

53
bed, and yet she woke with a feeling of sticky wetness between her legs”
(69). Worse still is that she is the daughter of a pastor and has been
brought up in the Christian way to believe that evil forces have no power
over her. Yet her prayers do not have any effect on the source or subject
responsible for these forceful invasions and body violations. This creates
anxiety in her and causes her physical and emotional trauma. Her friend
introduces her to Pastor Odele who combines his Christian worship with
that of Olokun, the traditional river goddess. He recommends a spiritual
bath in Sakpoba River to rid her of these oppressive forces at work in her
life after which she gets some reprieve.
The manner through which Endurance’s predicament is finally
resolved calls to question the religious practice of some modern-day
clergymen. The writer satirizes some of them who seek and employ
powers beyond the scope of their Christian faith. Pastor Odele may claim
to be a man of the Christian God by virtue of carrying a small Bible, but
he has no physical church structure to take his followers. He appears a
charlatan even as he combines Christianity with traditional religion (the
worship of the water goddess known as Olokun or Mami Wata); hence
he and others like Pastor Efe (whom he later empowers) are referred to
as “God’s medicine-men”. “Medicine-men” is here used as a paradoxical
referent of the known, but often disparaged, practitioners of African
traditional medicine. Ironically too, the writer seems to suggest that there
are some spiritual problems which require handling in the manner Pastor
Odele did Endurance’s against the backdrop of some traditional African
thought that power reinforces power. Unorthodox as they may be, the
admixture of disparate therapies or alternatives are sometimes capable of
restoring balance and harmony to troubled individuals within certain
cultural and spiritual contexts.
Ojaide further explores the manifestation of African spirituality
in his short fiction by interrogating the effects of superstitious beliefs on
the psyche and lifestyle of a person or community. Enajite Ojaruega
attests to the possibility of this line of reasoning when she affirms
elsewhere that: “The Urhobo also believe in the supernatural. For
example, that witches operate in their coven world to cause mischief or
harm to those they are envious of” (Ojaruega, 2015: 141). In both “The
Cherry Tree Palaver” and “Nobody Loves Me”, Ojaide presents
characters whose minds are conditioned to ascribe their problems to the
manipulations of spiritual forces. Once this situation arises, such persons
are bound to act on this impulse as troubled and seek spiritual healing.
This may be despite the fact that these people are only imagining that
negative forces are against them. Among the Urhobo and other Africans,
many people attribute their sicknesses and poverty to spiritual attacks.
This leads many to worry and seek salvation or healing from other than

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scientific sources. Hence, many go to traditional healers or to Pentecostal

pastors for assistance.
In “The Cherry Tree Palaver”, the people of Unoh village have
become disenchanted with the ageless cherry tree and seek “the
destruction of the tree’s resident demon” (38) by cutting it down. The
people experience short lifespan because of their unhealthy habits but put
the blame on witches and evil spirits that they claim meet in coven on
that tree. Clearly, the poor villagers lack scientific knowledge to relate
their unhealthy lifestyles to the premature death of young villagers. They
also lose sight of the tree’s functions in the ecosystem. Worse still, the
exuberant pastor and his member exploit the villagers’ naivety. They
amplify the people’s fears through religious conspiracy theories and even
further propagate the superstition that the sap of the old tree as they cut it
down is the blood of the victims of witchcraft. Subsequently, cutting
down the old tree did not stop people from dying young in the village. It
is noteworthy that at the end of the story, an educated son – a scientist
and a professor of Botany – who was skeptical from the outset about the
people’s views is able through logical reasoning to convince his
superstitious father to change his unfounded beliefs. The sturdy cherry
tree becomes a signification of ignorance that leads to superstitions.
Ojaide seems to be saying here that many of the conditions attributed to
spiritual attacks in Urhobo society (and other parts of Africa) are most
likely as a result of ignorance that leads to senseless action as the cutting
down of the ageless tree and the destruction of the ecosystem of the area.
Ngozi, in “Nobody Loves Me”, is a very beautiful woman at the
prime of her womanhood. However, she is unable to attract the attention
of men to seek for her love or fall in love with her despite her frantic
efforts. She is troubled by all manners of thoughts and even remembers:

… that her elder sister was still living a spinster at forty-five in Aba. Is
it true that the female children of her mother were jinxed not to have
men? An old aunt had died after confessing that nothing could be done
to remove the curse she had placed on her mother’s children (107).

At this stage, her condition becomes psychosomatic as although

not sick physically, her mind is extremely troubled by her unappealing
circumstances such that her appearance becomes lackluster. She seeks
the assistance of a medicine man but her situation does not change for
the better. She falls into depression and ends up committing suicide
because she feels nobody loves her. Depression in many traditional
African societies is often associated with being bewitched. Often, the
fear of stigmatization deprives them from seeking medical help on time
and from trained professionals. Because many who suffer from severe
depression, as in bi-polar or schizophrenic cases, tend to “hear voices,”
55
they would prefer consulting traditional healers for solutions to their
problems. Ngozi’s case does not even degenerate to a severe case of
mental disorder before she takes her own life. Her sense of low self-
esteem might have just been responsible for her not having male
admirers. Her problems appear to be psychological and may not have the
spiritual dimension she relates it to.
An important experience of African spirituality surrounds a
people’s apprehension of their indigenous medical practices and the
forces behind it. Ojaide’s weaves the story of “The Healer’s Favorite Son
Dies” from his latest collection, God’s Naked Children: Selected and
New Stories around this cultural trope. Aderha, whose name means “born
at a crossroads”, is the protagonist and regarded as an enigma for several
reasons. His mother, hard pressed by labor pangs on her way to the
market gave birth to him at a place where three roads meet. Within the
Urhobo and other African traditional cosmology, a crossroads is
regarded as the meeting or gathering place of spirits. It is where humans
make sacrifices and petitions to the spirits for malevolent or benevolent
purposes. The signification of this is that anyone unwittingly caught in
this location would either suffer some form of catastrophe or be the
recipient of good fortunes from these resident spirits.
In Aderha’s case, the spirits were benevolent towards him, thus
he grows up as a superhuman imbued with extraordinary powers. He also
puts these qualities to good use as he takes up the profession of a
traditional healer of mad persons. For the medicines he uses for
treatment, he relies on the efficacy of roots and herbs from plants and
trees coupled with arcane incantations. The narrator tells us that Aderha
spoke and understood the language of the plants as it is believed that the
spirits lived in the plants (153). As a result, he was quite famous and
celebrated as a great medicine man capable of taming “the spirit of
insanity” (144). This affirms the belief among Africans that madness is a
form of spirit possession rather than purely a medical condition.
However, Aderha’s professional fame and good fortune are put to
test when his favorite son and acolyte, Edewor suddenly becomes mad.
Always in his father’s company during his several forays into the forest to
collect herbs for treating patients, Edewor on a particular occasion
ventured far into the forest on his own. His father’s frantic search for him
leads him to the bottom of the akpobrisi tree, where he recovers Edewor,
already besieged by the spirit of madness. Against the background of
Urhobo folklore, the akpobrisi tree is said to be the most feared tree in the
forest and demands certain rites for fortification before a medicine man can
take leaves and barks from it. Aderha had always been the one to do so
when the need arises and always kept his son away from this task. It thus
appeared as if on this particular occasion, Edewor ignorantly violated this
practice when he went out to the forest on his own. He was therefore
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THEORY, HISTORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

assailed by the spirit of the akpobrisi tree which is assumed afflicted him
with the non-violent but incurable type of psychopathy.
The ultimate irony here is the inability of an acclaimed traditional
healer of persons with extreme forms of mental disorders to cure his favorite
son of even a supposedly mild form of insanity. Aderha’s life story which
started on a good note ends in pitiable tragedy as he not only loses his
favorite son to a sickness which he is famous for curing in others, but also
might himself soon succumb to. This is because an attack from the spirit of
the akpobrisi tree is imminent as in his hurry to retrieve his son, he forgot to
perform the rites required for protection. Aderha’s fate reminds one of the
tragedy of Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu upon the death of his favorite son,
Obika in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Both are remembered as male
characters who were abandoned by their spiritual sources of powers in their
moments of greatest needs. Maybe, the lesson to take home from these
representations is that the spirits do not have favorites!

Conclusion
From the focal stories interrogated, Ojaide presents characters
whose physical lives and psychological conditions are associated with,
and controlled by spiritual dimensions against the cultural backdrop of
an African epistemology. The writer’s characters live the spiritual world
in the physical world. Both worlds coalesce to determine the reality of
the living. Even though there are visible and invisible aspects to the lives
of the characters, their portrayal is realistic in the sense that these
configurations are interwoven in reality. Some aspects of the
unfathomable and spiritual may look like fantasy (such as the dead
counseling the living, a lover or husband in the spirit world having a wife
in the living world, and witches meeting at night in coven on top of a
cherry tree), but these are beliefs that many Africans harbor in their
minds and perceive as affecting their lived lives. They also have to be
reconciled in the destinies of humans in order to be able to survive
backlashes from evil humans and spirits. Clearly, for many Africans, the
physical and the spiritual have to be in sync with each other for
emotional and psychological peace and harmony.

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