03/12/2017
Explored by this submission is the concept of dibia or healer and the representations of dibia, including the nuances of dibia and why being a dibia is a culturally endorsed professional role. Drawing from fieldwork and research, the paper shows the dynamics of cultural construction of fields of healing occupational practices in Igbo of Nigeria. It argues for why indigenous medical practitioners in Nigeria need to be taken seriously in modern ways of training healers in university settings and moreso in the context of promoting integral health care for development at all levels. The key focus is on how levels of care should necessitate the recognition of the rich medical resources requiring endogenous imagination and biomedical logic and creativity. It calls that ethnographic studies are of necessity to further examine the dimensions of Igbo medicine and culture – and advances that critical reports from endogenous medical studies will open avenues to harvest and use the valuable cultural resources and results meaningfully – in giving care and in sustaining the identity of Igbo medicine and culture in its own right. Entirely, the paper seeks to point out how the dibia is commonly called and represented with diverse meanings in Igbo life and culture.
Key Terms: Endogenous imagination, Igbo medicine, healers, culture, development, integration, multiple skills and resources.
Introduction
As health is critical to life, development requires knowledge, time and resources to face the vicissitudes of life. Our knowledge and health condition affect us more powerfully. When people fall sick, they do something to recover. Every society has healers or dibia in Igbo parlance to help them understand forms of illness and how to cure them. The office of a healer and symbols of healing can be as complex as it may be commonly understood, including the notions and representations the medicine practitioners are associated with.
From the Goethe Institute, Lagos, Kole Ade-Odutola contacted me in 2007 after reading my work on Nigerian healer-practitioners and provided me with the Report of pre-conference work session on traditional medicine and therapy held in 1997. His obvious concern, I do agree, is on what we can do to produce knowledge in the alternative systems of healing – especially bringing the hidden possibilities, products and procedures to the open similar to what was done with the Chinese system of acupressure and acupuncture. I think we can begin by studying the dibia and why one is called and represented as dibia in Igbo in the first place. Given some personal communication with Remy Ilona, a historian in Abuja of Nigeria, he argued that we often claim we know what the dibia does, but the truth is that we have not studied them and therefore know little or nothing to represent them accurately. The vernacular of Igbo medicine is undeveloped and rarely accessed. Remy Ilona is right and I grant that healers deserve scholarly attention in the integration language of health care development. Now, the paper explores who is a dibia in the cosmology of life and healing and depicts the dibia’s cultural power base and healing symbols. It shows the critical values and validation processes placed on becoming a healer, the perceptions and complex nature of healers and roles in the university training programs in Nigeria is pointed out. How a dibia is concurrently referred to as a native doctor, witch doctor, pagan priest, and other nuances over time to reflect deeper things in Igbo life and culture. Isiguzo captures one characterization of a dibia as eze nmuo due to colour and attire put on at rituals while discussing African culture and symbolism. Drawing from fieldwork in Igboland and by adopting a descriptive and semantic approach, the paper shows the form of endogenous power and resources Igbo healers offer to critical healing needed in the pragmatics of illness interventions. I start with the etymology of dibia, followed by the clarification of transformational Igbo sage valourizing – dibia bu agbara to bekee bu agbara – that has become a colonial signature in the Nigerian technological development psyche and imagination.
The Etymology of Dibia
Etymology often shows the different forms a word such as dibia has taken in passing from one language and generation to another. Regarding dibia, I have not come across any Igbo studies where dibia has been critically analyzed or presented. Though common references are made to dibia, we require understanding of the word in its own right as a preoccupation in Igbo society. While conducting fieldwork in Igboland, I asked both individual healers and the collective association of healers called Ndi Oha Dibia themselves why they answer dibia and not something else. From their effort to explain, a dibia is a healer, onye na-agwo oria. But does the same dibia cause illness – dibia o na-atu oria? – like in biomedical situations where knowingly or not practitioners cause illness or bring about complications. Further, informants said that a dibia is formed by two words: di and bia. The prefix di refers to a master, holder of authority and power like in di bi ulo (household head), di nta (master hunter), and di mgba (master wrestler). Forming words of mastery and expertise by using the prefix di is common in Igbo logic of naming and characterizing activities of mastery and competence. Yet joining di to bia does not immediately bring out the connotation of someone to be a healer. I sought to know why bia is joined to di in the case of healing. Further explanation held that di~bia is a shortened form of dibiala (master of things of the land, community, cosmological forces, fortune, misfortune, illness and remedy).
It is sensible to say that a dibia is one who has a deep knowledge and skills of holding a land and its people for peace and growth. As di, a healer is ascribed with the power and authority of a master to welcome and direct the things of the land through rites of kinship cohesion, fecundity and progress. The suffix bia from di means ability to welcome and direct events, life courses and order of a society. Culturally, I point out that a dibia (dibiala) is a designer of fortune and cleanser of wrongs of the land. The dibia stands out as a cultural ethical ritual logician who welcomes, directs and provides endogenous means of interactive embodiments and cosmology of life forces as a whole. A dibia is therefore a master of the land ethos – offering ancestral wisdom, customs and traditions of being and becoming. Ala, land as pointed out by Uwazie forms the central core of Igbo consciousness. Isichei noted it as the totality of Igbo life – for that reason culture and customs revolve around it at the watch of the elders and ritual experts, namely the dibia. Essentially the moral universe of the Igbo, their food and water, gods, destinies, opportunities, misfortunes, illnesses and remedial ways are from the land. Nonetheless, Elsewhere, John Umeh seemingly identified a dibia with the title After God is Dibia. The same applies to Anezionwu’s Ahiajoku Lecture at Owerri captioned Chukwu ka Dibia in 1988. Even my most recent works also did not specifically report the etymology of dibia as I have provided it here and I think it is important to recognize the massive authority and power that a dibia embodies and weighs in the things of the land – calming down (ijiala, ibiala, di~ibiala) – a master who re-authors the land. Entirely, a dibia for the Igbo is a cosmological engineer – a relational order builder of this world and that world, health and society, descent and blood, kin-people and neighbours, fortune and misfortune, fecundity and expansion. Csorda’s recognition of embodiment as a paradigm for knowledge system reflects the dibia as a body that heals. The argument is that the body that we heal is not an object to be studied in relation to culture, but is to be considered as the subject of culture. In other words, a dibia is to be seen as the existential ground of culture, knowledge system, of the land and all else
Of dibia, agbara, bekee and colonial signature
In Igbo oracle of life and culture, dibia bu agbara, it is said. That is, a dibia is often rightly or wrongly viewed as a transformed spirit god or agent of spiritual care. Before colonialism the common cultural expression associated with people who performed or achieved amazing feats is dibia bu agbara. My grandfather, late Dede, a great local surgeon, general healer and hunter alias Ogbue Osibe (kill and cook) – told me when I was carrying his medicine bag as a young boy that usually a dibia shares a ritual relationship with a powerful deity – hence dibia bu agbra to heal wrongs. Little did I know I will grow up to become a knowledge worker and pen healer. But today the above Igbo sage is transformed and being eulogized as bekee bu agbara. The white man is spirit. That is, amazing. There are many things yet to be researched, debated and agreed or disagreed upon towards understanding the Igbo of Nigeria as an authentic and autochthonous seminal society. The concept of dibia is a virgin area for scholarship and intellection attention. Like culture which is not a fixed concept, changing with people and society, a dibia adapts in response to needs and circumstances of individuals and society served.
A common view on a situation when someone does something that either creates a wonder, amazement, awesomeness, ingenuity and class is linked to agbara. Any act of achievement, surprise, ingenious display of sense and skill to solve a problem considered intractable or extremely challenging, the Igbo refer to such as having a sense of and characteristic of agbara, spiritual capacity and ability. Helped to understand with this notion is a dibia as a transformed agbara is a status symbol for high achievers. A dibia embodies a layer of forces – ecological and awe-inspiring, in other words transcendental and transformational – illness to health, misfortune to fortune, weakness to strength, lack of power to empowerment, inability to ability and capacity, invisible to visible reality. But one can only give what one has – spiritually, materially and culturally. A dibia is empowered to be all that is – and is consequently represented. Deities or minor spirits are found everywhere in Igbo localities but only a few can be classed as agbara, in other words, dibia di ire (effective and meaningful healer). Like agbara, a dibia is an institution and status quo ante to be grown into. Being agbara is reckoned with being the iroko, osisi or icheku chere mba. A dibia is transformed to shade a community. A dibia resonates with a cultural metaphor applied to the theory of health and life people live with. Dibia bu agbara rather than bekee bu agbara (a medicine man is spirit, magical, wonderful, a trail blazer) is a constructed reference to imply achieving feats to resolve problems.
A sense of being agbara can relate to a metonym of being exceedingly a utility, enigmatic and belligerent. In understood dibia pari passu with agbara, it elevates one’s cultural intelligence to correspond with problem solving. Phenomenally, supernatural beings exist. There are known sites for agbara – and ritual experts do make known the reality of the powers and attributes of the deity. Elsewhere, I discussed Igbo oracles and shrines and showed some deities and their features, such as ahiajoku, agwu, ikenga, alawala, anyanwu, and amadioha. Now let us briefly identify the Igbo in Nigeria and situate who is a healer within the society.
