Retheorising The Pharmakos: The Nso Concept In Narratives Of The Igbo Of Nigeria

Abstract

SummaryNarratives written by Nigerians of the Igbo ethnic stock – those of Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, and others – have been read by critics as positing postcolonial and socio-cultural issues, thanks to Euro-Western theoretic lenses. However, there is more to these – the presence of the pharmakos figure, whose suffering is in excess of his sin or contrasts his (near) innocence. The pharmakos theory always undertakes to weigh a character's punishment against his sin, with the consequence that a certain degree of innocence ends up being imputed to him. Therefore this article, in deploying such pharmakos sub-concepts as the mob, violence and persecution-inducing identification marks, will attempt to bring this figure to the centre of retributive suffering through the indigenous idea of nso. Nso (inexactly translated into English as “taboo” or “abomination”) is the code of order in the Igbo cosmology as ordained by the Earth goddess, Ani/Ala, which when broken beckons on sentence and transforms the seeming innocent personage into the guilty. This article will seek to rehabilitate the conventional pharmakos theory by opening up considerably the possibility of the pharmakos being suitably requited within the existing logic of persecution and suffering as an innocent, or not too guilty, figure. Following insights from the analysis of Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, this work will fundamentally contribute to the overlooked direction of complementing Western critical tools with indigenous methods in reading Nigerian or African literature.