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By Emmanuel Kanayo
Our Igbo forefathers were gardeners of destiny. They understood one law older than politics: a leaf that forgets the tree becomes firewood.
They taught it with the smallest thing — eriri nwa, the umbilical cord.
The hospital calls it waste. Our people called it a rope. The rope that pulled you from the other world into this one.
So we did not throw it away. We buried it with intention.
A boy’s under the kola tree: “Grow deep like this tree. Be fruitful. Remember home, wherever you go.”
A girl’s by the hearth: “Build a good home. Nurture your people. Bring prosperity.”
With the cord went prayers. With the burial went an address — in the soil and in the spirit.
That was the first lesson, taught in silence: Know your root, or the wind will name you.
To our ancients, root was not sentiment. It was survival.
A man with no place for his cord was “a leaf on election day” — blown from one camp to another, belonging everywhere and nowhere. No anchor. No history. No ancestors to call when trouble comes.
Language, names, taboos, how we settle ikpe, how we bury our dead — these are buried cords. Invisible ropes tying us to the ground that first drank us.
Deny your root and you don’t become modern. You become homeless. You may wear agbada in Abuja, but you’ll spend your life holding press conferences to explain who you are.
And here is where irony puts on agbada — our Etche brothers and sisters in Rivers State.
Listen to Etche and you hear Igbo singing in a different key.
Watch Etche masquerades and you see Igbo spirits wearing a new cap.
Check Etche names, food, proverbs, and you find Igbo fingerprints still wet on the clay pot.
Linguists have classified it. Oral history has traced it. The soil remembers it.
Yet today, some Etche voices stand on podiums to declare: “We are not Igbo.”
As if you can rename rain and expect it to stop falling.
This is the modern way of cutting eriri nwa, burying it, and then suing the midwife for kidnapping.
When a people deny their cord, three things happen. First, you discard ancestral medicine — proverbs, communal labor, conflict resolution — for imported solutions that wither in your soil. Second, you lose your address. If your cord is not in Igboland, is it in a political alliance? Alliances expire every 4 years. Blood does not. A people without a root become rented chairs — used for meetings, then stacked away. Third, you lose your children’s inheritance. Fifty years from now, what will an Etche child answer to “Where are you from?” If the answer is “My leaders were confused,” then that child is already a ghost with a voter’s card.
But knowing your root is not declaring war.
The man who buries his cord in Mbaise can build ten houses in Port Harcourt. The root doesn’t tie his leg. It gives his wings a runway.
The prayer was never “Stay in the village.” It was “May your heart remember home, wherever you go.”
Etche can be Rivers by politics and Igbo by ancestry. Water and garri live in the same bowl. Cutting off your leg because the shoe is tight is not wisdom. It is self-sabotage.
Eriri nwa is not just Etche’s problem. It is a mirror.
Before we throw stones, let us check our dustbin.
What cords are we throwing away? The Igbo we refuse to teach our children because “English is faster”? Our village meetings we now call “bush”? Our names we bleach to sound like WiFi passwords?
Our ancestors watched that stump for ten days. No distraction. Just care.
Identity is like fire. If you don’t feed it, it becomes cold ash.
The wisdom is stubborn:
Before the iroko kisses the sky, something must rot in the ground._
For a person, that “something” is memory and values.
For a people like Etche, that “something” is truth.
You can redraw maps. You can rebrand history. But you cannot rebrand blood. Blood has a memory longer than any government.
A people that honors its cord will always have ground to stand on when the storm comes.
A people that denies it will spend its life looking for land to rent.
_“He who does not know the farm where his umbilical cord was buried will die a tenant in his own life.”
