ON OMUGWUO vs NKUH’UMAN

ON OMUGWUO vs NKUH’UMA

Cultural imperialism is the spread of one culture over another. Put simply, cultural imperialism is cultural export. The channels of spread include but not limited to education, trade, technology. But the most effective of them all is the media.

This approach to cultural spread stands on the other side of colonisation where a weaker country is forced to adopt the cultural values of a stronger country through direct political or military control. And when cultural imperialism succeeds, the result is called cultural hegemony.

Away from the pictured case of first and third world countries, cultural imperialism and the resultant cultural hegemony can also happen within a country. That is when the ruling or dominant tribe maintains power not only through political or economic control but also by sustaining the dominance of their culture, values, and ideas over others, and it often leads people to accept that dominance as normal or common sense.

Past few days, I have seen different opinions on Akwa Ibom people preferring the use of Omugwuo (an igbo titling for a mother’s visit to her married daughter after childbirth), against the Ibibio translation of the same term (Nkuh’uman).

The simple truth is that we have not been doing enough to export our cultural features compared to the efforts of the Igbo tribe in spreading theirs. Without any fault of ours, the Igbo tribe naturally dominates the Ibibio both in population and geographical space. They are even one of the three major tribes in Nigeria. Yet, despite falling behind the Yorubas, they have been seriously competing with them in the spread of cultural values using entertainment media.

Since inception, Igbo and Yoruba producers of movies and songs infiltrate the scripts with their languages indiscriminately in contents meant for the larger Nigerian society, but the few producers we had at that big stage never had such nerves. It was just the local drama and core Ibibio movies we had, until recently when the likes of Nse Ikpe and Zillions, Ikpa Udo began to change the narrative.

Documented history matters a lot. That is what the Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars have been battling on for decades. The former claims Africa had no history until the Europeans arrived, while the latter argues that Africa had history because it existed before the whites came, only that there was no literacy for the history to be documented. But despite the existence of oral tradition which is a source of history, the western scholars still claim that written history is the most reliable.

So the Omogwuo dominance over Nkuh’uman is most likely just a result of the years of consuming those nollywood contents from Igbo producers— the movies where the likes of Patience Ozokwor, Rita Edochie, Camilla Mbrekpe, Chinyere Wilfred, Ngozi Ezeonu dominated the screens and often played the mother/mother in law roles
…because, tell me why an Ibibio indigene goes to Lagos and lives for a few years, then comes home and prides over speaking Yoruba over their mother tongue.

Lastly, what I didn’t understand about the omogwuo arguments was why they said the use of the same term in English translation would have been better than in Igbo. You cannot be accepting cultural export on one hand and reject same on the other.