A Critical Examination of Ochelamu: The Concept of the Human Person from an Idoma Perspective
Abstract
This article repositions Ochelamu, the Idoma concept of the human person, as more than an indigenous theory of human composition. Rather than asking only what the Idoma person is made of, it asks how the idea of the person works: how it classifies bodies, assigns responsibility, sustains kinship, authorizes memory, and exposes vulnerable lives to judgment. Drawing on interviews conducted in Adoka in 2019, we argue that Ochelamu operates as a social technology of recognition. Its constituent elements do not merely name metaphysical parts; they regulate who becomes legible as honorable, dangerous, responsible, diminished, remembered, or ritually significant. The article’s central contribution is to show that Idoma personhood is ethically ambivalent: the same grammar that sacralizes life and sustains communal obligation can also moralize illness, gender blame, infertility, disability, aging, and widowhood. By shifting from ontology to the politics of recognition, the study challenges romantic accounts of African relationality and offers a critical framework for understanding how African concepts of the human become practical instruments of care, accusation, hierarchy, and repair.
Downloads
References
Abah, Joshua Abah. “Conceptualizing the Idoma Alekwu Tradition as an African Philosophy of
Peace.” BOYUT Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 4, no. 27 (2025): 90–111.
Allam, Onmoke Sylvester. “Unmasking ‘Alekwu’ Religious Experience among the Idoma
People-Group of Nigeria.” GNOSI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis 1, no. 2 (2018): 118–130.
Andanda, Pamela, and Marcus Düwell. “Individualistic Versus Relational Ethics – A Contestable
Concept for (African) Philosophy.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-024-10445-0.
Attoe, Aribiah David. “Death and Meaning(lessness): Re-examining the African View.”
Religious Studies 59 (2023): 311–325.
Barnes, Sandra T., ed. Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New. 2nd expanded ed. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997.
Calhoun, Laurie. “Moral Personhood and Human Security.” International Journal of Peace
Studies 10, no. 1 (2005): 87–110.
Chemhuru, Munamato. “The Ontological Foundation of African Knowledge: A Critical
Discourse in African Communitarian Knowledge.” In African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 91–107. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
De Craemer, Willy. “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Personhood.” The Milbank Memorial
Fund Quarterly. Health and Society 61, no. 1 (1983): 19–34.
Ekanola, Adebola Babatunde. “A Naturalistic Interpretation of the Yoruba Concepts of Ori.”
Philosophia Africana 9, no. 1 (March 2006): 41–52.
Hinga, Teresia Mbari. 2005. “Afterlife: African Concepts.” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed.
Accessed March 1, 2019. https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/afterlife-african-concepts.
Ikhane, Peter Aloysius, and Isaac E. Ukpokolo. “Introduction: On the Meaning and Discourse of
African Epistemology.” In African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 1–15. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
Ikuenobe, Polycarp. “Good and Beautiful: A Moral-Aesthetic View of Personhood in African
Communal Traditions.” Essays in Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2016): 125–163.
Ikuenobe, Polycarp. “Relational Autonomy, Personhood, and African Traditions.” Philosophy
East and West 65, no. 4 (2015): 1005–1029.
Imafidon, Elvis. “The Concept of Person in an African Culture and Its Implication for Social
Order.” Lumina 23, no. 2 (2012): 1–19.
Ipadeola, Abosede Priscilla. “Elẹ́ẹ̀rí as Omọlúàbí: The Interface of Epistemic Justification and
Virtue Ethics in an African Culture.” In African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 131–142. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
Jimoh, Anselm Kole. “Knowledge and Truth as Interaction Between the Knower and Being:
Knowing in African Epistemology.” In African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 35–52. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
Lajul, Wilfred. “Being as the Object of Knowledge in African Spaces.” In African Epistemology:
Essays on Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 79–90. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
Lartey, Emmanuel Y. “Be-ing in Relation: The Goal of African Spiritual Practice.” In
Postcolonial Images of Spiritual Care: Challenges of Care in a Neoliberal Age, edited by Emmanuel Y. Lartey and Hellena Moon, 17–28. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2020.
McCalla, Sandra. “From Ontology to Knowledge Acquisition in Africa and the Caribbean: What
Can Be Known for Certain?” In African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 115–130. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
Molefe, Motsamai. African Personhood and Applied Ethics. Makhanda, South Africa: NISC
(Pty) Ltd, 2020.
Oduma-Aboh, Solomon Ochepa. “The Symbolic Death of Monarchs in the Process of
Installation in Idoma Land: A Paradigm for Fighting Corruption in Nigeria.” Global Journal of Human-Social Science: H Interdisciplinary 15, no. 2 (2015): 1–10.
Oduma-Aboh, Solomon Ochepa, James Bako Danjuma Tella, and Ochoga Edwin Ochoga.
“Rethinking Agila Traditional Methods of Conflict Resolution and the Need to Institutionalize Indigenous Methods of Conflict Resolution in Nigeria.” IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities 4, no. 3 (August 2018): 104–116.
Oyowe, Oritsegbubemi Anthony. “Personhood and the Strongly Normative Constraint.”
Philosophy East and West 68, no. 3 (July 2018): 783–801.
Ukpokolo, Isaac E. “Truth in African (Esan) Philosophy.” In African Epistemology: Essays on
Being and Knowledge, edited by Peter Aloysius Ikhane and Isaac E. Ukpokolo, 107–114. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023.
Ushe, Mike Ushe. The Mortgage Culture of Tiv Death and Burial Rites Responsibility. Ibadan,
Nigeria: Vast Publishers, 2010.
Wiredu, Kwasi. “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality.”
Research in African Literatures 40, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 8–18.
The authors and co-authors warrant that the article is their original work, does not infringe any copyright, and has not been published elsewhere. By submitting the article to GPH-International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research, the authors agree that the journal has the right to retract or remove the article in case of proven ethical misconduct.
