What should be natural to us is no longer natural.
Perhaps that is where the story of Okpara House begins.
We have become estranged from ways of knowing, thinking, organizing, and understanding ourselves that once required little explanation. The continuity through which knowledge, values, language, institutions, and ways of seeing the world might ordinarily pass from one generation to another has been profoundly disrupted.
As a result, recovery requires effort.
It requires patience.
Yet patience has become increasingly difficult to sustain. We live in an age of immediacy, and for peoples who have been persuaded that they are behind, the temptation to hurry is even greater. We want to arrive without undertaking the journey.
But there are some things that cannot be circumvented.
We cannot bypass the naturally required steps toward a desired outcome and still expect that outcome to possess depth, integrity, or permanence. What we build will inevitably reveal what was—or was not—placed into its foundations.
The Problem of the Shortcut
A certain kind of deprivation has made us susceptible to shortcuts.
We have been persuaded that we are behind. From that premise follows an understandable urgency: if others are ahead, then we must catch up.
But catch up to whom?
And according to whose measure?
For generations, we have measured ourselves against standards established elsewhere and accepted the proposition that progress means reducing the distance between ourselves and those standards.
This has produced a peculiar condition. We are constantly attempting to become adequate according to definitions we did not establish.
We must interrupt this cycle and finally do right by ourselves.
That requires understanding what happened to us.
Colonialism did more than impose political and economic systems. It introduced another people’s worldview and elevated that worldview into a universal measure.
Among its most devastating instruments was shame.
Languages, institutions, philosophies, spiritual systems, technologies, aesthetics, social arrangements, and ways of understanding existence were recast as evidence of backwardness. What belonged to another people’s historical experience was presented not simply as another way of organizing human life, but as the destination toward which civilized humanity was expected to progress.
Another civilization’s particular experience of the world became the standard by which civilization itself was measured.
We Were Educated as Though We Had No Arc
The consequences became particularly profound as we entered modern systems of literacy and formal education.
We learned to read through an archive that was overwhelmingly not our own.
We encountered the histories of other peoples, their philosophers, religions, literature, political thought, scientific traditions, discoveries, heroes, chronologies, institutions, and arguments about the nature of the human being.
Their civilizational continuities accompanied them into the classroom.
Ours did not accompany us with equivalent authority.
This absence could easily be mistaken for nonexistence.
The tragedy is not that we had no civilizational arc.
We were educated as though we did not.
That distinction lies close to the heart of Okpara House.
The work before us is therefore not to invent a civilization retrospectively. Nor is it to manufacture an identity adequate to the present.
It is to recover enough continuity with ourselves that we can once again participate in the world from a position of self-knowledge.
A Civilizational Arc
This is part of why I wrote the six books I have called A Civilizational Arc.
The title is deliberately not a claim that these books constitute the Igbo civilizational arc. No six books could contain something so vast.
They are an incision into the larger civilizational continuum of the Igbo.
Through questions of erasure, remembering, personhood, morality, cosmology, responsibility, and the meaning of being Mmàdu, the books enter fragments of a much larger body of knowledge. Their purpose is not to complete that body but to reveal its presence—to demonstrate that beneath what appears fragmented lies a deeper continuity worthy of investigation, recovery, reinterpretation, and extension.
The arc exists beyond these books.
The books merely allow us to enter it.
And this is important because recovery must not be confused with return.
The purpose is not to reconstruct an earlier world and inhabit it again. Time has moved. We have changed. The world has changed.
Nor does recovery require us to preserve everything inherited simply because it is ours.
To know ourselves is also to acquire the confidence to interrogate ourselves.
We should possess the intellectual sovereignty to determine what remains valuable, what requires reinterpretation, what should be abandoned, and what might yet be created.
That is a very different proposition from either wholesale rejection of the past or wholesale adoption of the present.
It is authorship.
The Knowledge Was There
One of the strange experiences of contemporary African life is encountering ideas presented to us as discoveries and then recognizing, beneath unfamiliar terminology, something our own languages and inherited systems already understood.
Look deeply enough into language and it begins to reveal a world.
Concepts are embedded there. Relationships. Philosophies. Distinctions. Moral propositions. Observations about human behavior. Ways of understanding nature, community, responsibility, time, life, death, and continuity.
This does not mean that our ancestors knew everything.
No civilization did.
It means something much simpler and more consequential: they were thinking.
They were observing.
They were building knowledge.
And when the structures that carried that knowledge were weakened or displaced, we did not merely lose information. We began losing the language through which we recognized the intellectual content of what remained.
The knowledge was there.
The language for recognizing it was lost.
Okpara House begins from the proposition that what remains deserves serious attention.
Appreciation Does Not Require Surrender
None of this requires diminishing the extraordinary achievements of the modern world.
I began articulating some of these thoughts while aboard a flight from Atlanta to Chicago, marveling at the enormous complexity hidden inside something we now experience as almost mundane.
Commercial air travel represents an astonishing coordination of engineering, science, manufacturing, navigation, logistics, communications, infrastructure, regulation, labor, and accumulated knowledge. Systems of almost incomprehensible complexity have been organized so effectively that the passenger is spared most of their mental burden.
We buy a ticket. We arrive at an airport. We find a gate. We sit in a chair.
And some hours later, we emerge hundreds or thousands of miles away.
There is something magnificent about that.
The stewardship of the West in developing, organizing, preserving, institutionalizing, and extending significant dimensions of modern knowledge deserves acknowledgment and respect. Recognition of the violence, exclusions, and destruction that accompanied aspects of that history should not require intellectual dishonesty about its achievements.
We should be capable of holding both truths simultaneously.
But appreciation does not require surrender.
To admire what another civilization has accomplished does not require accepting that civilization’s historical experience as the singular template for human advancement.
We cannot afford a human future in which there is only one legitimate path through life.
One conception of progress.
One definition of civilization.
One understanding of knowledge.
One measure of wealth.
One answer to what it means to be human.
Humanity is too large for that.
Our Answers Deserve to Remain Among Them
Human beings emerged from different landscapes, histories, climates, languages, environments, experiences, and encounters with existence.
From that plurality came different systems of knowledge and different responses to enduring human questions:
What is a human being?
What constitutes a good life?
What do we owe one another?
What is our relationship to the natural world?
What is wealth?
What is progress?
What should endure?
Humanity has never answered these questions in only one way.
Its richness lies partly in the fact that it did not.
Okpara House emerged from the conviction that our own answers deserve to remain among them.
Not because they are Igbo and must therefore be defended regardless of merit.
Not because the past possesses some inherent purity.
And not because the world should exchange one form of cultural supremacy for another.
They deserve to remain because the human conversation is diminished whenever an entire people’s accumulated encounter with existence becomes inaccessible—even to the descendants of those who produced it.
That is the larger work.
A Civilizational Arc is one incision into it.
Okpara House is an attempt to create a place from which that work can continue.
A place for recovery, inquiry, conversation, making, criticism, reinterpretation, and eventually creation.
The objective is not simply to remember who we were.
It is to recover sufficient authorship to determine who we might yet become.
Before we can determine where we are going, however, we must understand what happened to us.
What survived.
What was interrupted.
What we have forgotten.
What remains.
And what is still ours to carry forward.
There is no shortcut around that work.
We have tried the shortcuts.
Perhaps it is time to do the patient work of knowing ourselves again.