Sheila Chukwulozie and Uzoma Chidumaga Orji

Oulimata Gueye, Paris, 29 November 2021
Arrow of God - The Palm Oil With Which Worlds Are Eaten:
Sheila Chukwulozie & Uzoma Chidumaga Orji

I believe it’s impossible to write anything in Africa without some kind of commitment, some kind of message, some kind of protest. The whole pattern of life demands that you should protest, that you should put in a word for your history, your traditions, your religion and so on.
Chinua Achebe in “Commitment and the African writer”, Africa Report March 1970. 1

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past — with all its imperfections — was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important but so is education of the kind I have in mind: And I don’t see that the two need be mutually exclusive.
Chinua Achebe in “The Novelist as Teacher”, in Morning Yet on Creation Day, London, Heinemann, 1975 2

The artistic practice of Sheila Chukwulozie & Uzoma Chidumaga Orji revolves around a central issue: how to think about the techno-scientific moment in which we find ourselves, starting from their condition as digital natives on the one hand, and their location – Nigeria – on the other. Or to put it another way: how, from this position, can we re-open our thinking on technologies? It is of course a question of asking whether digital technologies are solely the product of Western culture, but beyond that, of asking what conversations to initiate with the algorithmic machine. How can we prepare for a world of artificial intelligence? And what tools can be called upon in the laboratories of alternative practices?

“In our bodies, we work from the perspective of an Igbo Cyborg contending with the state of being simultaneous: fixed | fluid, object | subject, matter | spirit, digital | analog, able | unable, and native | migrant. By juxtaposing local rituals, modern technology, and traditional myths, our practice as a duo interrogates what rests unseen or unheard whenever an Other asks that one “behave oneself” in a post-colonial body.”
Sheila Chukwulozie & Uzoma Chidumaga Orji

As "histo-futurists" – a term I like to borrow from the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, who defined herself as someone who looks forward without turning her back on the past, paying attention to the human and the technology at the same time – Sheila & Uzoma go back to the long history of Igbo cosmogony to imagine how to evolve in an environment determined by the media. How to develop algorithms that would integrate philosophical and spiritual dimensions? How to design digital technologies and practices that are not aligned with hegemonic and neo-colonialist models?

From this perspective, Sheila & Uzoma presume that 'Igbo proverbs as a technology can inform a planetary conversation on technological futures'. Drawing on a study of Chinua Achebe's (1930-2013) Arrow of God, the artists approach language use like media archaeologists examining a computer memory card.

Okenye anaghị anọ n’ụlọ ewu amụ ọ n’ọgbụrị
(A great position entails a great responsibility) 3

Arrow of God, published in 1964, takes us back to the colonial context of the 1920s. It is the third in a tetralogy that includes Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God and A Man of the People (1966). The novel is set in the village and centres on the character of Ezeulu, the traditional priest. In a dispute with a neighbouring village, Ezeulu supports the position of the colonisers, which he believes is right. The gesture is seen as a betrayal by his compatriots. Captain Winterbottom, who is the colonial authority, wants to reward him by offering him the new position of local chief, but Ezeulu refuses because this position does not have the divine character of his position as a priest. He was taken to prison by the colonists for thirty days. On his release, he decreed that since he had not been able to perform the usual rites to announce the beginning of the harvest, he would have to wait another thirty days to authorise the villagers to dig up the yams. As the famine begins, the clan challenges Ezeulu's authority and he ends up going mad. Taking advantage of the villagers' desperation, the missionaries encourage them to bring their yams for Christian blessing.

The book is written in English because Chinua Achebe claimed the right to use English and transform it to suit his needs. But the writing of Arrow of God is mostly punctuated with local proverbs and legends. Achebe writes: Because the Igbo have not constructed a rigid and detailed system of thought to explain the universe and man's place in it, preferring the metaphor of myth and poetry, it is here that those who wish to understand their world must look: in tales, proverbs, proper names, rituals and festivals. (1975 :132) 4

Chinua Achebe wrote Arrow of God in the 1960s, a time of great tension and frustration for the Igbo, and can be seen as a foreshadowing of the events that would profoundly affect Nigeria. In the wake of Chinua Achebe, artists Sheila & Uzoma see the recognition of the Igbo language as a civilisational vector that resists the process of destruction. How can we think of language as a technology, more precisely as a mnemonic device: what information is recorded and stored in the proverbs that we could use today? Their project was initially based on the conception of time in the Igbo language and culture: "Proverbs are timekeeping technology in Igboland. Instead of just telling you what time it is, a proverb will suggest what that time is for. For example, if the time has come for the people to change the way they live, an elder may encourage self-belief by saying "when a man says yes, his Chi says yes", they explain. The project soon expanded to include aspects of organisation and management of space and vernacular algorithms and concluded with a recognition of the power of popular culture.

If Achebe uses Igbo language as a tool in a changing world in his novels, science fiction writer Octavia Butler asks in the short story Speech Sounds 5 what humanity would do in a world without speech and writing. In the post-apocalyptic world of ‘Speech Sounds’ (1983), a virus has robbed humans of their ability to speak and read, returning the species to a pre-linguistic animality. Some individuals try to resist the inevitable regression. The loss of language has ethical implications that Speech Sounds implicitly highlights: in the absence of what makes ethical social life possible, not only has the socio-economic superstructure collapsed in on itself, but ethical concern for the other has been replaced by violence and indifference.

1 VERSINGER, Georgette. “Un Auteur Africain à l’Agrégation : Chinua Achebe.” Présence Africaine, no. 115, Présence Africaine Editions, 1980, pp. 188–93, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24350103.

2 op. cit.

3 Awa SAMUEL, La problématique de l'équivalence en traduction littéraire: le cas des proverbes dans Le monde s'effondre et La flèche de Dieu de Chinua Achebe, April 2016, University of Nigeria

 4 Françoise UGOCHUKWU, « L'organisation et la gestion de l'espace dans la langue et la culture igbo du Nigeria », Journal des africanistes [En ligne], 79-1 | 2009, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2012, consulté le 29 novembre 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/africanistes/2385; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/africanistes.2385

5  Octavia E. BUTLER, Speech Sounds was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1983. It won Butler her first Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1984.

Wrestling with human and machine language, Serubiri Moses

What I find deeply inspiring about the project, Proverbial Protocols, initiated by Sheila Chukwulozie and Uzoma Orji, is that it wrestles with language (both human and machine), and by doing so, helps us consider the mild uncertainty regarding machine languages, or software and its many advanced languages today. I will proceed by telling a story – hoping to assimilate the spirit of the Proverbial Protocols. As a software engineering undergraduate student, my encounter with CGI technology was confusing. Gaming, Nintendo, Sega Saturn, Pinochio, Godzilla and Batman movies, and even typing tutoring were so familiar to me. So visuality was not the issue of my concern. However, I wondered why it seemed that graphic interface technology was more “accessible” and more readily available than the other languages we studied including C++, C# and Java, among others. It puzzled me that, for some, CGI tech (3D Imaging, 3D rendering, or still or animated visual content in software) was considered marketable and job-friendly. A few classmates only a year into the undergraduate course – which comprised learning close to 20 software languages – decided to drop out to pursue “web design”.

Thus, the conundrum that I felt at that time was what distinguished “web design” and other technologies? Why was “web design” and CGI tech more readily available; and why was it considered more financially lucrative? Yet this was not all that software or its language seemed to offer, for example, for some engineers “front end” and “back end” technology was distinct and demanded a different set of skills. My particular skill set had to do with the “back end”, and thus, I looked forward to my professors' clarifications, and even debates, that emerged while debugging code in the classroom. I looked forward to clarifications of flow-charts and machine language protocols. I looked forward to the debates on the science of the language – to the mathematical philosophy that underpinned technological functionality, guided by my professors, who had trained in mathematics.

This story reminds me of Uzoma and Sheila’s Digital Earth fellowship studio crit sessions in which several of the faculty and student body wrestled with their “translation” of proverbs (in Igbo and English) into a visual medium (still, printed, animated, moving image visual content). At one point, a faculty member suggested “Siri” as a model for proverb translation. Thinking back to that crit session now, I reflect on it differently because of my belief that the “front end” and “back end” dichotomy is false. What might it mean for Proverbial Protocols to remain distinctly a work of language such as oral, written, or programmed language? What might it mean to think of Uzoma and Sheila’s work as a work of code? To borrow Uzoma’s question, what might it mean to have Chinua Achebe’s internet? Contrary to this, our current fascination with “front end” and CGI technologies obscures the reality of “back end” tech, such that when software engineers at Facebook and Google begin protesting, we rarely understand how much their work impacts the Feed or the Timeline. What I might imagine for a Proverbial Protocol is that front and back end processes could be equally considered, such that working with “back end” programmers through protocols of language and proverbs, such as developing code flow-charts to illustrate various language protocols found in the novels of Chinua Achebe could be just as exciting as developing complex graphic and visual interfaces.