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| Anayo Nwosu |
An Nnewi man whose wife is yet to
conceive a male child is heavily constrained by his tradition in his choice of
modern options available to him to have a male child of his own. He knows the
implications of adopting a male as his first child.
Nnewi is a profoundly religious
town. We are so religious in our culture and traditions, and we also take the
issue of lineage very seriously. If the cause of infertility is with the man,
he could be assisted by a relation or another man. DNA testing to establish
paternity is not for Nnewi people. Payment of bride price or evidence of
marriage or ịmachili nwanyị is the confirmatory test for a child's paternity in
Nnewi. The male child undeniably belongs to a man as long as the son is born by
his wife. But to adopt a son entirely born of different parents is a big
problem.
An adopted son may be legal, but
he will never become the Obi or the hereditary head of his extended family or ụmụnna.
He would also not be allowed to carry the holy ọfọ Okenye of his father's
extended family. An adopted son cannot be our traditional ruler or Igwe of
Nnewi. Neither can he be the Obi of any of the four villages that make up Nnewi
to which ascendancy is by heredity, and the heir must be a pure breed. If you
are from Nnewi and you adopted a son, you must let your son know his limited
citizenship rights. He can be anything in your own family but not in the
extended family. You cannot impose an outsider to lead your relations. Your
quest to have an outsider as a son is considered selfish. How can an adopted
son superintend the sharing of an ancestral land? To which ancestors will he
beckon during the breaking of kola nut?
The options available for an
Nnewi man who has challenges in siring a son are as follows:
1. Surrogacy: In which someone
known or unknown to him will help impregnate his wife.
2. Take a second wife or third or
fourth till he gets a son.
3. If his new faith does not
support options 1 & 2 above, he could adopt his brother's male child. Such
son will be anything except to inherit the Obi if he is not next in line. But
he can inherit his adopted father's assets and liabilities and be called his
son.
An amụful Nnewi man believes in
the doctrine of "One Man One Wife" as long as he has got a son from
his only wife. The determination to sustain a lineage is more critical to an
Nnewi man than a religious belief. It is rather a patriotic duty. Many
Christians do not know that Jesus descended from Solomon, whose mother was not
the first wife of King David, and that all the sons of Jacob, including those
he sired from the maids of his wives, were counted as legitimate. Further, we
have seen the christian churches ordain children from polygamous homes as
priests and bishops.
When you have a male child in
Nnewi, you can name him "Afamefuna", meaning "may my lineage
never cease or quench or forgotten." I need to state here that female
children now take better care of their ageing parents than their male
counterparts, but only the male child advances the lineage of an Nnewi man.
There are families in Nnewi where the male children are completely useless and
irresponsible in that their only worth is their gender. One may ask if parents
are not better of with female-only useful children. Unfortunately, it is what
it is. Our tradition has rigged everything against the female folks.
If you are an Nnewi couple in
need of adoption, why not adopt a female child if at all you need to? An
adopted female child has all the rights of an Nnewi daughter. In that area, ndị
Nnewi are gender-sensitive. The preferred option is to adopt from the children
of a relative(s) as our ancestors did. Many from my place view adoption of a
male stranger of unknown parentage into the family as selfishness, wickedness
and a bid to cause a cultural confusion within an umunna or a clan.
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