What does it mean to be an an Igbo person (onye Igbo)?

Growing up, I had the benefit of a father who told us what it meant to be an Igbo person, onye Igbo. Much of our tradition is oral, so there isn’t an abundance of books that tells us who we are, our history, or our traditions. And so my father did what was done for him: he told us about our people, our history, our norms, over and over and over again. In fact, he still does.

Some of what he said to us bears repeating.

When we were growing up, my dad would say, successful Igbo business men were the most frugal people on earth. They would work for so many years in their trade, night and day, saving almost every penny they earned after buying necessities. In fact, if you didn’t know them, you might never believe they actually had a way to earn a living. That’s how simply they lived. After years of hard work, they might one day buy a bicycle. Now, remember, at the time, cars were not part of broader society at least in eastern Nigeria. A bicycle was a very big deal, and would certainly be received as such by the community. But a bicycle is a means of transportation that he would conclude was a wise investment.

But ultimately, the only way you’d know how rich this man truly was, is when his children grow up and go to school. They would attend the most expensive schools money could buy. When they get their certificates and collect their degrees, he would frame them and decorate his house with them. If you insult him, he will tell you that one of his erudite children will sort you out when they return from their excellent jobs in faraway places, and that if you don’t believe him, come to his house and see all their fancy degrees hanging on his wall. And this, his children’s achievement, really was what set the rich man apart from the poor man.

I love this story, even though I’ve heard it many times almost verbatim during the course of my life. I almost tell myself this story when I see some of us Igbos, who clearly were never told this story behave in ways that are incongruent with my idea of what it means to be onye Igbo. I learned from my father what set the smart Igbo man (and woman) apart from others. We work hard, we value education—almost above everything else one could acquire in life, we spend wisely, we forgo material extravagance, and we invest in things that matter.