Ngozi Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Afamefuna: An Encyclopedia of Igbo Names

Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria: Anchor Book Publisher Africa, 2024, 428 pp. ISBN: 978-978-767-210-5, paperback

The second edition of Ngozi Ezenwa-Ohaeto's Afamefuna: An Encyclopedia of Igbo Names, is a collection of more than 6,500 Igbo names and their meanings. The Encyclopedia is an attempt to achieve exactly the literal meaning of its title: ‘Afamefuna’ (‘May my name not get lost’). Other names that mean the same thing as it are ‘Amaechina’ and ‘Amaefula.’ In the Igbo world view, such names reflect the people's desire for the perpetuation of their lineage. ‘Ama’ in the deeper Igbo context means ‘my path’ or ‘my lineage’ while ‘echina’ or ‘efula’ means ‘not close’ or ‘go into extinction.’ In most situations when a child is named ‘Afamefuna’ or ‘Ahamefula,’ it indicates either a long period of childlessness or the family has only female children who will eventually get married and leave the family with no one to continue the lineage. The birth of a son offers the hope of continuity to the family. Thus, a child's name can be deployed to know the circumstances of life of the name-givers because the existential experiences of couples and the circumstances surrounding a child's birth are used to create a name for the child. Therefore, name-giving in the Igbo world view can be used to draw insights into their traditional values and their philosophy of life.

It is 27 April 2010. A small crowd, held back by a police cordon, waits in front of the entrance of the Reggio Calabria police headquarters for the exit of Giovanni Tegano and his transfer to prison. A ‘Ndrangheta boss and a fugitive since 1993, Tegano had been captured the previous day, in Terreti, along with five other individuals. Once outside, escorted by two police officers towards the patrol car, Tegano is greeted with a mixture of cheers and tears of despair by relatives, associates and supporters. Among the shouts, the voice of a woman becomes increasingly distinct as she angrily, repeatedly, yells, ‘Man of peace! Man of peace! He has done good!’. The police car, with the boss on board, departs and the crowd's shouts gradually fade into silence, but the woman continues to shout that unsettling ‘Man of peace!’ for several tens of seconds, in an attitude of furious defiance towards the state and even some of those present, who were urging her to calm down.

The episode caused a sensation and no small amount of outrage in the public opinion, at both the local and national levels. Regardless of that woman's affiliation with criminal clans, how can a ruthless murderer at the helm of a mafia organisation be considered a ‘man of peace’? How can a term (‘peace’) that evokes concepts such as harmony, concord and justice be associated with the ferocity of the struggle between criminal factions?

Q. Managers are crucial players in any professional musician's career, and they have played a central role in the history of the Romeros. Share the managerial aspect of that history with us.

A. The first manager I met was a neighbor in Seville, even before he was a manager: Jesús Antonio Pulpón, who lived in the apartment beneath ours. We met under rather comical circumstances. When I was 11 or 12 years old, one day my father said, “I’m going to give you an incredible present!” And he introduced me to Paco Ávila, who became my flamenco teacher. We met every single day from that time until our family left for the U.S. in 1957. He would come over and bring his grandfather with him, who was in his 70s, and I would teach him classical guitar. I thought that it was amazing how he could play at such an old age, but look at me now! Paco also used to bring his girlfriend, who was a flamenco dancer, and he would teach me how to accompany her even as he would teach her how to dance to the sounds of a guitar. We usually did this in the evening, and on one occasion, her zapateado was so vigorous that it prompted our downstairs neighbor to pay us a visit and complain that his ceiling lamp had fallen off! That was Antonio, who went on to become the most famous flamenco manager in Seville. He managed every great flamenco artist, but he never had anything to do with us, and we never had a manager while we were in Spain.

In 1940, Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger's lifelong friend and correspondent, Alfhild Sandby, published a play whose main character was almost certainly modelled on Grainger. Titled Artist-Comrades, the play concerns a young sculptor, Leon, who is tormented by conflicting loyalties, as he is forced to choose between his lover, Varenka, and his domineering mother, Leonora. Sandby sent a copy of this work to Grainger, who, after damning it with faint praise for its ‘decorative & delightful’ cover and ‘charming’ print quality, was unflinching in his criticism. It seems that Sandby had diverted from her model, allowing Leon and Varenka to elope, escaping the clutches of Leonora's tyranny. Writing ‘as an Australian’, Grainger said,

While Sandby's play was possibly the first work for stage inspired by Grainger's life, it was certainly not the last. Since his death in 1961, there have been at least ten other plays inspired by Grainger, not counting the dozens of other screenplays, radio plays, novels, and performance works stimulated by his dramatic life and unorthodox lifestyle.

This book explores the depiction of Percy Grainger (1882–1961) on page, stage, and screen, examining how his public persona and received biographical narrative were developed, then transformed by writers, play-wrights, and filmmakers, to suit the needs of the stories they wanted to tell.

The 1960 Coup d’État, led by brothers Germame and Mengistu Neway, marks the abrupt right turn in Emperor Haile Selassie's reign, ending his struggle to consolidate power against foreign and domestic challengers and inaugurating his determination to hang on to power while deaf to the counsel of trusted advisers and blind to societal signposts. As Bahru Zewde states: “In the three decades between Liberation and Revolution, no event shook the imperial regime or attracted as much public attention as the abortive coup d’état of December 1960.”1 The plotters tested the regime to its core and their suppression challenged the monarchy to implement a just solution.

Serving justice, or not, is the focus of this chapter. The first section probes a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual currents coursing through Ethiopia at the time. It concentrates on the Qachane Club, for many of the drivers of the coup and countercoup were members of this social and intellectual club. The second section outlines the adoption of European legal practices in Ethiopia by focusing on procedural developments in the courts and the reorganization of the Ministry of Justice. This is followed by an account of the coup d’état as background for the trial of the plotters, the most noted of whom was Mengistu Neway. Comprehending how hanging from a rope in the middle of a square in Addis Ababa would ensure his place in history as a revolutionary martyred for his cause, Mengistu Neway did not appeal his death sentence or seek other means of redress. The trial was an outright rejection of restorative justice and, if probed further in cases of less prominent supporters of the coup d’état, the tricky reconciliation process showed elements of traditional restorative justice long practiced by the state, yet with omissions that reduced its ability to bring about reconciliation.

In short forms such as the bagatelle, there is a strong correlation between the dynamic of the form and the shaping of the spatial envelope. In several of the bagatelles, the analysis has shown how the ‘recapitulatory registral shift’ creates a teleological process and climactic goal within the combination of binary and ternary forms. Over the next two chapters, I look at how Beethoven's use of register and shaping of space using a different strategy, spatial expansion, contributes to a similar sense of teleological coherence across the theme-and-variations form. Traditionally considered as an additive form due to its static tonality, any sense of directionality in variation form is conventionally explained as deriving from intensification of rhythmic activity. The analysis of a selection of variations spanning Beethoven's career, from his youth in Bonn to the visionary late period, highlights how spatial expansion and contraction acts as an important structural agent, through which theme-and-variations form becomes imbued with teleological energy and climactic process.

Radical innovation characterises Beethoven's approach to variations, emphasising development over decoration and creating a strong conclusion through an extended ‘composite’ final variation. These works, so popular with the Viennese public from his earliest mature sets, were vehicles for virtuoso display, exploiting as variational techniques a panoply of registral gestures drawing on the entire piano range. It is striking to compare, for instance, the spatial envelope of Beethoven's earliest and last variation sets, the ‘Dressler’ (1782) and the ‘Diabelli’ (1819–23), composed forty years apart, the former's range restricted to around 3 octaves, whilst the latter's range, saturated with spans of 5 octaves and more, reaches the widest 6-octave span at the end of variation 10.