21/08/2026
CHEMISTRY IS AN ASPECT OF OMENANI
One of the greatest intellectual mistakes we have made in understanding Omenani is that we have reduced it to rituals, customs, festivals, taboos and ancestral practices.
Omenani is much deeper than that.
If Omenani is the indigenous Igbo system of understanding, interacting with, and regulating our relationship with Ani, nature and existence, then everything that concerns the systematic study of nature is already within its intellectual territory.
And this brings us to chemistry.
Chemistry is not merely the science of substances. It is the study of matter, its composition, structure, properties, transformations and interactions.
Now ask yourself: did our ancestors live in a universe without matter?
Did they live without fire, water, minerals, metals, plants, soil, pigments, fermentation, preservation, extraction, combustion or transformation?
Of course not.
They were constantly observing, manipulating and transforming matter.
The difference is that modern chemistry gives these processes a particular language, mathematical framework and laboratory methodology. Omenani represents an indigenous epistemological framework through which our ancestors encountered and interpreted the natural world.
The laboratory did not create nature. Nature existed before the laboratory.
This distinction is fundamental.
When an Igbo farmer observes that certain plants alter the condition of the soil, that is an observation about material interaction.
When an herbal practitioner combines different plants because experience has shown that their properties interact in a particular way, that involves an empirical understanding of substances and their effects.
When our ancestors processed palm products, fermented foods, extracted dyes, worked iron, produced pottery, prepared medicines, preserved food or transformed raw materials into useful objects, they were engaging with chemical processes even though they did not necessarily describe them using the modern vocabulary of chemistry.
Take iron technology.
The transformation of iron-bearing ore through intense heat into usable metal involves reduction, oxidation, phase changes, heat transfer and material transformation. Modern chemistry can explain these processes at the molecular and atomic level.
But the fact that modern chemistry can explain the process does not mean the process began with modern chemistry.
Nature came first. Human observation came next. Scientific formalization came later.
This is where Omenani becomes important.
Omenani should not be understood merely as a collection of conclusions inherited from our ancestors. It should also be understood as a framework through which knowledge about the natural world is generated, transmitted, tested, applied and refined.
That means the question is not:
“Did our ancestors call it chemistry?”
The better question is:
“Were our ancestors systematically engaging with the material processes that chemistry studies today?”
The answer is obviously yes.
Chemistry studies transformation.
Omenani studies our relationship with transformation in nature.
Chemistry studies properties of substances.
Omenani contains indigenous observations about the properties and uses of substances.
Chemistry studies interactions between materials.
Omenani contains generations of accumulated knowledge about plants, minerals, metals, water, soil, fire and other natural materials.
Chemistry formalizes these observations through modern scientific methodology.
Omenani represents the broader indigenous epistemological environment in which Igbo people historically encountered and made sense of nature.
Therefore, when I say chemistry is an aspect of Omenani, I am not saying that modern chemistry was secretly invented by the Igbo.
I am saying something much more intellectually defensible:
The natural phenomena investigated by chemistry are part of the natural world that Omenani seeks to understand.
The modern discipline called chemistry is one particular historical institutionalization of humanity’s systematic investigation of matter.
Omenani can therefore be approached as a wider epistemological framework, while chemistry represents a specialized modern discipline concerned with one dimension of nature: matter and its transformations.
This is why we must stop defining Omenani by its external appearances.
If you define Omenani only by masquerades, rituals, sacrifices and festivals, you have reduced an epistemological civilization into folklore.
Look deeper.
Our ancestors observed nature.
They categorized plants.
They understood seasons.
They worked metals.
They processed food.
They fermented substances.
They manipulated fire.
They extracted materials.
They transformed raw resources.
They developed technologies.
They established rules governing human interaction with the environment.
They accumulated knowledge through generations.
That is not intellectual emptiness.
That is indigenous engagement with nature.
Modern science has given many of these phenomena specialized names and increasingly precise explanatory models.
That is progress in knowledge.
But progress in knowledge does not require us to erase the epistemological traditions that preceded modern disciplinary boundaries.
In fact, one of the objectives of reconstructing Omenani should be to demonstrate that our ancestors were not merely consumers of nature.
They were observers, interpreters, experimenters and technologists.
Chemistry, therefore, should not be presented to the Igbo child as something completely alien to our intellectual heritage.
We can teach modern chemistry in its modern scientific form while simultaneously teaching the child that the material world being investigated by chemistry has always been part of human existence and that Igbo civilization developed its own accumulated knowledge and technologies for interacting with that world.
This is the distinction between science as a universal investigation of nature and the historical institutions through which different civilizations organized knowledge about nature.
I am not attempting to replace chemistry with Omenani.
I am attempting to remove the artificial wall that colonial education built between the Igbo and the natural sciences.
Omenani is not anti-science. Omenani is a framework through which we can recover our place as producers of knowledge about nature.
Chemistry is one of the disciplines through which humanity investigates matter.
And because Omenani is fundamentally concerned with understanding and relating to the natural world, chemistry can be understood as one aspect of Omenani not because the Igbo invented modern chemistry, but because the material world that chemistry investigates has always been part of Ani and therefore part of our indigenous encounter with nature.
The work before us is not to romanticize our ancestors.
It is to study them.
Not to claim that every traditional practice was scientifically correct.
But to identify what they observed, what they discovered, what they tested, what they developed, what they got wrong, what they got right, and how their knowledge can be critically reconstructed using contemporary scholarship.
That is epistemological restoration.
And that is why I insist:
Chemistry is not outside Omenani.
Chemistry is an aspect of Omenani.
Because before chemistry became a discipline in the modern university, there was already matter, transformation, observation, experimentation and humanity’s attempt to understand nature.
And Omenani belongs to that ancient human encounter with the natural world.
Majorofafrika001
Maazi Major
