CENTRE FOR LIBERATION THEOLOGIES

Networking: Whelan Research Academy, Owerri, Nigeria

Last Update: Feb. 13th, 2001

Theophilus Okere, president

Villa Assumpta, Box 85
160 Wetheral Road
Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria
tel: 234-83-232-238

740 S. Shamrock Avenue
Monrovia, Ca. 91016, U.S.A.

Introduction

 The Whelan Research Academy for Religion, Culture and Society is a non-profit, tax exempt organization operating both in the state of California USA and in Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria.

Its purpose is to undertake and publish research on the culture, religion and society of the Igbo and their neighbours of South East Nigeria and especially the impact of Christianity and Western Modernity on these peoples. This is designed to retrieve what can still be retrieved from a vibrant and changing African culture under enormous pressure from foreign cultures and just as seriously disadvantaged from its own lack of a literate base. As generations of culture bearers pass away virtually unrecorded, memories are fading away and History is losing some crucial witnesses. Our task is to halt this trend by undertaking a massive campaign of information retrieval, management and dissemination. Our aim ultimately is to enable this culture to enter into some serious dialogue with modernity on its own terms, and in the process to articulate its own self expression and make its own contribution towards a more balanced and enriched emerging world culture.

To achieve this purpose, the Academy is to operate mainly as a research center, offering lectures, seminars, workshops, and symposia, as well as publishing books and a dedicated journal to disseminate the results of research. A well-stocked library with archives and a museum will form the centerpiece of the resource outlay. A comprehensive database on the Igbo language, history, religion and art as well as the interaction with Christianity and the west will provide the work place and environment for a college of fellows who will dedicate their time and talent to the mission of the organization.

 

Activities 

1. Organizing Research: this is the major activity of the Academy. The purpose of this is to seek out, organize and make accessible all available information on all aspects of the culture, more especially its history, oral and written, its language and art, its traditional religion, its contact with Christianity, with the West, with modernity. Resident Fellows and other scholars will undertake fieldwork as well as travel, to retrieve information in relevant documents scattered all over the world.
2. The publishing of articles and books and of a journal will provide the primary means of disseminating the results of research. Eventually, a web page will be established to give worldwide accessibility to the activities of the organization.
3. The Library will be the main center of the life of the Academy and will house books, microfilms and audio/video tapes, the acquisition of which is a major strategy in documenting this non-literate culture under pressure.
   The library will not only house books relevant to Igbo culture, language, art and religion as well as the wider African literature, but also reflect the full gamut of the Christian literary heritage - biblical, patristic, catholic, orthodox and reform Christian theology, church history and spirituality.
4. A comprehensive electronic database will complement the library, providing a body of well researched and updated information on all areas of Igbo culture.
5. A Museum will house and exhibit all related artifacts, works of art and symbols of worship.

Why our own Research and Archival Center

When Professor Felix Ekechi was researching for his book on Owerri, in the archives of the Colonial Office in London, he could not photocopy any of the relevant material. He could only go in with a pencil, not a pen. He could make summaries but no word for word copying. When Fr. Celestine Obi researched in the archives of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Rue Lhomond in Paris, it was with the greatest difficulty that he, even as a priest, got access to certain documents. Examples of such experiences can be multiplied, of our scholars making expensive journeys abroad only to have the access to the object of their quest severely restricted. And because our culture has been essentially an illiterate culture, it is clear that we harbour within our shores only a tiny fraction of the literature of our contact with the outside world. The vast majority of documents lie in archives scattered all over Europe and America. The retrieval and repatriation and domiciling of such documents in some form or the other is a necessary, inevitable, step towards getting fuller access to the sources of our history.

It is a crucial part of the mission of Whelan Research Academy to search out and retrieve copies of these documents and house them here in Owerri, making them immediately accessible to our historians, anthropologists, theologians and philosophers.

There are hundreds of local governments areas in the state where Igbo is spoken and there are at least four or five times that number of dialects of Igbo spoken wihtin them. Part of the first priorities of the Whelan Research Academy is to compile a comprehensive list of the dialects of Igbo, to analyze them in order to find their peculiarities and their commonalities, to save the integrity of each dialect by encouraging its being put down in writing, to provide thereby a dialect dictionary of Igbo, and to promote also literature written in Igbo dialects that can give immense service by providing raw materials for the development of a naturally enriched standard Igbo. Rather than the artificial, slavish information of English usage that dominates our present effort at modernizing Igbo, the language may expand, rejuvenate and modernize itself from its own native resources and from its own living dialects.

The research center will early commence work on assembling a comprehensive database that will deliver at the push of the button, any piece of information on the Igbo on any subject matter including names, place names and location, local history, historical data from the slave trade through colonization and since independence; the flora, the fauna, the known diseases and their known cures - all the available medical information; the proverbs, the cosmology, the deities and their theologies; Christianity, its sects and forms, its history before and after its coming into Igbo land; its church history, its doctrine and morality and laws and their impact on the Igbo. The clash of the religions, the clash of the cultures.

Though an initiative of the Catholic Archdiocese of Owerri, this Research Academy will be run on a strictly professional and scientific basis and will therefore be open to people and researchers of all persuasions irrespective of religion, sex or race.

As it advances, it is planned to expand and grow into a full fledged university while still retaining its initial catholic origin and its primary emphasis on research.

Areas needing special funding

• Planning
• Research
• Running Costs
• Construction of Offices
• Library, Museum
• Publishing
  

Who was Bishop Joseph Brendan Whelan ?