Anyanwu

Also Known As: Igbo Anyanwụ, usually glossed “eye of the sun” from anya, eye, and anwụ, sun; written Anyanu by the colonial anthropologist C. K. Meek, who glossed it “the eyes above”
Region/Culture: West Africa
Mythos: Igbo Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Anyanwu is the sun, a bringer of wealth and good fortune who carries offerings up to the supreme being Chukwu.
Role in Mythos: In Nri teaching the sun is the first of Chukwu’s four aspects, and in wider Igbo practice it is sometimes called Chukwu’s son and sometimes spoken of as Chukwu himself.
Relation to Humans: Household heads kept a shrine to Anyanwu at the compound entrance and made offerings at sunrise or sunset for children, crops, health and success in trade. Titled men took their titles at their own Anyanwu shrines, and a man’s personal spirit was thought to come down from the face of the sun.

Just before sunrise, in a compound in the Nsukka country of southeastern Nigeria, a man strikes a double iron gong with the horn of an antelope. The sound is flat and sharp. Beside the gong stands a young tree, cut from a branch and planted by the entrance hut, and at its foot is an earthenware bowl, dark with old blood. When the sun clears the horizon he cuts the throat of a white chicken over the bowl and pours palm wine after it. Then he asks the sun for children, for yams, and for a clear road home.

The sun has a name here. It is Anyanwu, and the word is usually taken apart as anya, eye, and anwụ, sun: the eye of the sun, or the sun as an eye. C. K. Meek, the government anthropologist who worked among the Igbo in the early 1930s and wrote the sun up as Anyanu, heard it differently and glossed it “the eyes above”. Either way the idea is the same. The thing in the sky is watching.

Meek’s Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, published in 1937, is still the fullest account of how the sun was actually served, and his picture is of a god at the top of the pantheon and at the bottom of every compound. He lists the high gods in order: Chukwu the supreme spirit, then Anyanwu the sun, then Igwe the sky, Amadioha the lightning and Ala the earth. Chukwu himself was distant. He had no shrines and received hardly any sacrifice. Anyanwu had shrines almost everywhere, and Meek noted that few households that had not turned Christian were without some symbol of the sun. Even the drink was different. A man might pour plain water for Chukwu, but Anyanwu, like every other god, had to be given wine.

The relationship between the two was left deliberately loose. Some people called Chukwu the father of the sun. Others spoke of them as one, and Meek recorded the invocation “Anyanwu Eze Chukwu Okike”, the sun, the Lord God, the creator, addressed to what sounded like a single person. The same looseness runs through the account M. Angulu Onwuejeogwu took down from the priests of Nri, the old ritual kingdom at the centre of Igbo religious life, and published in An Igbo Civilization in 1981. For them Chukwu had four faces. The first was Anyanwu, and the reasoning was spelled out plainly: as the sun’s light reaches everywhere, Chukwu is everywhere; as the sun is powerful, Chukwu is all-powerful; as sunlight reveals things, Chukwu is the source of knowledge. The other three faces were Agbala, the fertility of the earth, chi, the power to beget, and Okike, creation itself. When a Nri man broke kola he pointed it at the sun and named them together, “Anyanwu na Agbala”, light and fertility.

What did the god look like? Nobody says. Anyanwu has no face in the old record, no children with names, no quarrels and no adventures. The sun was the sun, and the shrine gave it a set of stand-ins instead of a statue. In Nsukka the core was a branch of the obo or ogirisi tree planted outside the entrance hut, with a stripped stick beside it and the bowl at its foot. At Uzaba the trees themselves carried the god’s name: the ogirisi was called Anyanwu, another tree the face of Anyanwu, the ururu the creation of Anyanwu, and a pot with four holes bored in it sat on the roof, tied to the tree by a creeper and holding parrot feathers and a carrying pad. In some compounds a round pottery dish was sunk into the ground upside down at the foot of the tree. People told Meek it was the sun’s disk.

The rites were short, and they had rules. At Nkpologu, Meek watched a household head stand before an obo tree banked with sand, with a flat stone for an altar. He split a kola nut, laid two pieces on the stone and said, “Anyanwu, Eze Chukwoke, protect me and my people.” The family ate the rest of the kola in order of age. He poured palm oil over the pieces on the stone, telling the god he did not sacrifice with an evil heart, and his senior wife, from the back, added, “Protect us all.” There could be no quarrelling in the compound while a sun rite was due. The night before this one, a man had argued with his brother, and the head of the compound fined him a goat.

Much of what people wanted from the sun was practical. Anyanwu was a god of good fortune and money. A man going to market might dip his fingers in the wine in the sun’s bowl, touch them to his tongue, and ask that his words sound sweet to the people he traded with. A creditor who could not get his money back was usually told by the diviner to sacrifice to Anyanwu. Titled men were made at the sun’s shrine: in one town the senior elder killed a cow at the candidate’s Anyanwu shrine and prayed that the god’s child, the new titleholder, would prosper. Even dancing belonged to the sun. A new dance was rehearsed in the dark, and before it could be performed in daylight the emblem of Anyanwu was set up in the dancing ground and a white cock was killed for it.

The sun’s other work was carrying things upward. When people sacrificed to Anyanwu, they asked the god to take the offering on to Chukwu. In Awgu, where Meek found much less attention paid to the sun, that was nearly all its cult amounted to: a man squatted facing the sunrise or sunset, hung a white chicken by its feet in a split bamboo stake, and asked the sun, coming out or going home, to carry it to Obasi, another name for Chukwu. Then he left the bird to die. Before the great oracle of Chukwu at Arochukwu was destroyed, a village group might even send a slave to Chukwu through the oracle and the sun together. The writer Chinua Achebe, in his 1975 essay on chi, described the same Igbo view of the sun as Chukwu’s agent, carrying the rare sacrifices offered as a last resort.

The traffic ran the other way too. Achebe learned that among the Igbo of Awka, when a man was ready to set up a shrine to his chi, his personal spirit, a priest brought the chi down “from the face of the sun at daybreak”. In Owerri Meek found a rite for the sick called Ndayo, “bringing down”, performed at the sick man’s Anyanwu shrine to fetch back a spirit that had already begun to rise toward the sun. A relative planted four sticks by the shrine and killed a fowl or a goat. It is said that when a diviner had decided the patient was past saving, he prescribed a sacrifice far beyond the family’s means. The sun could be asked for a great deal. It was not always obliged to grant it.

Some ideas about Anyanwu are younger than they sound. The claim that the ichi facial scars once cut on titled Nri men were rays of the sun goes back to M. D. W. Jeffreys, a colonial officer, who argued in the journal Africa in 1951 that the pattern descended from the winged solar disk of ancient Egypt, while admitting that no Igbo tradition explained the marks. The god’s sex is another modern question. Igbo pronouns do not mark gender and Meek wrote “he”, but much recent writing calls Anyanwu a goddess. Part of that image comes from art. Ben Enwonwu’s bronze Anyanwu, made in 1954 and 1955 for the new National Museum in Lagos, is a slender woman rising in an arc, and Nigeria gave a version to the United Nations in 1966 as the rising sun of a new nation. Octavia E. Butler borrowed the name for the immortal Igbo shapeshifter at the heart of her 1980 novel Wild Seed.

The power of Anyanwu is the power of anything that sees everything and goes everywhere: wealth, luck, a clear hearing in the market, and a road open to Chukwu when nothing else would reach him. Its limits are just as plain. The sun never had the weight of Ala, the earth, whom Meek called the most important deity in Igbo public and private life, and in some districts it was barely served at all. It judged no one and punished no one. It went up in the morning and came down at night, and whatever people handed it at either end, it carried.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anyanwu in Igbo religion?

Anyanwu is the sun as a deity in traditional Igbo religion in southeastern Nigeria. The name is usually explained as “eye of the sun”. Anyanwu was served at household shrines with offerings at sunrise or sunset and was asked for wealth, children, good harvests and success in trade.

What is the relationship between Anyanwu and Chukwu?

Anyanwu is closely tied to Chukwu, the Igbo supreme being. Some Igbo called Chukwu the father of the sun, while others addressed them as one being, as in the phrase “Anyanwu Eze Chukwu Okike”, the sun, the Lord God, the creator. The priests of Nri taught that Anyanwu was the first of Chukwu’s four aspects, and offerings made to Anyanwu were asked to be carried on to Chukwu.

How was Anyanwu worshipped?

In the Nsukka area most households kept an Anyanwu shrine by the compound entrance, made of a planted tree branch with an earthenware bowl for sacrificial blood at its foot. Offerings of a white chicken, kola nuts and palm wine were made at sunrise or sunset, and an iron gong was beaten before the sacrifice. Titles were conferred and new dances were blessed at Anyanwu’s emblem.

Is Anyanwu a god or a goddess?

The early field record treats Anyanwu as male: C. K. Meek, writing in 1937, used “he”, though Igbo pronouns do not mark gender. Much recent writing calls Anyanwu a goddess, and Ben Enwonwu’s famous 1950s bronze sculpture named Anyanwu shows a woman rising like the dawn.

Do Igbo ichi facial marks represent Anyanwu?

The idea that ichi scarification shows the rays of the sun traces to the colonial officer M. D. W. Jeffreys, who argued in 1951 that the marks came from the winged solar disk of ancient Egypt. Jeffreys himself noted that no Igbo tradition explained the marks, so the link to Anyanwu is a modern theory rather than recorded belief.