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Overview
The Great Ponds by Elechi Amadi is a social morality novel set in Nigeria during 1918 worldwide influenza epidemic. The novel, which was first published in 1969, revolves around a fierce conflict between the villages of Chiolu and Aliakoro over fishing rights to Wagaba Pond. The conflict escalates beyond physical battles, as rituals, spiritual beliefs, and an influenza epidemic further ravage both communities. In the end, no side emerges victorious—pride and stubbornness only bring destruction, and the contested pond is left forever cursed.
Plot Summary of The Great Ponds
War and its effects define the plot of The Great Ponds. The war is fought between the village of Chiolu and the village of Aliakoro over fishing rights to Wagaba Pond, one of the ponds alluded to in the title of the novel. Thirty years prior to the time of the story, Chiolu warriors won a battle with those of Aliakoro, and since then members of Chiolu have claimed Wagaba Pond and fished in it without hindrance. Aliakoro villagers, however, have begun to poach in the pond, and Chiolu sends a war party to catch the poachers.
Olumba, the main Chiolu warrior, heads the party. They catch two poachers and almost a third, Wago the leopard-killer, the chief Aliakoro warrior.
The conflict soon escalates. In the first major battle, Ikechi, a young Chiolu warrior and Olumba’s protege, kills his first opponent and is initiated into the company of his colleagues. Aliakoro wins the next battle, however, with the aid of the Isiali village, whose warriors kidnap four Chiolu women, among them Oda, Olumba’s pregnant youngest wife, and Chisa, Eze Diali’s daughter, whom Ikechi wants to marry.
Beyond working out the ransom for several of those taken by both sides, the highly ritualized conferences between Chiolu and Aliakoro (conducted by the chiefs and elders of each village or their delegates, with input from warriors such as Olumba and Wago) fail to solve the issue of Wagaba Pond. The war becomes so serious that no one in either village is safe and the daily routine in both deteriorates.
Chiolu and Aliakoro belong to the Erekwi clan, and the other villages that constitute the clan come together to keep the war from spreading and to bring an end to it. They set up a peace conference between the warring villages, at which Olumba, offering himself to the ritual whereby property disputes are commonly settled, swears by Ogbunabali, the god of night, that Wagaba Pond belongs to Chiolu. If Olumba is alive in six months, the pond will indeed belong to Chiolu. If he dies during this period, Aliakoro’s claim to it will be honored.
From this point onward, The Great Ponds focuses on Olumba. His village insists that he remain inactive and more or less in his compound. Though he takes great pains not to omit any kind of worship that might help him (which he is wont to do anyway, since he is a profoundly religious—if not superstitious— man), his anxiety begins to wear him down. Events conspire against him as well. While dislodging a hornets’ nest from a palm tree in his compound, he is badly stung and suffers a severe fall. Anwuanwu, a more powerful dibia or shaman than Chiolu’s, is engaged to save his life. Though he succeeds in doing so, he has to be called in again when Olumba falls violently ill from a spell put on him by Igwu, the dibia of Aliakoro. Igwu has unwillingly performed this powerful and (since Olumba’s oath forbids such intervention) illegal spell, mostly because Wago has intimidated him and his fellow villagers. With Anwuanwu’s help, Olumba survives this, too.
His household, however, causes him further worry. Nchelem, his young son by Oda, his kidnapped wife, falls ill because he misses his mother. Nyoma, Olumba’s senior wife, and after her Wogari, his middle wife, also become seriously ill. This illness spreads through the village and through Aliakoro and the entire district as well. Aliakoro calls the disease “wonjo,” and many die from it. Olumba loses Nyoma and his daughter Adada and contracts the disease himself. No family in the village is unaffected by it, and some families die out from it.
It is to this tragic state of affairs that Oda and Chisa finally return. The Isiali village sold them to slave traders, but their masters died in the epidemic. Chisa has been raped, and Oda’s male baby was born dead, which Olumba reads as a further sign that he has been cursed. The return of Eze Diali’s daughter and Olumba’s wife is a cause for rejoicing in Chiolu, but the celebration is short-lived. The epidemic—which is the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918—continues, and to make matters worse, Olumba is attacked one night by Wago disguised as a leopard. Ikechi and several other warriors save him and wound Wago; Wago is found the next day, dead in Wagaba Pond.
This event ends the dispute over the pond in the worst possible way for Chiolu and, presumably, Aliakoro. As Eze Diali points out from the evidence, Wago has committed suicide in Wagaba Pond, and this means that no one may fish there again. Both sides have lost the conflict, and the only winners have been pride, stubbornness, and ruin themselves.
Characterisation in The Great Ponds
Summary:
Olumba is the main warrior of Chiolu village.
Wago is the leopard-killer and the main warrior of Aliakoro village.
Ikechi is a young Chiolu warrior.
Eze Diali is the chief of Chiolu village.
Eze Okehi is the chief of Aliakoro village.
Anwuanwu is the dibia (shaman) of Abii village.
Igwu is the dibia of Aliakoro village.
Olumba and Wago the leopard-killer dramatise in The Great Ponds the pride of the warrior temperament and the lengths to which it can go. Both behave as though not only the progress of the war but also the welfare of their villages depend on their personal efforts. Olumba assumes the entire burden of Chiolu’s claim to Wagaba Pond by making himself the target of divine intervention for six months. Wago, on the other hand, defies the divine and spoils the moral integrity of his village by forcing its dibia to perform a spell against Olumba’s life. Olumba, at least, as his strength ebbs and his household crumbles, learns humility and a compassion for his wives that he did not have before. Moreover, his bravery is tested and deepened in a new way, for he must battle mental illness—a “voice” that is in him but seems apart from him that continually tells him that his efforts to survive are in vain. Wago, it appears, succumbs to such a “voice,” for his open attack on Olumba and his subsequent suicide in Wagaba Pond suggest that he has lost his mind completely.
Like Olumba, Ikechi, the young Chiolu warrior, learns through adversity to temper his pride. He also learns, by helping to represent his village in diplomatic missions and by traveling to locate the missing women, the frustration and complexity engendered by the war. When Chisa, the chief’s daughter, finally returns, Ikechi has matured. Though his father is on the point of death, he is able to comfort Chisa, accepting the fact that she has been raped and that her high spirits have been broken.
Eze Diali and Eze Okehi, the chiefs of Chiolu and Aliakoro, respectively, are a study in the inability of tribal elders to settle the conflict. Despite their skill in negotiation, their moderation, and the respect accorded them by their people, they are bound by parochial interests and tradition so thoroughly that breaking new ground in solving their common problem is beyond their imagination. The intervention of their fellow chiefs helps, but their solution, based on superstition, leaves the matter in nonhuman hands, and so fails. In fact, the system that Eze Diali and Eze Okehi represent is so brittle that they lose control in the face of the unexpected: Diali cannot keep Olumba from harm, and Okehi cannot stop Wago from essentially taking over Aliakoro. A sign of both chiefs’ weakness is the illness to which both fall prey at one time or another in the story and the influenza epidemic that decimates their villages.
The most colorful characters in the novel are the dibias, or shamans. Through their divinations, spells, and medicine, they exert an extraordinary power over the villages they serve. The most powerful dibia in the story is Anwuanwu of Abii. His “magic” is the most far-reaching and successful. He is able to diagnose and counter the spell Olumba is under, for example. He is much in demand beyond his village, and because of his power and reputation, he holds himself above the war. He seems to be somewhat amused by it, indeed, and he does not let it either hurry or fluster him. Igwu, the dibia of Aliakoro, having less power than he and harassed by Wago, faces a moral dilemma. If he does not put the deadly spell on Olumba as Wago and the village want him to do, he will fail his village. If he does employ the spell, he will fail himself and his calling. His pride and exasperation lead him to choose the latter; confronted by Wago’s cynicism and afraid to lose face in his village, he is unable to rise above the pressures of the war and thus contributes to them. If Anwuanwu is too powerful to be drawn into the war, Igwu is not powerful enough to avoid being drawn into it. The least powerful of the dibias in the story is Achichi of Chiolu. He serves his village without compromising its moral integrity, partly because he is unable to do so as a mediocre dibia and partly because he has accepted his lack of talent and power without resentment.
Themes in The Great Ponds
Summary: The themes in The Great Ponds are the futility of war, the devastating effects of war, superstition, spirituality, kidnapping, pride, and disease.
The Great Ponds stands—intentionally, it seems—as an allegory of full- scale, modern war insofar as its cause is small, its conduct all-consuming, and its end (which reminds one of the probable effects of a nuclear war) a defeat for both sides. In addition, both sides feel justified in waging it.
The novel underscores the irony of such a war in that the people of Chiolu and Aliakoro are decent and likable. Wago is an exception; he represents the kind of military mind that in its xenophobia loses perspective and in its egomania destroys itself and corrupts the cause it serves. All in all, war is pictured as a monster that devours the well-intentioned but nearsighted people who create it.
The divine is also a conspicuous element in the novel. It is not only consulted and used by both villages in their daily life but also appealed to by them in their conduct of the war. The use of “God is on our side” to justify bloodshed is as much alive here as it is today. Indeed, any ideal relying on superstition, tradition, and emotion may substitute for the divine in supporting warfare, and The Great Ponds strongly suggests this.
The irony built into this aspect of the novel relies on the physical—one might say the objective—essence of war. War produces injury and death irrespective of the ideals of those involved in it. What accompanies (and, in effect, ends) the war in this case is a virus—a physical reality which no amount of religiously oriented conjuring or justification is able to stop. Thus Elechi Amadi makes his point that war is first a moral madness and last— and most of all—a physical evil.
Critical Context
Elechi Amadi’s interest in playwriting appears in the emphasis on dialogue and setting in The Great Ponds. The novel suggests his background and interests as well. He was a captain in the Nigerian Civil War, he has been an educator, and he has had an avowed interest in religion, having coauthored a prayer-book and hymnal in Ikwerre, his native language. His sophisticated view of the complexities and psychology of war owes something not only to his firsthand experience but also to his travels in Europe and the United States and to the fact that he is a political independent. That his works are set in his homeland gives them an authentic ring, and that he focuses on the pressures brought to bear on traditional habits of thought shows his concern with, as he has put it, “gods.. . matter. .. life’s purpose (if any), and man.”
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