Ònyéàyànà and the Foundations of Resilience: Recovering an Original Igbo Ethico-Ontological Principle and Its Contribution to Global Philosophy
Conference: The 23rd Annual International Conference of the Igbo Studies Association (ISA) (2026)
Presenter(s): Jude Dunkwu
Presentation Date: May 15, 2026 @ 14:30 PM
Room: Enugu/Ebonyi
Tags: Conference 2026
Abstract
This paper recovers Ònyéàyànà — the Category 1 prefix short form of Ònyéàyànànwánnéyá, "thou shalt not abandon thy relation" — as an original Igbo ethico-ontological principle whose structure provides a rigorous philosophical foundation for the relational resilience articulated in Ọsọ Ndụ Agwụ Ike. Building on two companion papers in African Notes(Dunkwu 2026a, in press; Dunkwu forthcoming a), it introduces a new category — the ought-is — to global philosophical discourse.
The paper makes three contributions. First, it establishes Ònyéàyànà's ethico-ontological unity through morphological analysis and four-strand authentication: the prohibition against abandonment and the ontological claim about constitutive relational bonds are co-present in a single grammatical and onomastic act, neither derived from the other. The morpheme nwánné — nwa (child) plus nne (mother) — encodes constitutive relational personhood intrinsically within the name.
Second, it introduces the ought-is as a new metaethical category — principles in which prescriptive and ontological dimensions are primitively co-constituted — together with categorical inapplicability and foreclosure, which locate the precise boundary of Hume's is-ought framework at the onomastic register. A fifteen-tradition comparative survey across five continents establishes Ònyéàyànà as the first principle satisfying all three necessary and sufficient conditions simultaneously.
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