Obassi Nsi

Obassi Nsi is the earth god of the Ekoi (Ejagham), the chthonic counterpart to the sky god Obassi Osaw. Having helped create all things, Nsi descends to live upon the earth and grows ever greater in power, since every newborn child falls to the earth and every dead person returns to it. As the nurturing ground Nsi provides food, water and medicine, and is credited with teaching humans the arts of hunting and farming. The Obassi Osaw / Obassi Nsi sky-earth dyad is the structural centre of Ekoi cosmology.

Domains

• earth and land
• nurture farming and the dead

Powers

• to teach humans to hunt and to grow food
• to receive the dead back into the earth

Epithets

• Obasi Nsi

Relations

• ally: Obassi Osaw

Sources

• P. Amaury Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush (London: William Heinemann, 1912).
• Harold Scheub, A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, eds., Encyclopedia of African Religion (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009).